The 3 Pillars of SEO - How to Rank Higher & Get More Website Traffic

If you’ve been trying to figure out SEO but feel overwhelmed by all the advice out there, you’re not alone. You might be wondering, Where do I even start? What do I do first? Is one area more important than another? SEO can feel confusing at first, but when you break it down, it all comes back to the 3 pillars of SEO or the three core areas—technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.

Each of these plays a role in how well your website ranks on Google. But if you’ve never done anything for SEO before, where should you start? The answer is technical SEO, which may surprise you since I don't spend a lot of time talking about tech SEO. Most of us don't have to do a lot for technical SEO today because our website platforms handle the majority of the work. It wasn't always this way. When I started in SEO years ago, there was a lot to be managed and maintained from a technical perspective, but thankfully, today, you only truly need to worry about 3 parts, and they're easy. 

Technical SEO is important because without your site being easy to crawl and index, Google won't show it to people who are searching. Thankfully, you don't have to be a tech expert today to have a technically sound website the way you did a decade ago. 

Pillar 1 of SEO - Technical SEO: Making Your Website Easy to Find and Read (Crawl)

Technical SEO is all about making sure Google can find and read your website. If search engines can’t access your content, it won’t matter how good your blog posts are—they won’t show up in search. The good news? Most website platforms handle a lot of this for you, so you don’t have to be a tech expert. There are a few things you should check to make sure your site is SEO-friendly.

How to Get Started with Technical SEO

First, verify your website is in Google Search Console Google Search Console and go through the process to claim your site so you can see the data. Search Console is a free tool that helps you see how Google views your site. It will let you know about any technical issues, such as pages that aren’t indexed or slow loading times. If you haven't already done it, set up your account in Google Search Console and check to make sure your site is indexed and being crawled. Don't worry so much about the keyword reports and things in there - your main focus should be on the indexation and crawl - because this tells us whether or not Google can read (crawl) and remember (index) your site and will show it to people when they search. If they can't read and remember your site, you won't show up in the search results, and all of the other SEO work you do won't pay off. 

Second, check your website's speed. Google likes a speedy site, and so does your customer. If your website loads slowly, you won't rank as high because consumers won't wait around for a site to load, and Google knows this. You can use the Google PageSpeed Tool to see how your site is doing. It's free; just visit the website and enter your URL. You want to see how your site does on both desktop and mobile. The report will tell you how you're doing and what to do to speed things up. In most cases, the biggest issue with page speed is image file size. Compress your images using a tool like Jpeg Mini or a plug-in for your website builder. You may also find that you have an issue because of the hosting provider for your website. Sometimes cheap or free hosts put you on shared systems, so your website traffic is impacted by that of others on the host. You want to be sure that you have a dedicated host that can keep up with your traffic. 

Finally, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendly means that your site looks good on a phone. Since so many people search on phones, we need to make sure our websites work well on them. You want your site to use what's called responsive design; this simply means that the website changes based on the screen size. Your site should look good whether someone's on a phone, tablet, or computer. The good news is that most of today's website builders have responsive templates and handle this for you, but be sure to check out your site on different screens to see what it looks like and make sure the message is easy to understand, and you can navigate easily. 

Technical SEO is the foundation, and thanks to the advancements over the past decade, it's super easy. In most cases, you can do it and check it off your list pretty easily. When I first really got into SEO about 15 years ago, it wasn't this way. We'd spend months working with clients on their tech SEO and helping guide them through the changes they needed to make. I am so thankful that it's so much easier today. I was never a fan of tech SEO because it made my head hurt, and I think tech SEO - the  It's too techy, it's too hard, and I won't be able to understand SEO fears originally came from. Thankfully, it's not like that today. 

Pillar 2 of SEO - On-Page SEO - Helping Google Understand Your Website 

Once we know your website is able to be found and read by Google then we want to focus on making the content on the site easy to understand. We do this by adding SEO elements to our content. Google looks for clues as to what a page is about in specific areas on a site. We refer to these areas as our SEO elements. 

We want to focus on creating great content that's helpful for our readers and then making it super easy for Google to understand so that they're more likely to share it for us. This is the easiest and most fun part of SEO, in my opinion. This is the section where we talk more about content strategy (what we are creating for our audience) and optimization (how we help Google understand it so they want to show it to people). There isn't really anything technical in on-page SEO. 

Creating the Right Content for Your Audience & Optimizing it for Google

When you're thinking about on-page SEO, you want to start with content strategy. What content do you need to have on your website and where should it be? You want to think about your ideal customer and how you help them while also growing your business. You want to create content that helps them but also helps establish you as an authority and someone who can help solve their problem. 

I always teach my students to choose four content pillars or topic areas that they'll write about on their blogs. I recommend four because it makes life easier for you since there are four weeks in a month, and we want to publish a new blog post once a week. This way, if we have several ideal customers or different products or services, we can rotate through them on a regular basis, and that allows us to grow in multiple areas of the business. 

Once you've chosen your blog content pillars, then you'll want to brainstorm four topics for the month. Choose one for each pillar area. Then, write one blog post, and once it's ready, optimize that post for Google before publishing. 

