For many companies, their website can be their biggest brand asset, so it needs to demonstrate authority, trust and expertise.
Optimizing your website to meet customer needs and displaying these features constitutes the fundamental process of SEO.
However, before we dive into the scope of SEO, I always recommend my clients do an in-depth analysis of their customer and consumer relationships.
My company does this in three ways:
Understanding and acting on this data will put you on the first step to executing a proper SEO campaign.
So without further ado, let’s define the process of SEO, what strategies to take, and how it can help your online presence.
SEO Fundamentals
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to capture as much organic website traffic as possible through search engines and convert that traffic into measurable business results.
Simply put, SEO is the process of trying to direct people to your website whenever they type a search query into a search engine.
For example, if you type into Google [which is content marketing], there are about a million websites that have deliberately optimized content for that keyword to get you to click on their website.
Once you click on that site, you’ll browse, familiarize yourself with their brand, and sign up for their newsletter.
Simple enough, but SEO also involves a lot of jargon and nuanced strategies that can be difficult to understand at first. To make things easier, I decided to define some terms that I might throw around in this tutorial.
Defining SEO Terms
Keywords: Keywords are the words that users type into a search engine whenever they are looking for information on the web.
Organic traffic: Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your website through a search engine, excluding those who click on PPC links.
SERP: Search engine results page.
PPC: Pay-per-click advertising is an advertising strategy to rank products or landing pages above the normal Google SERP results. These links will say “ad” next to them.
User intent: The intent of the keyword search (eg, is the user asking a question or looking to buy a product).
Meta tags: Fragments of text designed to describe a web page to a search engine. For example, the title of the page is contained in an HTML title tag attribute.
Ranking factors: Any algorithmic factor designed to influence the ranking of a page in a search engine for a particular keyword search.
Crawlability: The ability of search engines to find web pages on your website.
Indexing: The ability of search engines to include your web pages in its web index.
Technical SEO: The behind-the-scenes details of a website, including web page speed and mobile rendering, that affect its search rankings.
On-page SEO: A list of ranking factors, including meta tags and header tags, designed to help a page rank higher in search results.
Off-page SEO: A list of ranking factors, including link building and acquisition, designed to improve your website’s visibility and authority.
Link Building: The manual process of building backlinks or hyperlinks to a website, which is an essential ranking factor for most search engines.
Algorithm updates: Any update to Google’s core algorithm (eg, Penguin, Panda) that affects a wide range of search rankings.
Core Web Vitals: Technical SEO factors that Google finds important in determining a page’s potential user experience.
E-A-T: Experience, Authority, Trust. A set of guidelines Google suggests to marketers to assess whether their content meets these criteria.
The Importance Of SEO
So the question becomes, why is SEO so important?
I’ve met many developers, advertisers and even high-level executives who either didn’t understand SEO or didn’t think it was necessary. This is foolishness.
Done well, SEO is the gift that keeps on giving. I tell clients to think of it as compounding interest on investments.
With these benefits in mind, the key to SEO now becomes understanding all its little intricacies and learning how to do it right.
7 Steps To Master SEO Once And For All
1. Build A Solid Technical Foundation
Unfortunately, everything I’m going to talk about is completely useless if your site has a major technical error preventing it from ranking high.
I’ve seen countless companies create magnificent pieces of long-form content only to be stymied by page speed or indexing issues.
Google values technical SEO because technical SEO is a major influence on user experience. For example, if your web page loads slowly and users tend to bounce, then Google will adjust based on this information.
To reinforce this, Google unveiled its Core Web Vitals project in 2020. Without getting too much into the weeds, Core Web Vitals measures a website:
Core Web Vitals provides developers with baselines to achieve in creating a solid UX.
The Chrome UX report (Chrome Users only) allows you to test your site on these core vitals to see if changes are necessary.
In addition, I recommend focusing on the following factors to position your website as best as possible to rank in the SERPs.
Write down a list of problems you have with your website and work with a developer to solve them before you start publishing content or doing keyword research.
For a more detailed breakdown of technical SEO factors, read Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide.
2. Learn How To Properly Research Keywords
Once you have your technical foundation in order, it’s time to get into the more granular aspects of SEO: keyword discovery.
Generally, we segment keywords into two categories that we can use to build from advanced navigation:
Your top-level navigation will include seed keywords related to broad topics, services, or product lines. For example, the top navigation of the Search Engine Journal website follows this format:
Screenshot from Search Engine Journal, November 2022
On the other hand, long-tail keywords will be used for informative evergreen blog posts or various forms of content that appeal directly to user intent.
