SEO Not Sure Where to Start: A Guide to Succeeding

If you’re not sure where to start, you’re definitely not alone. Search engine optimization can seem overwhelming at first, but with the right approach, you can develop an effective SEO strategy that drives results.

Let’s imagine that you are a first-time webmaster or a business owner whose company is working on a new website. You have big plans for it, you have an unlimited number of ideas for the website and you really, really wish for it to both wow users and make conversions.

While you are working on web development, you are also doing your best to get informed and you soon realize that pretty much everyone is telling you to also keep in mind that dreaded acronym, SEO. You decide to learn more about it and you soon have a rough idea of what search engine optimization is and how it can help your future website improve its google search results.

Then, you start scratching the surface and you are met by a wall of terms, data, strategies, tactics and everything else that has to do with search engine optimization. You learn about search engines, keyword research, meta descriptions, and technical SEO, but it all seems overwhelming.

The next thing you feel are the palms of your hands getting sweatier and your breathing becoming shallow and too fast.

This whole SEO business might be more complicated than it seemed at first. Soon enough, you realize you don’t even know where to start with your SEO efforts.

And really, where do you start with SEO?

Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is SEO and Why is it Important?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of enhancing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By employing various techniques and strategies, SEO aims to improve a website’s ranking, making it more likely to appear on the first page of search results. This is crucial because higher visibility leads to increased traffic, which can translate into more conversions and sales. In essence, SEO is about making your website more attractive to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, ensuring that your content reaches the right audience at the right time.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines operate using complex algorithms designed to crawl, index, and rank web pages based on their relevance and quality. When a user types a query into a search engine, the algorithm sifts through an extensive index of web pages to deliver the most pertinent results. Factors such as keyword usage, content quality, link equity, and user behavior play significant roles in determining a website’s ranking. Understanding how search engines work is fundamental to optimizing your website effectively and improving your position in search results.

Benefits of SEO for Your Business

Implementing a robust SEO strategy offers numerous benefits for businesses:

• Increased Online Visibility and Credibility: Higher rankings in search engine results pages enhance your website’s visibility and establish your brand as a credible source of information.

• Improved Website Traffic and Engagement: Effective SEO drives more organic traffic to your site, leading to higher engagement rates.

• Enhanced Brand Awareness and Reputation: Consistently appearing in search results helps build brand recognition and trust among users.

• Increased Conversions and Sales: By attracting targeted traffic, SEO can boost your conversion rates and sales figures.

• Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy: Unlike paid advertising, SEO focuses on organic growth, offering a better return on investment (ROI) over time.

• Better ROI Compared to Paid Advertising: SEO provides sustainable results, making it a more cost-effective long-term strategy.

Read Up

Before you do anything, you definitely have to read up on the whole field of SEO, if nothing else then to get a hang of the language and to give yourself a general overview of what is going on. The good news is there is no shortage of online resources on SEO, the vast majority of which are completely free.

Search Engine Journal, SEMRush’s blog, Moz’s blog, the Ahrefs blog and a few other places should be enough to ease you into the whole story, while also providing you with plenty of stories on the practical application of SEO. These resources can help you understand how search engines work and what factors affect search engine rankings.

Understanding User Intent and Search Intent

Before diving deep into SEO tactics, it’s crucial to understand user intent and search intent. When people use search engines, they’re looking for specific information, products, or services. Your content should address these intents directly.

User experience is also closely tied to search intent. Google’s algorithm increasingly prioritizes websites that provide excellent user experiences. This means your site should be user friendly, load quickly on mobile devices, and provide relevant information that satisfies your target audience’s needs.

Establish Your Position

Everything you do SEO-wise will depend on your current situation. In the introduction, we used a very dramatic scenario in which people wonder where to start with SEO. There are innumerable different situations in which you might find yourself doing the same.

Perhaps you bought a business and you discovered that the company’s website dates back to 1997 and hasn’t been updated once. Perhaps you just dabbled with your website previously and you want to get serious. Perhaps another competitor has entered your market and their website is making yours slide down the list of search engine results pages.

Before you can do anything, you have to analyze your position in google search results.

For one, you will check how you are doing for the keywords you are targeting. In other words, you will be checking how your website ranks for the keywords you wish to rank high for. Sometimes, you will discover that you have been targeting the wrong keywords or that you might be better off by targeting different, if less popular ones.

