SEO Beginners Guide.
Get SEO Help to Reach Your Customers When They Search Online
What Is SEO?
Lots of us do it, when we need to find something like ‘SEO Help’ we search for it online and the place to start is a search engine like Google or Bing. When you search for sometimes your results page can appear in many forms depending on what you have searched. Anything on the page that doesn’t have the ‘ad’ symbol is part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google and Bing scan millions of active pages across the worldwide web and sort them into relevance. This ranking depends on the search term what is presented on the website, the amount of page views the site gets, the speed of the site, and how the site is structured on both desktop and mobile. What you see on a search page is what an algorithm has deemed to be the best results.
Why Work On SEO?
Firstly if your paying for a website you might as well invest some time into the content on the site to get the most out of your investment. SEO is essentially a free way to get organic traffic and saves you spending on paid channels. Finally, focusing on your SEO helps build your businesses content, connect with your customers and adds a professionalism to your business.
In relation to your business you can research what users are searching in relation to your business, this may be a long search or a short one and then you can write a blog to answer this question.
SEO has changed in recent times with more people doing voice searches this means more longer worded searches and more variation than ever before. This gives you more opportunity to answer these growing terms and rank on the first page of Google and get traffic to your website.
Organic search can be associated with all levels but tends to be associated with the ‘awareness’ and ‘interest’. So a user would read your blog and then revisit your site at a later stage.
How To Do SEO Yourself.
To get to the top of the search engine result page (SERP) with sites like Google for most terms or topics you could potentially be competing with millions of other websites to get there.
Starting Out
Firstly you need to get your website up to scratch, a slow website will not sit well with Google when they scan your website so make sure you compress any images on your site. When Google is scanning your site they also look at your structure (Sitemap). So look to test the user journey out yourself starting from your homepage, go page to page to all your pages on your website. It could help to place each page of your website in your own tree diagram with the home page at the top. This way you can visually see that the website structure makes sense. Setting up a breadcrumb on your website and replacing dead links will give your SEO a push.
So now you need to think what users are searching with Google, key is to look at your business and the terms that relate to it. As a starter in SEO you’re more likely to get success from long searches or searches related to your local location. For free you can then put these search terms into the Google keyword planner (if you don’t have a Google Ads account this blog will help with access) or Google trends. Identify the terms with low competition and then look for longer searches and answer these searches in a blog. The best way to do this is to pick a topic and come up with 10-15 related search terms and use these words to answer the search on a single page. If you have it in your budget you could invest in SEMrush to get more details about these searches and your competitors.
Educate Yourself
When it comes to the writing style for your content it’s a skill that takes practice to appeal to Google’s algorithms when they scan pages. I recommend reading up on Yoasts readability tips for SEO writing. If you are using WordPress to manage your website Yoast has a useful free plugin to monitor your style. But if you want to get better I recommend taking up a Moz Academy Online courses or the free Yoast SEO beginners course.
Like I’ve done with this page, it helps to hyperlink text when its relevant to other sites or to your old blog posts. When Google scans your website for relevance this will help your score.
The Future
Look to blog regularly possibly once a week if you can. By pushing your new webpage across multiple channels with the more traffic you gain the more likely Google will pay attention for the search page. But keep communicating with your customers and followers by asking them what they would like to know so you can provide them with the content. You could even create a survey for them. There is little point blogging something if its not going to appeal to your customers.
You’re very unlikely to be sitting on top of the Google search engine results page (SERP) in a week it could take months or years or it possibly never will in this competitive space. But this is not the end of the world as this content provides more value for your customers and brand as we highlighted above.
Finally, the key is promotion, even after launching the webpage re-promote it whenever possible and hyperlink to it in future relevant blogs. You could push your blog on social, email or even pay for content publishers like Outbrain. Keep the content fresh and update the page if the content becomes outdated. Speaking of being outdated make sure you keep up with all the latest news and get SEO help, we’ve linked a couple of helpful newsletters you can subscribe to in our useful links section.
Useful links:
Google Search Console – See the searches you appear for organically.
Google Keyword Planner – Part of Google Ads but useful free SEO help tool.
Google Trends – Useful free analysis tool for monitoring search term popularity.
SEMrush – Useful analysis tool for seeing further details on keywords and your competitors.
Similar Web – Useful analysis tool for seeing further details on keywords and your competitors.
Yoast – useful tool for scoring page SEO help and readability.
Moz Academy – Learn about SEO.
Wordstream Newsletter – Good source on the latest in search and recent tests.
Search Engine Land Newsletter – Good source on the latest in search and recent tests.
Our Blog – Learn about our work with search.
How We Can Help.
SEO can get a bit overwhelming, it’s a skill that takes practice to write in a style that appeals to search engines and with search engines regularly making changes it can be tough to stay on top. We’re here to help! Drop us a message and we can provide some free advice. If it still proves too much you can potentially hire us if we have space. Find the contact form here.
The Author.
Tom Haynes
Worked in SEO for four years, has experience in content writing including for sport, travel and marketing companies.
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