SEO has evolved over the years.
Thankfully, Google has managed to rid us of spammy practices like content farming and keyword stuffing and left us with a powerful marketing tool that thrives on easy-to-read, helpful, and comprehensive content.
However, SEO is not a quick-win strategy: it requires a long-term investment, and as long as brands are persistent, it delivers value.
So how do you harness the power of SEO for your brand?
In this beginner’s guide to SEO, you’ll discover:
Let’s get started.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and refers to the process of making your site better for search engines.
The practice of SEO involves continuously optimizing your website for higher rankings and brand exposure in the organic (non-paid) search results so that you increase both the quality and quantity of your website traffic.
SEO activities include running technical audits, targeting high-intent keywords, creating quality content, and building backlinks.
The terms SEO and SEM are often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference.
SEM stands for “search engine marketing” and refers to all the activities you perform to earn placement in the non-organic (paid) search engine results.
SEM activities include targeting high-value keywords, optimizing ad copy, display creatives and landing pages, and monitoring key metrics.
The pandemic has accelerated the development of synchronous audio content (like Clubhouse, now valued at $4 billion) and asynchronous audio content ( 900K podcasts created in 2020 – 3X more than in 2019).
But standard SEO techniques (based on over 200 factors used by Google) are of no value to podcasters unless they repurpose the material as written content.
Google recently launched its Google Podcasts app (400K downloads/month) and knows it requires other methods to classify and prioritize audio content.
Enter Audio SEO – a new industry that may soon become a sub-branch of traditional SEO and that already weighs in at $80 billion. For example:
Source: Sounder
Let’s examine the advantages of using SEO for your brand:
Of course, there are always pros and cons, so let’s examine the disadvantages of SEO for your brand.
Let’s take a look at three examples of successful SEO campaigns.
SPOTIO (a leader in the field sales software niche) approached Virayo (a digital marketing agency) to help it launch a new website and reposition itself as a leader in the B2B field sales market.
Virayo devised an immediate, short, and long term action plan:
The initial results were spectacular:
Since then, SPOTIO has continued to improve its position as a market leader with more organic traffic and leads.
America’s Best Contacts and Eyeglasses is a national eye care brand with more than 500 retail stores. They engaged Cardinal Digital Marketing to help them improve their online presence and authority.
Cardinal developed a two-pronged SEO approach:
The new SEO strategy delivered impressive results. Americas Best ranked on the first page for 120 of their targeted keywords. And, as a result, they saw a 40.9% increase in website traffic and a 31.5% increase in pageviews.
The final example shows how SEO expert Brian Dean increased organic traffic on his site, Backlinko, using a technique he calls “Skyscraper Technique 2.0”. (It’s an update on his original Skyscraper Technique).
Brian noticed that one of his earlier articles – The Complete SEO Checklist – had dropped in search engine rankings onto page 2 of the results. As he puts it: “My content was a smash hit… then it flopped.”
When he analyzed his content, he found one crucial ingredient was missing: User Intent.
There are three key components to his Skyscraper Technique 2.0:
After optimizing user intent, organic traffic rocketed, and the page went from ranking in position #11 to #5. And at the time of writing, it ranks in second spot:
Feeling inspired by these examples? Now it’s your turn.
A robust SEO strategy helps you identify the bigger picture by answering these questions:
You’ll also need to consider your budget, resources, and timeframe in your planning.
Follow our 7-step guide to implementing your SEO strategy:
Let’s begin.
The first thing to do is to benchmark your current performance. You can’t set goals and measure success unless you know how your site’s performing right now.
As a baseline, you need to be benchmarking your site traffic and keyword rankings.
At this stage, you should also check the SERPs to analyze your competitors’ performance and strategies and identify where they’re ahead of you:
With those background tasks completed, you can set your goals and KPIs.
For example:
Keywords are central to search engine optimization, so keyword research is usually the first step of an SEO strategy. However, there are now two strands to keyword research:
For example, if “SEO” were our pillar page (broad topic), it would have cluster topics like Technical SEO, Local SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-Page SEO:
Topic clusters help you establish topical relevance for sections of your site so that it’s clear to visitors and Google what your content is about.
The first step is to create a list of keywords for your pillar pages. These keywords define topics broadly, such as “Paleo diet”, “running shoes”, or “CRM software”. They are usually one or two words long and are sometimes called “head” or “short-tail keywords”.
Aim to create a list of 5-10 short-tail keywords that are relevant to your business and being searched for by your target audience.
Once you have a list of topics, you can create a list of 5-10 long-tail keywords for each topic.
You can easily find longer keywords that customers search for using Google Suggest.