Start Content Planning with SEO Keyword Research 

This is where my teaching differs from some, but I find that it's much better to start with SEO keyword research when you're brainstorming topics before you've ever written a word of your blog post. This allows you to make sure there's an audience for the post you're going to write, and you can determine if there's a keyword you have a better chance of ranking for that you can use in the title. Being strategic and taking the time to start with keyword research before deciding what to write is how you get better results. This is what we did at the agency with our clients. We'd do a huge study and generate lists with thousands of keywords. We'd then analyze those lists and determine which ones had the most search volume and the best chance of ranking. Then, we'd tie those lists to their products and services and give them a list of topics to cover in priority order. You don't have to generate a list of thousands of keywords to do this as a small business owner, but this process allows you to be very strategic in your content development, which works better. You don't have to worry about your blog posts entering the black hole of nothingness on the web, never being read by anyone, or driving the wrong people to your site. I teach my students how to do this for their business in Simple SEO Content. If you'd like to learn, be sure to join me in there. 

Once you've decided what you're going to write about, you'll want to create a blog post or website page that is helpful for your audience. You want to answer their questions, provide value and guidance, and include some examples or anecdotes if they make sense. You want to showcase your expertise, experience, and authority within the content where you can. Google grades each webpage with a system called E-E-A-T, and it's a page-by-page grading system. It looks at your experience, expertise, authority, and trust to determine which pages or websites are better than others. I teach more about this in Simple SEO Content, but for now, know that it's important to share information that can help Google review you from an E-E-A-T standpoint. Trust you have less control over here, it's more about the sentiment towards your website and the links, we'll talk more about that when we get to off-page SEO. 

How to do SEO on your Website

Once your content is written, you'll want to go through it and make sure you've optimized your page with the SEO keyword you chose. The good news is that if you follow the process I teach, your topic should be about your keyword, and you've likely already used it multiple times in a very natural way. I don't teach to write to a specific keyword density (though I know many people do) because Google has come out and said there is no ideal keyword density score and not to try to write to one. Google wants you to focus on your readers first and then on them second, which is what I teach. 

Where Should Your Keyword be Used?

If you want to use your keyword in your blog post or page title, it should also be used naturally throughout your copy. If you've written the way that I teach, you won't have to adjust anything here. You want to make sure your keyword is in your first paragraph of copy, ideally in the first 100 words or so. 

From there, you want to use it in your headers; those are the lines with big fonts that separate my sections on this page. Use your keyword in them where you can. Make sure it still feels natural. You'll notice mine isn't in all headers because it would feel forced and weird. I've also used other relevant SEO keywords in the header tags but they're not ones that I'm specifically targeting on this page. 

Then, you'll want to write a Title Tag for the page. The Title Tag is the first thing people see in Google's search results. It's like an introduction to your page and what information you have, and they'll likely decide whether or not to click and visit your site based on the information. Your Title Tag is a max of 60 characters, including spaces, so you don't have a lot of room to work. You want to include your keyword in the Title Tag. Write this for your reader but use your keyword for Google. 

Next up is the Meta Description. This is also visible in Google's search results. It's a max of 160 characters and is the next thing a potential reader might read to determine if they want to visit your site. You want this to include your keyword and why they should visit your site. It's a summary to help them decide if you have the information they need. 

If you have other content that's relevant or helpful for your reader, it might provide additional depth or answers to questions; you can link to it within the page or blog post. This is called an internal link, and it's helpful for the reader. It also helps Google find more content on your site. For example, if you have a blog post about email marketing best practices, you might want to link to a blog post about creating an email marketing opt-in if you're talking about opt-ins in the post. I've seen some people say you need to include 3-5 internal links within every blog post; you do not. You only need to include the internal links that make sense. If you write a post and there really isn't any additional insight necessary to understand it, then don't link to something just for the sake of linking. 

For more information on how to do on-page SEO, request a copy of my free Beginner's Guide to SEO today. It walks you through all of this step-by-step with examples of what things look like on Google, so it's easier to understand. 

Pillar 3 of SEO - Off-Page SEO (Links)

Once your website content is well optimized and you've done SEO on your site, we start looking at building backlinks and growing our site's authority. When we grow our site's authority, it is easier to rank for more keywords. Google looks at links from other websites kind of like an endorsement; it's like they're saying, hey, this is a good site; we like it, and you might too. 

You want to be very careful with link building, or you can get yourself in trouble. Google cracked down on a lot of link-building practices over a decade ago, and I still see people trying to do them now. If you want to build links that will help your site, you need to be very careful. The first thing I recommend is that you don't buy links. I'm sure you get emails from people offering links with a certain DA (domain authority) for a price, or maybe you've had SEO companies say they can guarantee you'll get 15 links every month for X amount of dollars. Don't do these things. The people selling you the links don't really have the authority to do it unless they own all of the websites they're selling links on. 

It takes longer to build links the right way, but it works better and follows Google's rules. What you want to do is work to earn links. You do this by creating great content, becoming a resource for people, sharing your content in places it can be found, and building your brand's visibility by doing things like being interviewed on podcasts or in blog posts. 

Think of it more like digital PR than link building, and you'll have better luck. As you raise your authority in Google's eyes, you'll likely start to rank for more keywords and see additional traffic coming to your site. 

Brand Building and SEO

While brand building isn't specifically part of SEO, it does help. Google looks at how people interact with your website across multiple channels and platforms. When you share your content on other websites like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, or even on social media, you start building a bigger audience and sometimes people find your content on those places and start linking to you. It's important to have your brand be visible on multiple channels. It doesn't mean that you have to create brand new content for every channel that you're on, but it is a good idea to reshare content across different channels and platforms. 

If you're ready to do SEO on your website or blog, join me in Simple SEO Content, and I'll walk you through the entire process step-by-step.