Conducting Keyword Research

Ahrefs and Moz provide very useful keyword research tools that you can use to find out what people are searching for and how competitive various keywords and key phrases are. For example, you might find that a key phrase such as “affordable life insurance” is far more searched for than the key phrase “cheap life insurance”. Sometimes the competition for certain keywords will be so stiff that you will be looking for similar alternatives.

Keyword research helps you understand search volume, search terms, and keyword difficulty. Google Keyword Planner is another excellent tool for researching keywords and discovering long tail keywords. Long tail keywords tend to have less competition and can be easier to rank for, especially for new websites.

Keyword research is a whole separate field and it is crucial for discovering how your website is doing. Even if you are only now launching a website, you need to know which keywords you wish to rank for.

Once you have decided on the target keywords you wish to target, you will be able to find out how you are standing and how can improve your position in search engine results.

Using Google Keyword Planner and Other Tools

Google Keyword Planner is an invaluable tool for anyone looking to optimize their website for search engines. It helps you discover relevant keywords and phrases, providing insights into search volume, competition, and suggested bid prices. This information is crucial for developing a targeted SEO strategy. Additionally, advanced tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz offer comprehensive features that go beyond basic keyword research, providing in-depth analysis and actionable insights to help you stay ahead in the SEO game.

Filling Topic Buckets with Keywords

Organizing your content strategy around topic buckets is a smart way to optimize your website for search engines. Topic buckets are essentially categories of related keywords and phrases that help structure your content. By filling these buckets with relevant keywords, you can create a cohesive content plan that addresses specific search queries and user intents. This approach not only improves your website’s relevance and authority but also increases your chances of ranking higher in search engine results. Here’s how to do it:

• Identify Relevant Keywords and Phrases: Use keyword research tools to find terms that your target audience is searching for.

• Create Targeted Content: Develop content that directly addresses the needs and interests of your audience.

• Improve Website Relevance and Authority: Ensure your content is high-quality and authoritative to build trust with both users and search engines.

• Increase Ranking Potential: A well-organized content strategy enhances your chances of appearing in top search results.

By following these steps, you can create a robust SEO strategy that drives traffic, engages users, and boosts your business’s online presence.

Do a Search Engine Optimization Audit

An SEO audit is a process where you analyze how your website is doing SEO-wise by really digging deep and taking a detailed look at every little thing that can affect its search engine performance.

The first thing to check (and one that gets forgotten often) is that your website is only accessible as one address. For instance, some websites will be accessible as http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, https://yoursite.com and so on. It is important you use a 301 redirection to a single version you choose (it’s best to use the https:// version due to Google’s love of SSL enabled sites).

On-Page SEO Essentials

Once you do this, you should check your home page SEO – title tags, home page meta description, header tags and subheader tags. These html tags help search engines understand what your web page is about.

This is where you will be hitting hard on those keywords and key phrases we talked about before, making sure that the aforementioned contain those keywords while not being spammy or unnatural. A good meta description can significantly improve click-through rates from search results. Subheaders are also a great way to target the secondary keywords you will also have.

Another neat trick is to use the “site:” operator in Google, where you will use “site:yoursite.com” to find all of the pages that Google has indexed from your website. Chances are that you will find more than a few pages that are just “noise”, such as tag pages, for example. It is important that you noindex, follow these pages using a tool such as Yoast for example.

It is now a good idea to start checking your organic traffic and its history. There are plenty of tools for this and if you put a gun to our head, Ahrefs would be our choice. You will be getting all kinds of information on the traffic to your site and individual website pages, organic searches and referring domains, all represented by graphs that will clearly show trends, as well as dips and spikes in either. You will also find out for which keywords you are doing well.

For example, if you are ranking anywhere between 5th and 10th for a focus keyword, you are doing well and it will pay off to do more SEO for those keywords. If you are short on time, check out our guide to a quick SEO audit.

Technical SEO and Site Structure

Technical SEO refers to optimizing the infrastructure of your website. This includes improving site structure, ensuring proper indexing, and making your website load quickly. A well-structured site helps search engines understand your content better and improves user experience.

Internal links are an essential part of site structure. They help users navigate your website and help search engines understand the relationship between different pages. A logical site structure with strategic internal linking can significantly boost your SEO rankings.

