Are you ready to dive into SEO? Perhaps you heard about SEO from somebody who has had some major success, and you want to get your feet wet on your own. Or maybe you have a website and you want to get it found by more people online.
In any case, SEO is an important skill that can help you drive more traffic to your website and reach the right audience for your business. But before you can start optimizing your site and content, there are a few basics that you need to understand first.
Let’s take a look at the 11 steps you need to follow to get started with SEO:
Do Research Into Your Niche
Niche research is one of the most important steps in starting a successful online business. By finding a niche that you are interested in and knowledgeable about, you set yourself up for success from the start. You’ll be able to create content that is interesting and helpful to your audience, and you’ll be more likely to succeed in reaching them.
So how do you go about researching your niche? There are a few different methods you can use, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular techniques:
- Competitor Analysis
- Domain Search
- Keyword Research
- Social Media Monitoring
Each of these methods has its own strengths and weaknesses, and which ones you choose will depend on your own situation and preferences. However, no matter which techniques you use, it’s important to keep in mind that the key to successful niche research is understanding your audience and what they want.
Competitor Analysis – This technique involves looking at what other businesses in your niche are doing and trying to find ways to improve upon it. This can be a great way to get ideas for content, products, or services that you can offer that will appeal to your target audience. However, it’s important not to get too bogged down in what your competitors are doing. Remember, you want to focus on providing value to your audience, not just copying what others are already doing.
Domain Search – With this method, you simply search for domains that are related to keywords in your niche. This can give you some good ideas for content or products that you can create. However, it’s important to make sure that the domain you choose is available and not already being used by a competitor.
Keyword Research – Using keyword research tools, you can find keywords and phrases that are commonly used by your niche audience. This can give you some great ideas for content to create or promote. However, it’s important to be careful about which keywords you choose, as choosing the wrong ones can actually hurt your traffic instead of helping it.
Social Media Monitoring – By keeping an eye on what others in your niche are talking about online, you can get a good idea of what topics or products are popular with your audience and how they interact with one another. While this method is often overlooked by beginner SEOs, it’s actually one of the most effective techniques, if done correctly.
Start With Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important steps in SEO. By finding keywords that are relevant to your niche and target audience, you can focus your efforts on content that will reach them more effectively. And by using the right tools, you can make the process of finding keywords easier and more efficient.
Let’s take a look at some of the best tools for keyword research:
- AHREFs
- Semrush
- Google Keyword Planner
- Moz
- KWFinder
- LongTailPro
Begin by working on identifying your primary keywords that you want to go after. Then, for each keyword in the list, come up with your competitors for those keywords by looking at the top 10 of the search results for those keywords.
Then, you can dive deeper into some SEO checks for these competitors. Once you have a look into what they are doing, you can formulate your SEO strategy more specifically.
Understand What Your Audience Wants
Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s important to understand what they want. What are their needs and desires? What problems do they need help with? By understanding what your audience wants, you can create content that will address their needs and help them achieve their goals.
One of the best ways to understand your audience is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on real data and research. By creating a buyer persona, you can get a better understanding of your target audience’s needs and how to reach them more effectively.
Develop a Content Strategy
One of the best ways to attract and retain your target audience is through high-quality content. But in order to create effective content, you need a clear content strategy that lays out your goals and targets for each piece of content you create.
You need to have a plan for your content. You need to know what you want to achieve with every piece of content you create. This will help you make sure that your content is effective and reaches your target audience.
Your content strategy should answer the following questions:
- What is the goal of this piece of content?
- Who is the target audience?
- What format will this piece of content take?
- What keyword(s) will this piece of content be optimized for?
- When will this piece of content be published?
- Where will this piece of content be promoted?
- How will we measure the success of this piece of content?
Answering these questions will help you develop a clear and effective content strategy.
Create Compelling Content
Once you have a clear understanding of your audience and what they want, it’s time to start creating compelling content that will address their needs. But what makes for compelling content? Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating content:
High-quality – Your content should be interesting, engaging, and valuable to your target audience. Make sure that it’s high quality by focusing on providing useful information that helps your readers achieve their goals or solve a problem.
