13 minute read
Get More Leads & Conversions When You Properly Combine These Components Of SEO
You’ve probably heard of the movie The Fifth Element but what the heck does that have to do with the seven components of SEO? Nothing really, but it’s a parody that we just picked up and ran with, so keep following along for some educational humor regarding the boring topic of search engine optimization.
The Fifth Element was a 90’s movie with Gary Oldman and Bruce Willis when he had hair. It was all about having to find the fifth element so they could combine forces with the other four elements to defeat evil and save the world. In our case, it’s the seven components of SEO that are needed to outrank your evil competitors and save yourself from having to close shop and get a 9-5 job. Equally scary if you ask me.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” The better you are at it and the more frequently you do it will ultimately drive more quality traffic to your website from non-paid—i.e., “organic”— Google results. It’s not magic, it’s a lot of HARD work, strategy, patience, and money (if you’re the business owner footing the bill). If you want to actually learn how search engines work, we wrote a blog for that. If you don’t really care, you just want to start kicking butt and taking names, there’s more genius parody ahead.
Basically, you want to be on the first page of Google’s search results, especially in the top three non-paid spots since they get almost 70% of all clicks. The higher you rank in web search results, the easier it is for potential customers to find you. The easier it is for users to find you, the greater your brand awareness, the more leads you obtain, and the greater likelihood these leads result in conversions (that’s marketing talk for people buying what you are selling).
Side note, no one can guarantee you the top spot on Google, it’s a scam unless you are willing to spend a lot of money on Google Ads where you pay-per-click and once the money drys up so do literally ALL your results.
Finally, we’re going to go over the seven (not fifth, like the movie poster) key components of your SEO strategy.
- Quality of Your Website (Earth)
- Page Speed Optimization (Fire)
- Keyword Selection and Relevance (Air)
- Level of Competition (Water)
- Relevant Shareable Content (the Perfect Human, Leeloo aka Milla Jovovich)
- Link Building – On & Off-Page (Bruce Willis WITH Hair)
- Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation (the Iconic Costume of Bandages holding it all together, 1 minute & 25 seconds into the trailer)
1. The Quality of Your Website
The whole idea of SEO is to drive potential good-fit customers to your website. It’s the all-encompassing EARTH duh, everything is built upon your website, and without it, you’re lost in space. So, the first element or component of SEO is a high-quality website that actually converts.
Is it easy to navigate? Does it effectively tell your brand story? Does it look and function the same on multiple devices? If it looks like Chris Tucker’s hideous costume and sounds like his annoying voice in this movie, it needs to be fixed ASAP because it’s turning away viewers and making your business look unprofessional. Did you know that 88% of online consumers surveyed said they are less likely to ever return to a website after just one bad user experience? Think about that for a second… okay now move on.
Equally important is whether the underlying code, as well as the content itself, contains the necessary keywords (we’ll get to the element of AIR in a minute) that search engine website crawlers can easily identify and index the correct webpage for. Content also needs to be compelling, it’s THE PERFECT HUMAN after all. Not some rehashed thin AI content that everyone is regurgitating. Google is onto that garbage.
Maybe your website just needs a little tweaking. Maybe it needs a major overhaul. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. Updating your website, researching topics your target audience is actively searching for, writing quality content with a clear focus, publishing pages, SEOing those pages, and marketing them through various channels takes time. Like a full-time job kind of time.
Your website is the foundation of your SEO strategy, that’s why it’s the number one component. It’s not a task that you ever complete, it’s ongoing and constantly evolving as your business grows and your audience expands. But once your website is up to snuff for the moment, the second element or component of SEO is page speed. It’s time to bring the FIRE!
2. Page Speed Optimization
Page speed is now a huge ranking factor in Google because they know how impatient people are nowadays and will be even more in the 23rd century when the Fifth Element was set. They are rewarding websites with higher rankings for having faster page speeds and A-rating Core Web Vitals. If you care to learn more about the FIRE component of SEO (page speed optimization), punch that link.
Basically, page speed optimization aims to increase the speed at which your desktop and mobile web pages load on a user’s device. If you’ve ever been on a slow-loading website, you’ll know that the longer it takes for you to see content, the more likely you’re abandoning ship. In fact, you lose 27% of users every second it takes for your web page to load. That’s a crazy yet real stat from Shopify.
