In the world of SEO, what works today may not work tomorrow. It may sound all too confusing to an average business owner, but it’s the reality of the SEO industry. This blog will try to break down SEO jargon into understandable terms.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process that helps you rank the best keywords in search engines for your business.
A search engine optimization is a process that can help you rank your website for the keywords you want to target. It’s important to have a good understanding of SEO as it is a strategy used by the majority of businesses online.
The good news is, you can start learning SEO without spending tons of money.
In this article, we’ll give you some tips on how you can learn SEO and start implementing it on your site.
Learn the Basics of SEO to Get Started
Lots of people wonder how SEO works.
There are tons of “gurus” out there that tell you how to do it and even charge you for their advice. The truth is, most of those so-called “experts” don’t know what they’re doing. They just follow the trends and make stuff up as they go.
If you’re looking for someone to follow, follow Google.
Google’s algorithms are updated about 500 to 600 times a year and you can be sure they know what they’re doing.
The thing to remember is that Google’s goal is to show people what they are looking for.
If you can make Google show people what they are looking for, you’ll be in the top rankings.
To accomplish this, there are four basic components of SEO that you should focus on:
- Keywords (and keyword targeting)
- Search volumes behind keywords
- Traffic coming from organic search
- Conversions of customers searching for your targeted keywords
The actual techniques revolve around the following:
- On-page optimization
- Link building
- Content
- Technical SEO
1. Keywords
In the olden days of SEO, keywords were really all we had. Keywords and keyword targeting were the bread and butter of a good SEO strategy. Keyword targeting involved creating pages based on specific keywords and optimizing them.
The content would be laser-targeted and built around this keyword.
As you move forward with your SEO, one should carefully consider potential alternative terms that can be seen as synonyms for the same keyword but may not be considered so by search engines.
This might provide a chance to include keywords on your page that are not directly related to your product or service, improve reader retention, and improve your SEO strategy in general.
But there is a problem with keywords: they eventually sink into redundancy. Say you’re writing about social media tools.
If your keyword has to contain the term social media, then your keyword will end up being something like “social media-tools” or possibly “best social-media-tools”—painfully long and redundant keywords that reduce SEO traffic because it turns out that there just isn’t a high demand for “best social media-tools”.
In recent years, however, trends have shifted.
Publishers and content creators are now focusing more on topics and entities when it comes to SEO keyword strategies.
Topics and Entities
Just what are topics and entities, exactly?
A topic is a subject or category that is discussed in a text. An entity is a specific topic or item that is mentioned in a text; it can be a person, place, or thing. If you are writing about a specific topic, in this case, SEO, then you would also include a specific entity, like Google.
So if you were to write about SEO, you would want to include the entity, Google, in your text.
What you end up with is an article about SEO that mentions Google in it.
2. Search Volumes Behind Keywords
Keyword research is an important part of SEO because it’s the process of finding out which keywords are most relevant to your business and how many people are searching for those keywords.
These two pieces of information are essential to determining keyword competitiveness (how difficult it will be to rank for a keyword), as well as what your target audience is interested in, which can help you create relevant content.
Here are some keyword research tools that can help you find search terms:
- Google Trends – a free tool that visually represents how popular a keyword is over time
- Google Keyword Planner – provides keyword suggestions for suitable SEO keywords
- Google Search Console – tracks your website’s performance in terms of organic search engine traffic
3. Traffic Coming From Organic Search
Organic traffic is the term used for traffic to a site through natural search channels.
Whenever a user types in a query at Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, they will be provided with results that include websites shown on the first page (the first 10 sites) and on the sidebar of those results there are some ads (this is called paid advertising — it is when you pay to show up above all the organic listings).
When a user clicks on any of the organic results and visits a website, this is recorded in analytics tools as organic search traffic.
Organic traffic is the most important form of traffic you can get to your website.
It is more important than paid traffic, Facebook traffic, or traffic from other social media networks.
The reason is simple: Organic traffic is targeted.
Users typing a query in a search engine have a very specific intent and if you can provide them with a solution or answer to their question, you will more likely gain a new customer, email subscriber, or follower.
In addition to the above, organic traffic is important because it increases website trust and this has a number of additional benefits.
Users trust Google and websites that rank in the top positions of Google organically are therefore also trusted by users.
This is a great way to increase your reputation, both online and off.
Most critically, this means that you are more likely to convert an organic visitor than a visitor coming from Facebook or another medium.
4. Conversions of Customers Searching for Our Targeted Keywords
If you’re not converting free traffic from Google, you’re wasting bandwidth and can be compromising the effectiveness of your overall marketing strategy.
Why?
One reason is that without conversions, you won’t be getting leads in order to develop a systematic and effective way of reaching out to future customers.
This will have an impact on the success of all your future marketing campaigns — especially those that are dependent on advertising via search engines for instance.
Is there a way of ensuring your visitors click a link, subscribe to your mailing list, or even better — buy your products? Of course there is!
So what’s holding you back?
Start with this brief checklist to help with converting potential customers who organically find you:
- Have a clean website theme
- Have an opt-in box in the header
- Optimize for product name terms,
- Write engaging content
- Earn social trust from SEO visitors
Following these 5 things and having a solid SEO strategy will definitely help you find and convert customers!
Focus on the Quality of Your Content
In general, high-quality content plays a role in the success of your website.
It’s important to research and understand how your market works and what types of people will be visiting your website.
You need to understand if your industry is growing or declining because it will help you plan out what kind of content you should be providing for those that come onto your site.
But that takes on different forms depending on different attributes of your marketing campaign including:
- Your site’s main industry
- What has been done to your site previously
- What is being done to your site now
- Your industry’s overall competition
- What your competition is doing
- What Google’s algorithm is doing
If you want to learn more about integrating content marketing with SEO, check out How to Easily Integrate Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategies.
Rely on More Than Just Google
SEO marketers cannot wholly rely on any one update from Google alone, however.
Google is making it harder and harder for sites to rank in search results. It’s a tough time for SEOs and a great time for those looking to get themselves a position on the first page of Google.
But it’s not as hard as you might think, once you have the basics of SEO down. So what should we do to keep up to date with search engine trends?
Monitor industry reactions that cause changes in rankings or in website traffic and conversions.
Search engines are just like you and me, they are evolving constantly because their software depends on it – and so these changes require frequent adjustments as well.
No matter the scope of change, ultimately SEO is all about delivering valuable content to your target audience at every stage of development.
It’s impossible for anyone to set a standard approach that suits all websites because each individual has a different audience as well as resources available at their disposal.
Now You’re an SEO Expert, What’s Next?
If you want to start an SEO campaign of your own, there’s a lot to learn from the pros.
This post has touched on some of the most important steps to think like an SEO expert.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, but understanding these steps will be extremely helpful to anyone who wants to learn more about SEO.
We hope that it was able to provide a few new strategies that you will be able to implement when optimizing your website for search engines and improving your SEO.
Remember, the most important thing is to create quality content that readers will enjoy reading and want to share with others!