Optimized – In order to get the most out of every piece of content you create, you need to make sure that it’s optimized for both search engines and users. For SEO purposes, use keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions, as well as throughout the body of your content. And for user experience purposes, make sure that your content is easy to read and visually appealing.
Well-promoted – Just because you have compelling content doesn’t mean that people will automatically come across it – you have to promote your content in order to get the most visibility. There are many different ways you can do this, including social media promotion, email outreach, and paid ads.
Google Your Keywords and Narrow Your List
Narrowing your list of keywords is one of the most important steps in effective SEO. By targeting a smaller, more focused list of keywords, you can improve your chances of reaching the right audience for your business. And by using the right tools, you can make the process of narrowing your list easier and more efficient.
To narrow your list: look at broad matches and narrower versions of your keywords.
Broad match keywords are keywords that you put in your website or business to help people find it. People who are looking for things related to your website or business might use these words to find you. You can use tools to help you find good broad match keywords for your business.
Narrow match keywords are similar to broad match, but they offer a more targeted approach. These keywords focus on specific search terms and phrases that your audience is likely to use when searching for your business or website online. With the right tools, you can easily find good narrow match keywords for your business.
Long tail keywords are a little different than broad and narrow match keywords. They are longer phrases that also tend to be more specific to your business or website. By focusing on long tail keywords, you can target a smaller audience with your content, which can help improve your ROI from your SEO efforts.
Once you’ve narrowed down your list of keywords, it’s time to start creating content for each of them. To do this effectively, you need to understand what your audience wants and how to reach them more effectively online.
Get Backlinks to Your Pages
Backlinks are one of the most important factors in SEO. They are links from other websites that point to your website or blog. The more backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). And the higher your website ranks, the more traffic you will receive from people searching for information online.
But how do you get backlinks? And how can you ensure that they are high-quality links that will help improve your ranking? Here are a few tips:
1. Create high-quality content. This is by far the best way to get backlinks. If people like your content, they will be more likely to link to it from their own website. Make sure your content is well written, informative, and interesting.
2. Reach out to other websites. Once you’ve created high-quality content, reach out to other websites and ask if they would be interested in linking to your content. This is a great way to get high-quality backlinks.
3. Use social media. Social media can be a great tool for getting backlinks. When you share your content on social media, make sure to include a link back to your website or blog. This will help people find your content more easily, and it will also help improve your ranking.
4. Use directories and forums. There are many online directories and forums that allow you to submit links to your website or blog. These can be a great way to get backlinks, but make sure to only submit your links to high-quality directories and forums.
These 4 short steps will help make sure you are well on your way towards achieving basic link building techniques.
Improve Your Technical SEO
Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects of any website or blog. By ensuring that your website is properly optimized, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and receiving more traffic from people searching for information online.
But what exactly is technical SEO? And how can you go about improving it? Here are a few tips:
1. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. More and more people are using their smartphones to access the internet, so it’s important that your website is mobile-friendly. If people can’t easily navigate your website on their phone, they will likely leave and find another site that is easier to use.
2. Optimize your website for speed. People don’t have a lot of patience when it comes to waiting for websites to load. If your website takes too long to load, people will leave and look elsewhere for the information they are looking for. To improve speed, remove images that aren’t absolutely necessary, use a content delivery network (CDN), compress large files, and reduce redirects and plugins.
3. Make sure your site is crawlable and indexable by search engines. Search engines need to be able to easily crawl through and index all of your content in order to rank you higher in SERPs. You can do this by creating a sitemap, optimizing your internal linking structure, and avoiding duplicate content or broken links on your website.
Crawling and indexing is largely the first step that all search engines will use when they visit your site. Search engines need to be able to go through your website and find all of the content so that they can show it to people who are looking for information. You can help make this easier for them by creating a sitemap and making sure your website is easy to navigate. You should also avoid having broken links or duplicate content on your website.
