How to Level Up Your Business as an SEO Beginner

If you’re new to SEO, it can all seem a little overwhelming: between meta tags, schemas, and search engine algorithms, an SEO strategy is a many-tentacled beast. And what if you’re also a business owner or marketing manager tasked with driving more online traffic and growing brand awareness? Isn’t it all a bit much for a relative novice?

Well, while SEO is a complex and nuanced area, even a complete SEO beginner can learn the basics pretty quickly and start putting some growth-driving initiatives into place. In this guide, we’ve identified the key areas you should focus on if you’re looking to grow your business as an SEO beginner.

First, let’s define SEO and explore why it’s crucial.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing web pages and content to increase their visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves optimizing on-page elements such as keywords, meta tags, page titles, and headings to make them more relevant to the search engine’s algorithm. SEO also includes link building (earning links from other websites to your own) and other off-page activities to help improve a website’s ranking.

Another important element is technical SEO, which is about ensuring that your website is indexed correctly to be crawled by search engines. This involves validating HTML and CSS code, optimizing page loading times, and minimizing duplicate content. Technical SEO also involves utilizing tools such as Google Analytics to monitor website performance and identify and address any issues affecting visibility.

Why is SEO Important?

SEO forms an essential part of a digital marketing strategy, and for any business with a digital presence — which is almost all businesses nowadays, surely — it’s borderline impossible to achieve significant growth without it. In fact, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, meaning if you’re not paying attention to SEO, you’re missing out on a huge potential audience.

Not only can SEO boost organic traffic, increase visibility, and establish authority, but it’s also one of the most cost-effective growth strategies. Of course, it will require a degree of investment to build and maintain a successful SEO strategy, particularly if you leverage a third-party SEO agency to support you in reaching your organic growth targets. However, the return on investment (ROI) is typically much higher than in other areas of digital marketing.

SEO Strategies for SEO Beginners

SEO can be daunting for anyone with little to no knowledge of the subject; it’s wide-ranging, nuanced, and based on continually shifting trends and algorithms that can be hard to keep up with. That said, there are some simple SEO strategies that can help to increase website visibility and ranking. Here, we’re going to focus on the most fundamental aspects of SEO that every SEO beginner should be paying attention to.

Optimizing Web Content for SEO

Creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content is essential for SEO success. Businesses should focus on creating content that is optimized with relevant keywords (more on that shortly) and tailored for their target audience. They should also focus on optimizing page titles, headings, and meta descriptions for SEO — these elements are important because they help to structure the page in a way that makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand it, increasing your ranking potential.

However, it’s important to remember here that your content should be targeted at people first, and search engines second. This is the basis of Google’s recent Helpful Content Update, which denotes that content that has been written for humans, by humans is likely to outrank that which has been crafted simply to manipulate a search engine algorithm. User experience (UX) is important to Google, and they want to ensure their top search results are helpful, engaging, and relevant for their users.

Performing Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial element of SEO because it allows you to identify phrases and terms that are most relevant to your target audience and market. By understanding what keywords potential customers are searching for, you can create content that meets their needs and provides value. Keyword research can seem like a daunting part of the process, but it can be broken down into a step-by-step process.

1. Make a list of topic clusters — list the high-level topics that are broadly related to your niche, and separate these into ‘buckets’.
2. Expand each topic cluster by identifying more specific (long-tail) terms related to that topic (e.g. if your topic is “web design”, you might expand this to “website design services”, “how to design a website”, “best practices for web design”, and so on).
3. Find related search terms — now you have an initial list of keywords for each of your topic clusters, you can expand these by finding related search terms. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or KWFinder are great.
4. Include these keywords throughout your website content without overusing them (your content should still be readable and engaging). You can use a tool like Surfer SEO or SEMrush to ‘score’ your content for your chosen keyword(s).

Understanding Local and International SEO

Local SEO focuses on optimizing websites for search engines within a specific geographic location and involves targeting location-specific keywords (“digital marketing services in New York”) and creating content tailored to local customers. International SEO, on the other hand, is concerned with optimizing a website for multiple countries or geographic regions. This involves researching and targeting keywords relevant to the region and optimizing content for a number of different languages.

For small businesses that operate within a specific geographic region — and want to target users within that area specifically — a solid local SEO strategy is required. However, businesses with more of a global presence (or at least those looking to expand to new markets) may benefit from the help of overseas expertise in building a successful international SEO strategy. In this case, using an international contractor might be an option: Remote has created a useful guide on paying remote independent contractors.

Building Internal and External Links

Regarding search engine optimization (SEO), link-building is an essential part of the process. Link building involves the acquisition of both internal and external links for the purpose of boosting authority, enhancing credibility, and ultimately improving a website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Internal link building involves interlinking pages on your website. This helps to aid navigation by making it easier for customers to move between pages on your site, while it also helps search engines in indexing and ranking your content. It’s a good idea to create an internal blog and include several links to other pages on your site.
• External link building is the process of obtaining links from websites other than your own. It’s an essential step in increasing a website’s visibility and credibility, as search engines evaluate a website’s authority based on the number and quality of its external links. Link building can be achieved through a variety of methods, but the most common is guest blogging.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fundamental part of digital marketing, helping brands reach wider audiences and enhance their reputation and authority. By following these tips and strategies, even SEO novices can improve their website’s visibility, ranking, and organic traffic.