Ever wondered how some websites seem to magically appear at the top of your search results? The answer lies in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy. If you’re just starting out, check out our guide to Digital Marketing 101 to understand how SEO fits into the bigger picture.
Whether you’re a seasoned business owner or a newbie, mastering SEO can be a game-changer for your online presence. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including:
- What is SEO & the Types of SEO
- Why SEO is Important
- How Search Engines Work
- Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
- How to Get Started with SEO
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of improving your website to appear higher in search engine results. This is done by targeting specific keywords, improving the user experience of your site, and by showing search engines your website is a credible source.
There are three different main types of SEO that affect the ranking of your website. Some are easier than others to accomplish, but overall,they all play a valuable role in getting your website to rank on the first page.
Types of Search Engine Optimization
On-Page
Optimizing the content on your website to make sure that itis easy to understand and that targets keywords relevant to your industry. This includes things like updating the metadata, optimizing your images, updating file names, and creating a good user experience.
Technical
Optimizing the technical parts of your website such as sitespeed, optimizing for mobile, create a site architecture that is easy to understand, and security measures.
Off-Page
Creating opportunities that will increase your brand recognition in your industry to create a link back to your website. This is often considered one of the most important types of SEO because this is how search engines will decide if your content is accurate and relevant.
Why is SEO Important?
According to an analysis done by Backlinko, only 0.63% of Google’s searchers click onto the second page of search results. Knowing this it is easy to see why a business would want to try to be on the first page. So, how do you get onto the first page? With SEO.
SEO is a large source of incoming web traffic for all industries and all businesses. When you optimize your website for search engines you are making it easier for your customers to find you by helping you rank higher in search results. SEO can also help you build trust, guide customers through the buyer’s journey, enhance your client relationships, and help increase your brand awareness. SEO is very cost-effective because it can help you generate organic traffic to your website for years to come.
For example, let’s say you just got a puppy. It’s your first puppy and you need to learn how to take proper care of it. What are you going to do? Most likely you will end up online searching for something that contains “new puppy” to learn about caring for your new pal.
Now according to Moz.com, this keyword is searched on average 800 times per month:
Now let’s say I’m a pet store who offers puppy training classes once a week and want people to find your classes. So, to get your business in front of potential customers for your classes, you would probably think that your keyword would be “puppy training classes”, which gets approximately 4,000 searches per month. However, not all searches are the same. This new pet parent might not even think they need puppy training classes. So, how do you get their attention? By optimizing your website for keywords related to your niche,industry, & location.
Here are some examples of keywords that our puppy training class business might also consider targeting on their website:
Now you might be thinking, why not just target “puppy training” in general as the keyword instead of trying to individually target each of these different keywords. You would be right to think that, but keep in mind that other people have had that same idea.
So, according to the Keyword Checker on Moz.com “puppy training” has been searched more than 16,000 times per month. That’s a lot of potential visitors to your website! However, if you notice on the right side of the picture below is a column that tells you the difficulty. This tells you that there are numerous other websites out there that have already targeted “puppy training,” making it hard for your new website to rank on the first page.
Hopefully, you now have a general understanding of why it’s important to optimize your website for specific keywords based on search data. To recap, here are the benefits of optimizing your website for search engines:
- Can generate more traffic to your website
- It’s a cost-effective way to grow your business
- Helps improve brand awareness
- It can help you understand what your customers need better
- Can improve the experience visitors when visiting your website
- Helps local customers find you easier
That’s just a few of the reasons. There are countless ways that your business can benefit from using SEO on your website, each varying depending on your business.
How Search Engines Work
Now that you understand where your business falls into SEO, it’s important to understand how search engines work in order to understand why this works.
Search engines work by crawling websites on the internet using bots or crawlers to understand what the website is about. However, searchengines don’t see websites like you and I do, instead they only see the websites code.
Using links found on your website such as internal linking ora sitemap, search engines will crawl each page of your website and index them.If your page meets certain ranking criteria, then you will have the chance to appear in search results.
Your content has the chance to appear in a variety of different ways on searchengines. For example, with Google, you can appear as a site link (blue text), a rich snippet, a product listing, an image, and several others. This is important to know because it demonstrates all the different areas where SEO can take place.
So, what does Google look for to determine if you are eligible to appear in search results? They look at a variety of different factors including:
- Relevancy of your content
- Quality of the content on your site
- The presence of keywords
- The number and quality of links from other sites (helps boost your credibility)
- Schema markup data
- Page speed
- Usability
You can learn more about Google’s criteria by reading their SEO guide.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
As we learned earlier, there are 3 different types of SEO: on-page,off-page, and technical SEO. Each one plays a part in search engines deciding if your website is of high enough quality to rank on the first page. Below, we have provided a more in-depth explanation of each type, along with things to watch out for when optimizing your website.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves the content that is on each page of your website. This is where keywords come into play the most. To optimize your site for specific keywords, you will place the keyword throughout the page, but only when it makes sense to use it. You want to avoid overusing the keyword or stuffing it into everywhere you can because that is considered keyword stuffing, which is considered black-hat SEO and can harm your ranking.
So, where should you place your keyword then? Here are some of the best locations to add your keyword to help your page rank:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- H1 Tag (the primary headline)
- Subheading tags (H2s, H3s, etc.)
- Image alt text
- URL slug
The other key consideration here is to make sure that the content on the page is quality content. Quality content means that people will find it compelling or useful. However, everyone’s opinion of what is compelling and useful is different, but it usually will contain many of the same features.What Google looks for is content that is:
- Easy-to-read and well organized- This means making sure it is free of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Break up long sections of text. Use section headings, lists, images, and other visual methods so its scannable.
