There are many ways to improve your web site’s visibility—advertising, public relations, outreach marketing, etc. SEO is the process of writing content for users to find you via a search engine, such as Google.
You can think of SEO as a type of marketing. And frankly it is one of the cheaper types of marketing you can do.
Think about it: everytime you run a Google/Facebook/Instagram ad you have to pay for every day that it is up. And that price scales depending on which people you are trying to target.
SEO doesn’t work that way. You pay for the content (either with your time or having someone write it) one time.
You then reap all the benefits that the content will serve you over the years without having to spend any more money on it.
SEO done right can be your main driver of traffic to your website.
The main way to create SEO content is to make articles based on certain queries that people search for.
The easiest way to get those phrases is to go straight to Google.
You’ll want to target long-tail keywords, which are longer, more specific queries that you can answer in a well thought out article.
For example, someone who types “how to install tile” probably needs a specific answer to the question.
You may be able to answer that question, so writing an article will help you reach those people.
You can find long tail keywords suggestions just by doing the autocomplete in Google. Start by typing in a query that you can answer with your domain of expertise.
For example if I’m a clothing store I might search for something like this:
When in doubt, go straight to the search engine (Google, Brave, Bing, etc.) this is the freshest data available.
Be wary of certain tools that recommend keywords for free. Usually in order to find top tier keywords they’ll be priced in terms of their competitiveness.
When you do start writing the article you’ll want to include some key things so that Google perceives your article as rich and adding value to users.
They should usually be organized well, which means the use of headers (H2s, H3s, and H4s,) to distinguish sections.
Search engines also like rich, engaging content, so relevant images and videos will definitely give your site a boost.
Bold and italics tags also signal to Google that your content is rich, so be sure to include those!
Good news is that our product Juice, an AI writing assistant, helps you write awesome SEO content very easily.
Juice lets you draft an article with all the things like text, headings, bolds, italics, and relevant images and videos baked into the blog post, so you don't need to worry about optimizing your article. You can just worry about editing and putting your special touch on the blog post.
There are more things, like tags, metatags, inner linking, etc. that we can be aware of when constructing our content, but it is important not to stress too much over them.
We’ve seen good content rank without being perfectly search engine optimized.
No need to “keyword stuff” the article, just write a good piece of content that answers the user's query.
Another way you can do SEO is by targeting keywords around unique identifying words (such as your brand or your name) and eventually those pages will index and pull in traffic for people searching specifically about you or your brand.
A backlink is a link to your site by another (preferably more trafficked) site. And yes, backlinks are important.
But it is also important not to stress about them as they will accrue naturally and organically the more content you publish and the better that you do in the SERPs.
Of course a good backlink can do a page wonders, but it is not the end all assurance of a successful page.
Backlinks are also double-edged swords: A good backlink can boost your site tremendously.
But a bad backlink can tank your website like you’ve never seen.
To our SEO clients we are usually slow to add backlinks to their site and only do so on the assurance that it will do their site more good than harm.
Google analytics is a popular and easy to learn tool.
By easily tracking your page views, you can see which of your sites are growing and therefore which ones you should pay attention to.
Paying attention to your winning articles is an absolute must (for more information about winning articles, see this page).
Your website may not get as many visits as other sites in your industry, but if yours has content that resonates with your audience, then they may visit more often.
Most of the people coming to your website will come via a few pages.
You’ll want to identify which pages those are in order to improve them, add links to them, and direct them through your funnel (sales or other).
This is your billboard for your site, so this is where content is king and your brand is seen for the first time.
Make sure that your site has a proper funnel integrated to get maximal conversions. Remember that although traffic is important, your sales funnel will be the deciding factor for whether or not a customer converts.
We recommend this video for a closer in depth view of the sales funnel on an online store.
If this article still seems foreign to you, check out our friends at Moz and what they recommend to get started ranking content quickly:
https://moz.com/blog/drive-newsletter-growth-with-seo
Also see our other articles to help you extract the most traffic out of your site!
5 Ways to Get the Most ROI Out of Your SEO Content