There are a number of factors that create slow-loading pages:
- Too many big images and large files.
- Too many third-party plugins, apps, or other scripts, notably JavaScript.
- Lots of unused CCS or inline CSS (how you style elements of your website such as font size and color).
- Issues with your website hosting provider – You don’t want a slow shared server like GoDaddy that buffers while streaming. You want a LiteSpeed server that can handle all those cool special effects like it’s nothing.
- Broken links or unclosed code.
Page speed optimization consists of this and more to improve your site’s resource utilization and make your users happy and coming back for more.
3. Keyword Selection and Relevance
Keywords are the words or phrases (known as “long-tail keywords” in the industry) typed or spoken into search engines. If your webpage or blog article contains relevant keywords your target audience is searching for, the better chances you have that your page or post will rank well on the search result page.
Keep in mind, that there can only be one keyword focus per page, but you can actually rank well for lots of related words since Google bases its selection on user intent.
It sounds simple, like breathing AIR, and that’s why we made keywords our AIR element or component of SEO. There’s a lot of research and experience that goes into determining the best keywords and how to implement them on and off your website. The best keywords are not only those most likely to be used in conducting searches but also those that distinguish you from potential competitors.
In SEO, you want a good-fit keyword with a good amount of traffic that has a low SEO difficulty score while having a high cost-per-click. A high cost-per-click means that the keyword is in demand and that it’s most likely a high-intent keyword. The whole strategy is built on data. Not what you “think” is a good keyword. Nobody cares that you rank number one for a keyword that nobody searches for or is bad contextually with your business. That being said, you also can’t put a gun to the user’s head and say, “Search this keyword to find me or die!” as Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis’ character) would do.
4. Level of Competition
The level of competition within your industry significantly impacts the time it takes to see results from SEO. If your niche has numerous established competitors, it takes longer to outrank them and get noticed by search engines. On the flip side, if your industry is antiquated, and they aren’t doing SEO or running pay-per-click ads on Google, it may be easier to cruise right by them to the top.
That’s why competition is our WATER element and the fourth component of SEO, representing volume and current.
Analyzing Zorg (the bad guy played by Gary Oldman) and other competitors’ digital footprint and finding ways to differentiate yourself is crucial for SEO success. Since most of your evil competitors out there are trying to do the same thing, it’s an ongoing process to target the best keywords your audience is looking for and fill the gaps they left open. It’s time to leave those bad boys in your wake.
Some industries, such as insurance or retail, are cutthroat. It’s tough to rank for industries that are spending billions against you. Another reason why SEO is so important. It levels the playing field, costs less than paid ads, builds momentum long-term, and converts at a better rate.
Google is a local algorithm. If I search for “best waterpark near me” I get the local waterpark ten minutes away. Not the national headquarters across the country that sucks (sucks is a technical term meaning they are rated poorly on Google with like 2 stars). With local SEO, you want to dominate in your own backyard and protect that position at all costs.
5. Quality Content That People Want To Share
Congratulations, you made it to the Perfect Human element, Leeloo played by Milla Jovovich. There’s so much to say about this fifth component of SEO so let’s dig right in.
Creating high-quality, well-optimized, shareable content is essential for driving traffic, converting leads, and winning sales. Investing time in keyword research, writing engaging and informative content, and optimizing it for both search engines and users increases the likelihood of success.
This is never a “one and done” kind of task either. No one-pump-chumps here. As much as adding new content is important to SEO, so is re-evaluating existing content and freshening it up. A good rule of thumb with the content portion of your SEO strategy is to:
- Spend 40% of your time creating basic content
- Spend 10% of your time creating advanced content
- Spend 20% of your time refreshing old content
- Spend 30% of your time marketing your content
A keyword or topic that everyone was searching for in 1997 is going to most likely be different than what they’re searching for today. For instance, searching for the new Bruce Willis movie would have gotten you the amazing Fifth Element then, and now it’s some crappy Assassin or Rogue movie where he’s bald and suffers from a disease called Aphasia. Poor Bruce 🙁 We still love you but I can’t watch your new flicks anymore, I just can’t.
