Beginners Guide to SEO

Rob Wilson December 15, 2021

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving your website to make it more visible in online searches related to your business. For any online business, SEO is a game-changer. And it’s easy to see why. What this means is the first-page results are driving a vast majority of all traffic, leaving the rest behind. Think about it – when you search on Google, how often do you click to the second page of results? Probably never.

So we know SEO is important, but it doesn’t have to keep us up at night. That’s because it’s not rocket science. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to implement just a handful of techniques that will have you ranking higher in searches and driving much more traffic to your website.

In this article, we’ll discuss 6 things that anyone can implement to improve their SEO.

1. Update your Google My Business listing

If your business has a storefront and interacts with customers face-to-face in some capacity, updating your Google listing is a quick and easy way to immediately beef up your online presence. With Google My Business, you can choose how your business will appear on Google Search and Maps – including a link to your website, business hours, a physical address, phone number, and more.

2. Create Quality Content

This one is simple. Google’s algorithms work by analyzing web pages for keywords, traffic, in-bound and out-bound links, and more. Over time, the more high-quality, relevant content you post to your website, the higher you will rank. Then it becomes a positive cycle. As more people read and share your content, the higher you will rank on Google.

Here are some tips for creating quality content:

• Do your best to ensure your content is well-written and engaging. More importantly, make sure it’s interesting!
  
• Provide relevant information that your target audience would actually want to read and engage with.
  
• Make it shareable. This will ultimately increase the traffic to your site.

Also, the great thing about publishing great content is that it lasts forever. Once you put something up, it can provide returns for you for years to come!

3. Optimize Web Pages

Optimizing your web pages is one of the best and easiest ways to rank higher for specific keywords. It involves:

• Tagging relevant keywords – just make sure to not spam the keywords
  
• Making the URL structure intuitive
  
• Optimizing audio and video elements to improve site speed
  
• Making the website mobile friendly

4. Use a Site Optimization Tool

Optimization tools do all the SEO dirty work for you so you can focus on what’s important to you for your business. For example, SEOCrawler instantly analyzes your web page content, giving you information on tags, page speed, keyword optimization, and broken links. Additionally, WordPress provides built-in SEO tools that are fairly easy to use and help you easily optimize your pages.

Google also provides a free Keyword Planner tool that helps you determine which keywords you should try to rank for on different pages.

5. Know Your Audience

When you create content for your website, always have your target audience in mind. Consider what they would search for (like specific keywords and phrases) on Google. A good way to get started on this is to research your competitors in the industry and look for the types of keywords and phrases they use in their posts and articles.

6. Acquire the Right Domain Name

As discussed many times on this blog, your web domain is your identity – it’s how people recognize you as they browse the internet. And that means your name can make or break your company.

And that is also true when we’re talking about SEO. To best maximize your SEO, follow these tips when choosing a domain name (also, these tips are general domain best practices even outside of SEO considerations):

• If possible, go with .com
  
• Use relevant keywords if applicable
  
• Absolutely no hyphens
  
• Use subfolders rather than subdomains (saw.com/blog rather than blog.saw.com)

We heed these best practices ourselves with saw.com, so you could say we stand by them.

Next Steps

The key to all of this is that, ultimately, the goal of search engines is to show people what they’re looking for. And if your business is what that person is looking for, but they can’t find you, it doesn’t matter. That person will go elsewhere for their business. So let’s help the search engines help our potential customers find us!

Before you follow tips 1-5, you’ll first need to acquire a great domain. For example, if you have a spammy-looking domain, it might not even matter if you rank high on Google because customers may be turned off by the name and not visit your website anyway.

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