Enter a keyword into Google’s search field, and it will auto-populate a list of suggestions:
You can also find longer keyword ideas in the “People Also Ask” boxes:
And the “Related Searches” at the bottom of the page:
Longer keywords (known as “long-tail keywords”) tend to be less competitive than “short-tail” terms:
You can use your SEO tool of choice to check out the search volume and competition levels for your keywords.
So at the end of this planning phase, you should have a list of 5-10 pillar pages, each with 5-10 cluster topics.
For example, if one of your pillar pages was “SEO Copywriting”, your cluster topics might be:
And would look something like this:
Now that you’ve planned your pillar pages and topic clusters, it’s time to create your content. Again, there’s a two-pronged approach to follow when you produce each piece of content:
First, you want to check what’s already working for your keywords, so enter one of your keywords into Google and check the first page results.
For example, if you enter “SEO writing tools”, you can see that most of the results (eight out of 10) are lists of tools:
So if you wanted to cover that topic, you’d need to create a “list post” on your blog to match the existing SERP.
If you want to rank higher than the existing content, then you need to create something better. For example, the list posts above cover 5-25 tools, so you might want to create a list of 50 SEO writing tools. But it’s not just quantity that needs to be better – you need to focus on creating better quality.
Remember the example from Backlinko where he needed to match and satisfy user intent and create something better with images, videos, and layout?
That’s what we’ll cover in the next step when we optimize your content.
On-page SEO covers many factors for optimizing each page on your website. The idea is to provide a positive user experience for your visitors and help search engines understand your content.
In this guide, we’ll cover three factors:
When you create your content, whether it’s a pillar page or a topic cluster, there are a few strategic places where you need to include your target keyword:
For example, if you check our blog post on Local Marketing, you can see some of these factors in play:
Pro Tip: Use Short, Keyword-Rich URLs. Research by Backlinko found that when it comes to SEO, short URLs tend to outrank long URLs:
Plus, they’re more user-friendly!
We already highlighted that you need to map your content type to the existing SERPs. But here are three more factors to optimize.
There’s no definitive answer as to how long your content should be. You can check what’s already ranking for your target keyword and use that word count as an indicator.
The Backlinko-Ahrefs search engine ranking study couldn’t find a direct relationship between word count and rankings, even though the average word count was evenly distributed among the top 10 results.
Takeaway: The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words, but you’ll need to check each target keyword for a true reflection.
Two of Google’s algorithms reveal what type of content it favors:
When the Backlinko-Ahrefs search engine ranking study ran a subset of their dataset through the content analysis tool Clearscope, they found a clear correlation between “Content Grade” and Google rankings in both desktop and mobile results:
Takeaway: Comprehensive content with a high “Content Grade” significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth.
Again, if you check our article on Local Marketing (or any other article), you can see all these actions in play:
There are several steps you can take to optimize your images for search engines and improve the user experience on your website. Plus, you can rank higher in Google Image Search – the specific search engine for images.
While On-Page SEO covers how to optimize individual pages, Technical SEO covers how to optimize site-wide factors.
If your site has technical SEO issues, they could hinder its performance and prevent it from ranking as well as it could if they were fixed.
Think of Technical SEO as improving the technical foundation of your whole website so that individual pages run smoothly and rank higher.
The best way to check for technical issues is by running a Site Audit from your preferred SEO tool.
For example, the SEMrush Site Audit Tool can analyze your site against more than 130 technical SEO problems, such as duplicate and thin content, broken links, HTTPS implementation, crawlability, and indexation problems. These are categorized by errors, warnings, and notices based upon their severity and ability to impact performance:
You can run the audit every month to ensure everything is in tip-top condition.
After you’ve completed your On-Page and Technical SEO tasks, it’s time to turn your attention to Off-page SEO, sometimes referred to as search engine promotion (SEP).
Off-page SEO refers to anything done outside of your website with the potential to increase search engine rankings.
Backlinks remain one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so you need a solid link-building strategy.
You can use various techniques and strategies to attract backlinks to your content, including:
Aside from building backlinks, there are other off-page factors, including:
The latter three are all covered in our Local Marketing guide.
After you’ve created your strategy and started to implement it, you’ll need to measure your performance.
Like all marketing strategies, you’ll need to continually track your SEO goals and metrics, assess your progress, identify possible areas for improvement, and adjust accordingly.
Improving and updating content by removing outdated screenshots and images and replacing them with fresh ideas can return tremendous results. For example, Brian Dean boosted organic traffic to one article by 260.7% using his Content Relaunch process.
Whether it’s creating new content, optimizing existing content, acquiring more backlinks, or ensuring that no technical issues appear, you need to continually evaluate and refine your SEO activities to ensure you’re successful.
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and refers to the process of improving your site for search engines. SEO activities include running technical audits, targeting high-intent keywords, creating quality content, and building backlinks.
Follow our 7-step guide to implement your SEO strategy: