SEO for Beginners Step By Step Guide to SEO Basics

1. SEO for Beginners: Step By Step Guide to SEO Basics This quick and comprehensive guide takes you through the SEO fundamentals. If you’re new to SEO, we recommend you go through the contents in the given order. However, if you already have an overview and are looking to review a specific topic, feel free to jump to the section of your choice. As Google accounts for more than 87% of searches happening online, this guide focuses on Google, and all the terms related to the search engine and SEO are in that context. However, if you want to know more about other search engines, leave us a comment with your queries, and we’ll see how we can help. What is SEO? There are multiple definitions of SEO. We like to put it as – SEO is the pursuit of optimizing your website and content such that the search engine finds it beneficial for the person searching for related content/products/services and, in turn, ranks it higher on the Search Results Page (SERP). If you have listed or been promoting your business online, you probably already know how important it is to make your business page/website rank on the SERP. Anyone looking to achieve that must pay attention to SEO. There is no better testament to your brand’s authority than maintaining a top rank on SERP.

2. Before starting the SEO journey, you need to understand that Google’s USP is to help people find what they are looking for, and more than 80% of Google’s revenue comes from fulfilling this goal. Google wants your product/service in front of the right audience. So, while keeping track of the technical details of SEO is essential, the most important thing to keep in mind is to make your content extremely useful and relevant to your users. This starts with understanding your users, their needs, and their intent (Hyperlink the entire highlighted part to redirect to the user flow/persona doc from the playbook) when searching for something relevant to your product/services. It’s essential to point out here that you should never fall into the trap of Black Hat SEO to trick the search engine as it’ll backfire sooner than you think, and the penalties can destroy your brand image and business. Though time-consuming, white Hat SEO (Hyperlink to a different doc about White vs. Black Hat SEO) can be immensely rewarding in the long run. How search works When you search for something on Google, it refers to its Index of the web to give you the results. Google indexes web pages by crawling through them and ranking them for a possible combination of search terms. If you need clarification on the statements above, you need to know about the three primary functions of any search engine. Crawler–A piece of code written to systematically parse through a web page’s syntax and content (text, images, videos, animations, etc.) to learn about the webpage. Index– The collection of millions of web pages that have been crawled that Google looks into to find the best results whenever a search is done. Rank–A website’s position, as a user finds it, on the SERP after a search is complete is the rank of that website. Organic Vs Inorganic paid result As a business owner, you can either work hard and improve your website rankings or secure a spot with paid Ads. Organic results Websites that are more SEO friendly than others rank better than websites that are not. These results are called organic results, and they are solely dependent on how well the website has been optimized for SEO Inorganic/ paid result Other companies pay and secure the top position on the SERP. This lets them have better rankings without having to go through the trouble. Although this is an effective means of showing your website to the user who might be interested in it, there is a huge

3. competition among companies trying to gain a higher spot in paid results (link to another article about Google Search Ads). Website Audit One of the main aims of a website is to create an excellent user experience. A user- friendly website will be more likely to attain other business goals like lead generation, email signups, or simply getting more sales. An SEO website audit helps you check just that so you can know what to work on to improve your rankings. A website that a user loves is loved by the crawlers too. So, let’s see what you should check on your website to perform an SEO audit. The great news is that you don’t need an SEO professional to perform this audit. This is a simple list of things you could do very quickly by yourself and improve your chances for SEO success. Perform a site search yourself When you look for your domain name on Google, you will understand the following. The position of your website in SERP The pages of your website that appear This way, you will understand which pages of your website are being crawled the most. You can also do a ‘site:domainname’ check to see which pages show up. This will help you identify if any of your important pages that are business-driving need more work. Analyse the content Though the first step is to write good content, the content wouldn’t mean anything if the crawlers can’t find it. What makes the content user-friendly is precisely what makes it crawlable too. So how would you decide if your content does its job or not? Well, think as your reader. A mind is attracted to things that are easy to understand. Your content should not only have an easy-to-understand language but also create an engaging flow for the user, ultimately leading to a CTA that’s important for your business. Use headings and subheadings in your content to keep it structured. This will make your content easy to navigate. Duplicate content and an excess number of keywords should be taken out at that very moment to make the content more SEO friendly. Content laid out step-by-step and told a story increases the time a user spends on your website. This type of content is found to be more relevant for Google. UI-UX A lot of factors can drive a customer away from a website. This is never good for Google. And the website design plays a vital role in gripping the users.

4. Site speed Slower loading speeds could be due to many reasons. Larger images, videos, and plenty of banner ads. Check if the images on the web page are at most 50 KB and if any embedded videos are YouTube links and not directly uploaded videos. Websites that take a long time to load can drive people very soon, leading to a higher bounce rate and lower ranking. Once you check how well your site is optimised for SEO, you can improve the pain points by focusing on them one by one. Keyword research An essential tool in ranking better is to find out the best keywords to target for your business. Good keyword research will help you understand the terms to include in your content, meta tags, and descriptions (discussed later in the blog). Here are the steps that you need to follow to perform a keyword research Conclusion Ranking higher in Google can help your business in many ways. But it does not stop there. With updating Google algorithms, a business must always be at the top with the latest SEO practices in place. It is constantly monitoring and experimenting to see what works better. Moreover, there’s always a lot you can do, even with a high-ranking website, to gain more visitors and traffic. With over 3.5 billion searches happening every day on Google, there’s a lot that you can work on (link to another descriptive blog) to optimize your website to its fullest and reach your business goals.