If you're new to SEO, you may be wondering where to start. This guide provides everything beginners need to know about search engine optimization. Learn how to optimize your website for search engines, and get tips on improving your ranking and driving traffic to your site. Plus, discover why SEO is essential for your business and uncover some of the top misconceptions about this marketing strategy.
The best place to start as someone new to search engine optimization is by understanding what it is. The phrase is thrown around quite often without meaning. The broad definition of SEO is the actions you take to increase your site's ranking on search engines. Understandably, this definition can confuse you slightly, especially since there are hundreds of factors to consider. After all, when search engines rank websites there are different impacts.
So, what does raising the ranking of your site mean? It means improving the visibility of your site in search results. There are many ways to do this, from advertising to the creation of content. Additionally, using social media, doing keyword research, improving user experience, and much more will impact it. If you are feeling overwhelmed, that’s completely normal. No one knows everything about SEO nor completely understands it.
At this point, you are probably wondering why SEO is so important? Why are so many businesses are spending thousands on it? Consider this simple statistic: there are approximately 5.6 billion searches per day. This means that at any given time, people could be searching for something in the industry your business operates within.
For example, if you are a restaurant owner, did you know that the top 17 and 20 search queries are “food near me” and “restaurants near me.” In fact, there are 28,000,000 and 24,000,000 searches, respectively?
Not only does SEO increase people's awareness of your business, but it also helps increase website visitors. Thus, leading to conversions and repeat customers. More than this, SEO is perfect for expanding the authority of your business. This of course is essential for the foundation of a brand. Your business needs search engine optimisation to stay competitive, as it's likely that your competitors are already leveraging SEO.
If you are new to SEO, you might think that the definition is anything you do to improve your site's rankings. Many think doing something is better than nothing. Unfortunately, this isn’t entirely true, and there are many mistakes you could make. These could end up lowering your ranking. For example, according to Cozab, the initial link velocity is very important and can hurt or increase your rankings.
Not conducting thorough keyword research could also impact your growth. Incredibly popular keywords might help because they’re getting search queries, but everyone else will be using them, too. Perhaps you decide to focus on content creation and pump out as many articles as possible with as many links as possible. But since the quality of the content isn’t that great and the links are spammy, your ranking drops. More than this, in a rush to pump content, you might disregard the organizational structure of your site. Thus, decrease the quality of the user experience.
Finally, the last thing you should be aware of as a beginner in SEO is that it isn’t all doom and gloom. There are plenty of resources that can help you. To start, one of the best tips for those new to SEO would be to focus on creating great content.
Recent updates to search engines like Google focus on a “quality, not quantity” approach. Consider that a search engine's purpose is to answer users' queries. Therefore, if your site is producing great content and answering queries, you will increase your ranking.
More than this, while you may be itching to begin guest posting to backlink your site, you need to do your research. Treat backlinks like a currency. Only choose to use sites that actually have a higher domain rating than yours. This is the best way to build authority and not waste time.