In general, many small businesses like to focus on long-tail keywords for more niche services because they have lower competition.
You might also consider building separate column pages around seed keywords on your website to help them rank higher in search engines. For example, having a broad topic page related to mobile SEO will not rank as high as an evergreen post discussing mobile SEO.
Again, Search Engine Journal provides another great example of a column page using a seed keyword and supporting pages that discuss subtopics taken from long-tail keywords.
Screenshot from Search Engine Journal, November 2022
Next, we need to filter our keyword search for user intent.
There are generally two broad categories of user intent into which we can separate keywords:
To develop business keywords for advanced service/product pages and individual product pages, I recommend using the free Google Ads Keyword Planner.
To get started, type in a seed keyword related to your business.
Google Keyword Planner screenshot, November 2022
Google’s Keyword Planner even provides additional ideas for long-tail searches above, and you can separate keywords based on competition and other factors.
I like to filter keywords by the “Top of page bid (high range)” to see which keywords advertisers bid the highest on. This filter is also useful if you want to separate keywords by intent, with higher bids being commercial and lower bids informational.
Choose a list of seed keywords – preferably with lower volumes – and export them to CSV.
Next, we’ll look for long-tail keywords with question phrases. Question phrases allow us to answer user questions directly, have lower search competition, and can be used to build support pages for our columns.
You can filter your keyword searches in Keyword Planner by incorporating “what”, “why”, “when” and “how” into your search, or use a tool like Semrush that does the work for you.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022
I highly recommend a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, which allow you to build keyword lists and topic ideas using relevant long-tail keywords. You can even filter keywords by difficulty, volume and intent.
In addition, tools like AnswerthePublic are great for finding additional question phrases.
Screenshot from Answer the Public, November 2022
Google Trends, Semrush and Ahrefs also offer tools that allow you to see trending topics and keywords in your industry for new ideas.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022
Finally, look at what your competitors are doing if you’re looking for a list of keywords or topics and don’t know where to start.
Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs show you who your biggest competitors are online and allow you to research which keywords and pages drive the highest traffic to a competitor’s domain.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022
Steal these keywords and content ideas to optimize your site based on what forms of content rank highest for your competitors.
After you compile a list of keywords in a spreadsheet, match your seed keywords to your top navigation URLs and use your long-tail keywords to build topics for your content calendar.
3. Create Content That Ranks And Converts
Building a content marketing strategy from your keyword research will enable you to develop authority on topics and meet user intent throughout your sales funnel.
Advanced content creation also helps you or your business become thought leaders in their respective fields.
For example, Neil Patel, Brian Dean, and several others have used content to promote their personal and professional brands to the top of our industry.
First, let’s look at factors affecting content ranking, such as:
In general, I like to build column posts using evergreen tutorials (like this one!) and then use long-tail keywords to create subtopics.
So, for example, each step of this tutorial could represent a subtopic, and my strategy could get more granular from there.
Next, we need to discuss writing content for each stage of your sales funnel. While informative content and blog posts are great for attracting traffic, you need to create strategies to convert web traffic into sales or subscriptions once they land on your website.
The typical sales funnel consists of at least three broad stages:
You’ll often find sales funnels in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform much more complex than this, but this should provide you with a basic overview of how you should approach your inbound marketing strategy using content marketing.
4. Optimize Your Web Pages For Search Engines
Once you start pumping out content and creating your service pages, you need to make sure your content is properly optimized for search engines.
I know we’ve discussed several ranking factors and technical SEO, but now it’s time to dive into on-page and SERP optimization factors.
Perhaps one of the most important off-page SEO strategies and Google ranking factors remains the ever-avoidable link building, which is described next.
5. Build Links To Your Website
According to research, inbound links are still a powerful ranking factor, even though the quality of links outweighs their quantity.
There are literally dozens of link building strategies to use, from HAIR to guest blogging.
To start link building, you need to build great content. Then, once your link magnet is built, you’ll need to get eyeballs in front of it so people start linking to it.
Fortunately, tools like Semrush have greatly simplified the process of manual outreach, enabling you to collect contact information for target websites and manage your manual outreach via email.
You can even plug in specific keywords or competitors to discover sites for link building opportunities.
Screenshot by author, November 2022
If you don’t have a backlink tool, you can still manually contact people using website operators.