- Unique- Don’t plagiarize others’ work. It’s okay to quote others, but make sure most of the piece is original content that you created yourself.
- Up-to-date- Regularly check on previously published content and update it as needed. This could mean changing some of the information in the text to be relevant with current trends, adding additional internal and external links, or removing the content if it’s no longer relevant.
- Helpful, reliable, and people-first- Your written content should be focused on things that readers will find helpful and reliable. This might mean sharing your own personal experiences and stories or interviewing an expert and sharing that information within your article. It could also consist of linking to other top-ranking websites for that topic. For example, in this article I have linked Google Search Central, Moz, and Backlinko. All of whom are leaders in SEO content.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to things that happen outside of your website to help improve its search visibility. The most common way to use off-page SEO is link building, which consists of other high-quality websites in your industry placing links on their website that will direct their website visitors to your site.
These links are called backlinks, and they are incredibly important for your website to have. Backlinks help show search engines that your content is trustworthy and credible.
To put this into perspective for you, let’s say you were in the market for a new car. More than likely, you would ask your friends and family about their past experiences with local used car lots. Now if three out of four people you talked to all recommended the same car lot, you would probably feel pretty confident about working with them, right? This is like how searchengines view your content. If other websites are linking to your website, that must mean your content is valuable.
However, you can’t just go out and get any website to link your content. The website and its content must be relevant to the content that is on your website. For example, the car lot wouldn’t really benefit from a restaurant linking to their website, but they would benefit from a local auto body shop linking to their website.
There are a lot of different considerations when it comes to obtaining backlinks. Moz has a well put together guide on their website regarding link building best practices for anyone who is interested in learning more, but to summarize links should always:
Other common methods of off-page SEO include social media management (sharing posts and website content), online reputation management, and email marketing. All of these can benefit your overall credibility and increase your overall brand awareness and engagement.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website. This includes a variety of different methods such as:
- Having a responsive design or a website that can be viewed on both desktop and mobile internet browsers
- Improving your page speed
- Optimizing for international audiences with translations available for multiple languages
- Condensing image file sizes to increase page load times
- Condensing or minifying your JavaScript files
- Having an active SSL certificate on your website for security purposes (You want to use Https instead of http)
- Using meta robot tags and robots.txt to control the behavior of search engine bots
- Creating a sitemap to help search engines navigate your website
- Internal link building
- Adding schema markup to your pages
Essentially, your website should be easy for search engines to read, be secure, and be user friendly.
How to Get Started with SEO
At this point in this guide, you should know enough about SEO to get started optimizing your website. However, there are so many different things to consider, it can be very overwhelming at first. Below are some quick tips on how to get started optimizing your website for search engines.
1. Perform a Website Audit
The very first thing you should do is perform an audit of your website. You need to know how your website currently ranks, what you are doing well, and where there is room for improvement. You will want to check all three aspects of SEO during this audit.
An easy way to perform a website audit is by using an SEO tool like SEMRush, Moz, or Ahrefs. While they do have a monthly fee, many of them have free features available and they all have free trials.
2. Perform Keyword Research
Knowing what keywords you should be targeting is important prior to trying to update any of your content, so it's time to do some keyword research. Plus, this will also help you understand what your customers are searching for so you can provide them with better answers to their questions.
There are numerous different ways to do keyword research. You can use Google’s auto-complete feature to see what other people are searching for. You can also check the “People Also Asked” section on Google’s search results page after searching a root keyword or looking in your Search Console to see what searches you are receiving impressions on. If you are interested in the trend growth or search data, you can check out Google Trends or Google Ads Keyword Planner which are both available for free.
Aside from Google's tools, there are numerous different paid keyword research tools available on the market as well. Some of the the top tools are Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz. However, they tend to have a higher price due to how many features their plans include.
If you are looking for a budget-friendly alternative and don't need all of the bells and whistles, you might find KWFinder or Keywords Everywhere to be a better option.
3. Start Creating Quality Content
Next you will want to start writing content for your website. Remember that content needs to be unique, meaning you should write the content yourself, and it needs to be considered compelling or useful.
It should also be easy to read and understand for users. Make the content scannable by using different level headings (H1s, H2s, H3s, etc.),lists, and images. A general rule of thumb is to write your content at no higher than a 7th Grade reading level. This will help make sure that everyone who visits your website can understand your posts.
Lastly, don’t forget to add links in your content that point to other areas of your website and to leading sites in your industry. This will help search engines navigate your website and build authority.
4. Start Looking for Backlink Opportunities
Remember that backlinks should come from another site that is relevant to your industry. Look for opportunities where you can guest post on other websites to earn editorial links. If you have a local business, you should add it to local directories such as Yelp, Apple, Google My Business, and NextDoor. Don’t forget about local chamber groups either! Often, local chambers will have a business directory available on their website.
Share your content on social media or through an email newsletter.Encourage your followers to also share it so search engines see the content as something people are interested in.
5. Track Your Performance
The easiest way to track your performance is through a paid tracker like SEMRush or Ahrefs. However, recently Google Search Console has made some changes, and you can now see where you rank in search results from within their dashboard. This information can also be easily exported as a Google Sheets or Excel document to easily track your rankings over time and see your progress.
6. Keep Learning About SEO
SEO is constantly evolving as our technology advances which means there is always going to be something new to learn about SEO. And since it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to increase traffic to your website, you can’t go wrong learning about it.
However, if you don’t have the time in your day, we can help. Dynamyte Digital Lab offers a range of different services to help you grow your business including Local SEO services, reputation management, content marketing,and more. Schedule a call with us today where we can discuss your goals and create a plan to help you grow your business.
