SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is a nightmare of many entrepreneurs and marketers.
All of them want to hit first pages of Google rankings with their pages and they all see SEO as a malicious obstacle standing between them and better Google ranks.
But what if we look at SEO a different way? Not as an obstacle to our website success but as a tool helping a user find what they are looking for?
You can think about SEO as an old-fashioned library.
Youâd come to a library and tell a librarian that youâre looking for information about gardening. The librarian would probably ask about the context of your search. You would specify that youâre thinking about setting up a balcony garden, so upon checking the catalogs, the librarian would give you the right books and magazines.
Thatâs exactly how SEO works.
Itâs not a simple program anymore, as it used to be in the 90s, where it was all about site traffic. Now itâs an artificial intelligence built on complicated algorithms and learning abilities. Now itâs all about the quality of content, conversions, and sales.
But although we donât know what SEO likes, we know good practices that can help us to gain the higher place in Google rankings.
SEO Basics
Before I get to more complex problems, letâs start with basic SEO definition.
Website optimization stands for strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the number of visitors to a website. In other words, if you optimize your website for SEO, your goal is to gain the first rank on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing because this will bring you more website visits. This traffic is called organic traffic.
Another definition you should be familiar with is a keyword. We understand it as a key phrase a user enters into a search engine. The most popular keywords have hundreds of thousands of monthly searches, so itâs very hard to position your website for one of them because of a huge competition.
Thatâs why at the beginning you should optimize your website for long tail keywords â longer keyword phrases. They have a lower search volume and in most cases low competition, so they are likely to deliver a higher return from visitors.
Another keyword category are related keywords. These keywords are synonyms, variations and semantically related terms and phrases, that can strengthen your website even more.
In other words, you aim to optimize your website for a couple of main keywords, but you also should think about less relevant ones and include them in your content, so your website has a bigger chance to be found by your potential customers.
Now, when you know all the basic definitions, letâs move to the strategy.
SEO strategy
An important thing to remember is that before you start to optimize your website for engin search, you need to have a strategy. It means that every page within your domain needs to have its clear purpose and the main keyword assigned to it.
A couple of months ago I spoke with Bartosz Goralewicz about SEO in my podcast, and he gave me a great example of how such a SEO strategy can be built.
Letâs imagine that you open a business as a wedding planner. As every young business, you need more leads and a strategy that will help with SEO. Fortunately, some tools can help you with it. You can go with or , enter your competitorâs URL and see every single keyword they are ranking for.
These keywords will probably be the same ones youâd like to rank for as well.
When you have this data, you need to filter out all keywords that you donât need. For example, if youâre a wedding planner from London, you wonât be interested in the keyword âwedding planner Las Vegasâ.
Once you have the filtered list, you have to compare it with your website. For example, if youâre going to go with âwedding planner servicesâ, you need to go with a âwedding planner servicesâ landing page within your website with the following domain.com/wedding-planner-services.
Youâd probably also want to go with âwedding planner Londonâ, âwedding budget checklistâ, you could write a post about âhow much does the average wedding costâ or you could also think about making a simple âwedding budget calculator.â
There are two important things: you donât want to target all the keywords with just one landing page, and you donât want to go after âwedding plannerâ straight away as itâs most likely not going to happen.
You want to go after informational traffic like âwedding planner checklistâ, âwedding checklistâ or tips for people that are going to be interested in a wedding.
For example, let's compare the âwedding plannerâ keyword which has 135,000 searches monthly and is very broad, with âwedding locationsâ with 2400 monthly searches and medium competition. Itâs obvious that you have much better chance of ranking with the âwedding locationsâ article or post.
To sum it up, hereâs what you need to do when youâre starting with a website optimization:
- You need to do a market research (check keywords that your competition is ranking for),
- You need to filter out all keywords you donât want to rank for,
- Choose the most important keywords,
- Create a landing page for every important topic.
And thatâs it, hereâs your basic SEO strategy!
But, of course, you also need to have the right software to check for keywords.
SEO software
As the first, very simple SEO tool Iâd recommend to start with the from Google AdWords.
Check âSearch for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.â Simply enter a keyword youâd like to check and hit âGet ideas.â
It will give you information about both: search volume and competition, but it will also suggest related keywords that you can find useful.
Keyword Planner is a fine tool, however, itâs very basic and wonât allow you to spy on your competition. Thatâs why you can use other application, .
Once youâre there, scroll down until you see the search button and enter your competitorâs URL.
It will give you information about the competitorâs main keywords that you probably should include in your contentâs body.
Alexa is not a freemium and at first it will show you only five keywords, however, it offers a 7-day trial and thatâs enough to get a full list of all keywords from your industry.
For more advanced SEO actions I highly recommend Semrush as it allows to monitor your keyword rankings in Google, analyze your competitor's websites and look for keyword ideas, but I think that the Keyword Planner and Alexa are great as a starter pack.
SEO content tips
The first rule of SEO writing is that the reader comes first. It means that you donât want to create texts, posts or an article because you want to rank on Googles first page, the first thing you need to think about is contentâs value.
Barbaric methods of gaining easy traffic like writing invisible text or stuffing copy with keywords don't work in 2016. Itâs user-unfriendly, SEO hates it and it makes you look like a dumbass.
Once we have it explained, here are SEO best practices:
- Title ("h1") of your page should contain your main keyword,
- URL of your page should contain it as well,
- Be sure to enter your keyword at the beginning of the copy,
- Add main keywords to imagesâ file names to âAlt Text,â
- Add related keywords in subheadings ("h2" and "h3"),
- Post long, valuable content (at least 800 words long),
- Add valuable links to your content (itâs a good sign for Google if you link to valuable websites),
- Include internal linking (if you link to your own pages, itâs another sign that your content is consistent).
It will be much easier for you to remember about all these things if you have your website built on Wordpress and youâll install the plugin. Itâs quite basic and far from being perfect, but itâs a nice SEO checklist helping to remember about all important things.
But itâs not only content that makes your page rank high, itâs also a matter of technical aspects. The longer your website visitors stay on your website, the better score you get from uncle Google. If your page doesnât load or there is a problem with checking it on mobile, your visitors will leave.
Thatâs why you need to make sure your website loads quickly and you cannot forget about a responsive design.
âThe best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search resultsâ
SEO goes for Search Engine Optimization and it helps to drive free, organic traffic and valuable leads to your website and business. So if you donât want to spend a crazy amount of money on advertising, itâs your best choice!
So remember:
- Gather info about your competitors,
- Pick keywords where you feel you have a chance to provide better content or better value than your competitors and outrank them,
- Build awesome landing pages, optimize for those keywords or topics. The more specific landing page, the better,
- Monitor all your rankings and efforts. Adapt your strategy. If after a month you'll find out that the strategy wasnât that good, change it as soon as possible.
You need to remember that you have a very small chance of ranking with your service landing pages if you donât provide value with it. The reason is simple: why would Google or any other search engine rank you for nothing?
You need to provide value to your readers as there is no SEO without content.
But when you provide value better than your competitors and stick to the above pieces of advice, your pages wonât be buried on the second Google search site.