While technical and on-page SEO are incredibly important, they are just a few of the many factors that go into achieving good rankings in SERPs. If you want to be successful with SEO, it’s important to continue learning about best practices and adapting your strategies as needed. Whether you’re just starting out or looking for ways to improve your existing approach, there are always new techniques that can help boost your ranking. And by staying up-to-date with current trends, you can ensure that your site will continue performing well over time.
Create a Great Design and User Experience
Good design is essential for any website or blog. By ensuring that your website looks good and is easy to use, you can improve your chances of attracting and retaining visitors. In fact, research shows that people are more likely to stay on a website if it has a great design and user experience.
But what exactly makes a website’s design “great”? And how can you go about improving it? Here are a few tips:
1. Use simple, clean designs. People don’t want to be overwhelmed with too much information when they visit a website. Keep your designs simple and clean, using only the most important elements. This will make it easier for people to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily.
2. Use white space to your advantage. White space, or negative space, isn’t just a design buzzword – it’s essential for good website design. By using white space effectively, you can help direct people’s attention to important content and improve their experience on your site.
3. Focus on usability. Usability is all about making websites easy to use and intuitive for users. This means that your designs should be simple and straightforward while still providing the functionality that people need when they visit your site. If you can get this right, you’ll find that visitors stay longer on your site and are more likely to convert into customers or clients.
Good design isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s also about creating an amazing user experience for visitors to your website. If you want people to stick around, it’s important to focus on both the design and usability of your site.
4. Use images and videos wisely. Images and videos can be a great way to add visual interest to your website. But if they’re not used wisely, they can actually end up hurting your site’s performance. That’s because large files can take longer to load, which can make your site seem slow and unresponsive. So, when adding images and videos to your site, make sure to compress them first to reduce their file size.
5. Optimize for mobile devices. With more and more people using mobile devices to browse the web, it’s essential that your website is optimized for these users. This means having a responsive design that looks great on all screen sizes and using mobile-friendly fonts and navigation elements. By making your website easy to use on mobile devices, you can help ensure that visitors have a positive experience and are more likely to return in the future.
With good design, a focus on usability, and optimization for mobile devices, you can create the perfect user experience for your website visitors.
Continue to re-optimize Your Content
As you know, SEO is all about optimizing your website content for search engines. But what happens when that content needs to be updated or changed? Do you have to go through the entire optimization process again?
Thankfully, the answer is no. You can optimize your website content without having to re-optimize everything from scratch. Just follow these simple steps:
1. Identify the changes that need to be made. Before you start updating your content, take a moment to identify the specific changes that need to be made. This will help ensure that you’re focused and efficient as you update your site.
For example: it could be that user search behavior has changed, and you have to tweak the keywords on your site. Or, you have to get more links. Or, you have to tweak your content a bit because the SERP (search engine results pages) you are targeting have become more competitive.
Either way, these types of changes can be very specific and will need research and information in order to determine exactly what you need to do to keep your results moving in the right direction.
2. Make the necessary changes. Once you’ve identified the changes that need to be made, go ahead and make them. This may include updating text, adding or removing images, and more.
3. Re-optimize the content. Now that your content has been updated, you can re-optimize it for search engines to help boost your rankings even further. To do this, simply go through the same optimization steps that you used when you first created your content – including keyword research and on-page optimization.
With these simple steps, you can easily keep your website content up-to-date while still improving its SEO performance over time. So don’t be afraid to make changes – just be sure to optimize them afterward!
Monitor Your SEO Progress
The final step in effective SEO is monitoring your progress. This includes tracking your ranking in search engine results pages, monitoring your traffic, and analyzing your backlink profile.
There are many tools that you can use to track your progress. Some of these tools are free, while others are paid. But no matter which tools you use, it’s important to keep track of your progress so you can see how well your SEO efforts are working.
SEO is an important part of any online marketing strategy. By following these steps at the beginner level, it is still possible for you to continue achieving great results.
An SEO Professional’s Work is Never Done
By working on continuing to develop your SEO skills in these areas, eventually you too could be achieving the results we have been able to.
With time, you will get better at keyword research, design and user experience, creating content, monitoring your progress, and analyzing SEO changes.