For example, you can find contest links using the following search: site:www.competitor.com -competitor.com
Screenshot of a search for [web search: searchenginejournal.com], November 2022
If there is a website you want a specific link from, you can also do a “website:” search and type in a topic to see if they have content written on that topic.
To find general trending topics to get links to, do a “title” search.
Screenshot of a search for [title: “link building”], November 2022
Site operators can also be used to find resource pages or guest posts to contact.
To summarize, I’ve written a list of essential link building practices below:
Editor’s Note: As a free alternative to tools like Semrush, you can mine data from Google Search Console. For more information on how to do this, we recommend this resource.
6. Share And Promote Your Content
While I’ve discussed some strategies to help your content rank high and get some backlinks manually, sometimes those strategies aren’t enough.
Unfortunately, SEO is notoriously competitive.
Instead, we should also focus on various outreach strategies designed to drive eyeballs to our website.
Below are some strategies I’ve outlined to help drive instant traffic to your content and help it rank higher.
There are a dozen more strategies to help you promote content, especially if you’re trying to rank on specific mediums like TikTok, Substack, Twitter, or elsewhere.
7. Consult The Analytics
Finally, SEO is not complete without consulting our analytics.
The most important analytics tools I recommend for any business are Google Analytics, Google Search Console and a competitive research tool like Semrush.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022
First, I love using a tool like Semrush to see what content ranks in that striking distance (position 11-20) in Google to either repurpose that existing content or create new content around that keyword and link back and forth between the two pages.
Your analysis will also tell you which pages are driving the most traffic and which need more promotion.
However, to get more granular, we need to look at Google Analytics to examine how people engage with our content.
I recommend setting up goals or conversion paths to track how many people complete desired actions on your sites.
I also like to use Google Analytics Behavior Flow to show me what path users take when they land on my site.
Screenshot from Google Analytics, November 2022
Use the key performance indicators (KPI) that GA provides to make changes to your site where needed.
For me, the most important KPIs to remember are:
In addition, Google Search Console is also a helpful tool that allows us to see how many impressions our pages are generating and how many people are clicking on our links.
Setting KPIs and consulting your analytics monthly to find improvements can help you understand which strategies are working for your website and which should be discarded.
Put Your Skills Into Action
Now that you understand SEO basics, you’ll learn more as you troubleshoot a campaign.
Fortunately, many mistakes you make along the way won’t cost you much money as an ad, and any failed campaigns can always be reused later for better success.
Featured image: Vadym Pastukh/Shutterstock
What are the 3 types of search?
Types of searches: transactional, navigational, informational.
What are the 4 search categories? When researching to discover a user’s intentions behind making a search, we can classify all keywords into four main categories of intent: commercial, transactional, informational and navigational.
What type of searches are there?
It is generally accepted that there are three main search types: transactional searches, navigational searches and informational searches. Most modern search engines are able to determine the type of search based on the search entered and the format of that question.
What kind of searches are there?
It is commonly accepted that there are three different types of search queries: Navigational search queries. Information search queries. Transactional search queries.
What is the most common type of search?
Most Common Types of Search Queries
- Navigation Search Queries. A navigational search query is a query that finds a specific website or web page. …
- Information Search Questions. An information search query is made when a person is looking for more information on a broad topic. …
- Transactional Search Queries.
What is the most common type of search?
Most Common Types of Search Queries
- Navigation Search Queries. A navigational search query is a query that finds a specific website or web page. …
- Information Search Questions. An information search query is made when a person is looking for more information on a broad topic. …
- Transactional Search Queries.
What is the most commonly used search agent?
Google. With over 86% of the search market share, one hardly needs to introduce readers to Google. However, it clearly needs to top any list of search engines. Created as a research project in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, they offered to sell their engine in 1999 to Excite for a whopping $750,000.
What is the most commonly searched word?
The winner of the most popular keyword is Facebook, with more than 1,102,800,000 searches per month. This is closely followed by YouTube, Amazon and the weather, or âveteroâ for short. Surprisingly, many people prefer to search for popular brands rather than typing them directly.
What are the most common searches?
| # | Keyword | Search volume |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 144,000,000 | |
| 2 | youtube | 143,000,000 |
| 3 | amazon | 119,000,000 |
| 4 | weather | 95,300,000 |
What are the 5 most commonly used searches?