Content reviews are important and evaluate whether the keywords have resulted in significant search volume, the title or meta tags need to be revamped to improve the clickthrough rate (it’s like the open rate on an email, something that entices you to open or click it to learn more), on-page optimization needs tweaking to make it easier for search bots to find the information to index, and whether the topic needs updating, among other considerations.
Content evaluations also include reviewing the historical data of the words each page or post is ranking for. You need to make sure they are relevant to the page and if the changes you made improved or decreased your ranking which is easily tracked in a Ranking Report (SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and Google Analytics all have this report).
Don’t even bother with AI content… it’s still years away from being undetectable by Google’s algorithm. All AI does is scrape the internet like dog pooh off of a sidewalk and regurgitate the same thin boring content that already exists from any source, reliable or not. It fails to interact with your target audience and resonate with them. The likelihood of someone finding it good enough to share on social media or within their own blog is slim to none. Be funny, be witty, be the PERFECT HUMAN like Leeloo.
Do what it takes to engage with your audience and keep their attention. Like I’m attempting to do in here haha.
6. Link Building – On-page & Off-Page SEO
The process of acquiring backlinks, also known as link building, plays a significant role in improving your website’s authority and visibility. And for that reason, there’s no other person that I would assign this important role other than BRUCE WILLIS with the hair element! The sixth component of search engine optimization.
Backlinks are when a webpage from a third-party website links to a webpage on your website. A reciprocal link is a full circle link, where you then link back to their website, not necessarily the same page. You want to gather as many high-quality, reputable links as possible but don’t get caught up in a linking scheme. Tap that link if you’re even thinking about buying links, it will save you a headache and a half.
By reputable and high-quality, we mean a website or webpage that search engines consider legitimate with a high domain authority (DA) or page authority (PA) score. Search engines consider backlinks as a kind of endorsement of a website’s relevance and quality. Pages with a high number of relevant backlinks tend to have much higher organic search engine rankings. These scores range from 1-100 just like in school with 100 being the coveted A+. That score can be found in any link-building software such as SEMrush and Ubersuggest.
Building a solid portfolio of quality backlinks can help accelerate your SEO efforts. However, link-building takes time and requires a strategic approach to ensure organic growth. If done incorrectly, Google can actually penalize you into oblivion and the Anti-Life will take over the world and destroy all your other elements.
7. Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation
We made it to the seventh and final element, the ICONIC BANDAGE COSTUME. This one we obviously had trouble coming up to stay in parody, but as creative as we are, it makes a little sense. This component of SEO keeps all the goods together in a lean, mean, butt-kicking machine taking out evil competitors one at a time.
SEO is an ongoing process, as we keep saying, that requires constant monitoring, analyzing, and adapting to changes in search engine algorithms and user behavior. Staying updated with the latest trends and implementing necessary adjustments is vital for maintaining and improving your results and return on investment. It’s important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy that requires focus, patience, and testing testing testing as the data rolls in.
Expecting overnight success with SEO efforts is unrealistic. Depending on various factors such as website quality, competition, loading speed, keywords, content optimization, link building, and continuous adaptation that we’ve discussed in this Fifth Element parody, SEO can take 3 to 12 months (or even longer) to achieve significant results and hit your goal. However, by implementing effective SEO strategies, consistently creating valuable content, and staying committed to your efforts, you will gradually see the fruits of your labor—a steady stream of leads and conversions that fuels your business’s growth.
Need Help Stopping Zorg & The Ani-Life From Stealing Your Customers?
Start now before evil prevails and destroys your dreams of staying in business long enough to retire and sell, or successful enough to pass down to the next generation. There’s no going back to working for the man, when you were the man (or woman).
Request a FREE SEO audit and book a consultation with Tag Marketing today. We would love to connect with you to discuss your needs, goals, timeframe, and target audience… or even the movie lol. It’s hassleless and obligation-free, so we can either send you on your quest with a proven SEO roadmap along with actionable deliverables to reach your goals or you can hire us to get you there faster with a much better ROI. View some of our SEO pricing packages to get an idea of what your investment may be.