Are you looking to increase organic traffic to your website through search engines such as Google or Bing?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short, is the process of improving search rankings for a website on search engine ranking pages (SERPs). It involves technical, offsite and onsite SEO to see optimal results. Beginners to SEO are often overwhelmed by the whole process and don’t know where to start, wondering whether what they’re doing is right, whether they’ll see results soon, or how much of it to even do. Here’s five beginner friendly SEO tips to help you along the way:
- Learn As Much As Possible
Keep reading articles online for the latest insights and tips on SEO. Follow guides and play around with ideas. SEO takes a lot of time and is an investment that needs a lot of tweaking to get right. You’ll find some approaches work well more than others, depending on your line of business, your business size, your SEO budget and your target market or audience. Blogs are your best bet for learning the ropes of SEO. Since you’re reading this article at this very moment, you are on the right track!
- See What Competitors Are Doing
Lookup backlinks of your competitors using tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer to identify what websites your competitors are getting links from, and try to replicate what they’ve achieved. You can also manually search for resource pages – i.e. pages dedicated to having useful links or resources in the relevant topic. One you’ve identified where websites are getting links from, try acquiring them too.
- Read Case Studies
Examine digital marketing case studies written by digital marketing agencies for a clear idea on best practices and success stories. These will help you build a stronger understanding of SEO overall and explain the consequences of SEO actions by showing their results. The success of larger SEO campaigns can be replicated for SEO campaigns for smaller businesses so case studies are great for when you’re starting out and can’t visualize your SEO results. Learn how to set benchmarks and targets such as number of links by the end of the month.
- Don’t Over-do It
Google Penguin is a Google algorithm update that decreases the rankings of websites that don’t abide by their Google Webmaster Guidelines, making black-hat SEO techniques less effective and punishing those that try to manipulate links to their website through artificial or manipulative techniques. Avoid black-hat techniques and spamming links. Aim for higher quality links through relevant and high quality content that isn’t spammy – this will result in better links and no punishment. Punishment means lower search rankings and lower traffic!
Cast your net wide and outreach as many websites as possible when link building, but make sure that the links you are trying to acquire will look organic and are relevant! Managing a high number of outreaches is made much easier through using outreach management tools such as BuzzStream where you can add due dates for follow up emails and be able to view and send emails for each website through one platform. Another method of managing your outreaches is to use a spreadsheet to keep track of websites that you’ve outreached to and the progress of your attempts.
- Be Patient
You can track your website and keyword rankings with tools such as AWR Cloud or Searchlight Conductor but if you’re not already ranking, it can be quite demotivating to not see results for a while. That’s where patient comes in – you have to persevere and keep writing up content, acquiring links and targeting the right keywords. Results don’t come overnight… it can take up to 10 weeks for link building to have an effect on website’s rankings depending on your efforts and the competitiveness of keywords. Another great tool to track keyword rankings and backlinks is Ahrefs which serves as an all in one tool for SEO.
SEO is a huge learning progress that never stops. Keep on reading and learning as much as you can. Tweak and find your own optimal strategies to implement. What works varies from business to business, so take your time testing out ideas and finding your success. Good luck!
Raymond Tang