According to statistics from Netmarketshare, Statista and StatCounter, the top 5 search engines worldwide by market share are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex.
What are SEO activities?
SEO Action Plan is a toolbox for setting up an adjustable workflow, allowing users to engage in all aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to meet their website goals and challenges.
What is SEO and examples? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks.
What are the 3 types of SEO?
The three types of SEO are: On-page SEO â Anything on your web pages â Blogs, product copy, web copy. Off Page SEO – Everything that happens away from your website that helps with your SEO Strategy – Backlinks. Technical SEO â Anything technical undertaken to improve Search Rankings â web indexing to aid bot crawling.
What are the main SEO types?
12 Types of SEO
- White-Hat SEO. When you hear someone say white-hat SEO, it means the SEO practices that are consistent with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, including Google. …
- Black-Hat SEO. …
- Gray-Hat SEO. …
- On-page SEO. …
- Off-page SEO. …
- Technical SEO. …
- International SEO. …
- Local SEO.
What are the 4 types of SEO?
Having explained the approaches to search engine optimization, we can now go over what the different types of SEO are.
- On-page SEO (on-site SEO) …
- Off-page SEO (off-site SEO) …
- Technical SEO. …
- Local SEO.
How many activities are there in SEO?
On-page SEO can be broadly divided into three categories: content, HTML, and website architecture.
What are the different types of SEO?
12 Types of SEO
- White-Hat SEO. When you hear someone say white-hat SEO, it means the SEO practices that are consistent with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, including Google. …
- Black-Hat SEO. …
- Gray-Hat SEO. …
- On-page SEO. …
- Off-page SEO. …
- Technical SEO. …
- International SEO. …
- Local SEO.
What are the 3 parts of SEO? The three main components of SEO are: Technical SEO. On-Page SEO (or Content SEO) Off-Page SEO (or Links)
Can I learn SEO in 2 months?
Average time needed to learn SEO Experts say that it usually takes one to three months to learn the fundamentals of SEO and one or more years to fully master the practice. The length of time it takes to learn the basics of SEO depends on several factors.
Can I learn SEO in a week? How Fast Can I Learn SEO? You can learn SEO in as fast as 2-4 weeks if you study search engine optimization for several hours a day. The speed with which you can learn the fundamentals of SEO is not bound by time, but by how quickly you understand the concepts that apply to SEO campaigns.
How long does it take to learn SEO?
If you can learn SEO for a few hours every day, then you can master the basics of SEO within 4-8 weeks and get your first SEO job in 3-6 months. If you can learn SEO full time then you can master the basics even within 1-2 weeks.
Can I learn SEO in a month?
Although it’s a career-long journey, you can indeed learn SEO in about a month – enough to make an impact on your website and thus your business as a whole.
Is SEO difficult to learn?
SEO is not necessarily difficult to learn, but it does take time, effort and persistence. If you’re just starting out and don’t know anything about search engines and how they work, you can expect to feel a little overwhelmed at first, especially if you’re trying to learn SEO on your own. However, it is important to keep trying.
Is learning SEO worth it?
SEO is worth it if you have the right strategy in place and work with a partner who knows how to get results. About 93% of online experiences start with a search engine, and the close rate of SEO leads is much higher than that of traditional marketing. So, SEO provides an impressive return on investment (ROI).
Can You Learn SEO in a month?
Although it’s a career-long journey, you can indeed learn SEO in about a month – enough to make an impact on your website and thus your business as a whole.
Is SEO difficult to learn?
SEO is not necessarily difficult to learn, but it does take time, effort and persistence. If you’re just starting out and don’t know anything about search engines and how they work, you can expect to feel a little overwhelmed at first, especially if you’re trying to learn SEO on your own. However, it is important to keep trying.
Is SEO difficult to learn?
SEO is not necessarily difficult to learn, but it does take time, effort and persistence. If you’re just starting out and don’t know anything about search engines and how they work, you can expect to feel a little overwhelmed at first, especially if you’re trying to learn SEO on your own. However, it is important to keep trying.
Is SEO good for beginners?
SEO is not easy. But it’s not rocket science either. There are things you can implement right away and there are concepts that will take much more time and effort. So yes, you can do SEO on your own.
Can You Learn SEO by yourself?
It is possible to learn how to do SEO on your own, you don’t have to be an SEO specialist or expert. The first thing to do is to convince yourself that SEO is not difficult. If others can do it, so can you. All it takes is the will to learn and time.