Content Audit: The Heart of SEO

Another aspect of auditing your website for SEO is to do a content audit, making sure that all of your website pages are doing something content-wise. This is especially true for blog posts where there are always duds that bring no traffic and can drag the website down. You should also make sure that you are not using a whole bunch of pages to target the same keywords over and over again. A content audit is a lot of work (manual work), but tightening it up can do wonders for your google rankings.

Creating content that satisfies user intent is crucial. Whether you run an ecommerce site or a blog website, your content should provide value to your visitors. Relevant keywords should be incorporated naturally into your content, especially in your page title and throughout the text.

You should probably check for content duplication next, making sure everything is 100% unique. Remember, Google frowns upon duplicate content more than anything else. This is where Copyscape will do the work as you will be entering all of your URLs into the tool and it will let you know (after some time) if your content is available somewhere else on the web.

Of course, if you discover duplicate content, either from another website or duplicated on your own website, make sure to correct this.

Website Speed and Mobile Optimization

Finally, you simply MUST check the loading speed of your website. There is no shortage of tools that will tell you how fast your website is loading and many of them will even recommend actions to take in order to rectify the problems. A perfect place to start is Google’s own PageSpeed Insights Tool. Speeding up your website is a separate subject (and an extensive one), but since it can affect your website’s rankings, we have to mention it.

In short, speed up your website and make sure it is truly mobile-friendly. With more searches happening on mobile devices than ever before, Google now prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its search results. If you are short on time, check out our guide to a quick SEO audit.

Tracking SEO Performance

Monitoring your SEO performance is essential for long-term success. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are invaluable tools for tracking your progress:

• Google Analytics helps you understand your organic traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates.

• Google Search Console provides insights into how Google sees your site, including search queries that bring users to your site, indexing issues, and mobile usability.

Regularly reviewing these metrics will help you refine your SEO strategy and identify areas for improvement.

Getting Proactive

Now that you have established where you stand and how your website is ranking, it is time to get proactive. In fact, you already became active as you remedied the burning issues that your SEO audit uncovered. However, there is always more you can do with off-page SEO strategies.

Some people would say that checking your backlink profile and getting busy with it should be just a part of the aforementioned SEO audit, but your backlink profile is so important (and quite an activity), that we decided to treat it as a separate process.

The reason why backlinks are so important is that Google’s algorithm still hasn’t come up with a better way to determine the relevance and reputability of a website or a webpage. It is a flawed system, but it has been working for a while and it will be working for a long time to come.

You will start off by checking your existing backlink portfolio and, once again, you have plenty of tools at your disposal. The important thing is that you find out which of your pages get linked to and what anchors are used to send people to your website. For the majority of websites, the anchors will be the site’s URL and the brand name, which is expected. Still, you should also have links pointing to your targeted pages with anchor text that includes your preferred keywords.

A backlink portfolio should always be a balanced act, with different types of sites pointing back to your website. For business websites, these should include local directories that will list businesses in the area. If your services are not local in nature, you will also want links from national and global directories.

If they are, it’s best to partner up with an SEO Agency based in Ireland as such agencies already have relationships with reputable local websites and can leverage them to get high quality backlinks for you.

Links from other reputable and high-ranking sites will also be desirable, especially if you can get links from .edu and .gov websites which are Google’s absolute favourites. Quality backlinks from news sites and other authoritative sources can dramatically improve your search engine rankings.

Link Building Strategies

The reason why backlinks are considered a proactive aspect of SEO is that you will want to start building new links to your site and the more creative you get, the better. The good news is there are really no limitations to what serious link building can do.

One word of warning, make sure it is quality link building. Doing it the 2009-way and spamming links to your site will only cause you trouble.

Guest blogging, despite what some people will want you to think, is still alive, although in a much evolved form with high-quality contributions to other people’s sites that actually provide value for their readers. Guest blogging has truly become something else over the last couple of years and while it will require much more effort and time than before, it is still a perfectly viable tactic.

You will also want to publish content that people will naturally link to. This includes white papers, research and other types of resources that people will want to link to without even knowing what your company does.

Another way to build links is to monitor the mentions of your brand online and make sure these mentions link to your website. This is especially useful for new, young companies that get mentioned all over the place, often without a link pointing back to their site.

Broken link building is a relatively old link building tactic, but it still works. In essence, you find links in your industry that are no longer live, create content (or find existing content on your website) that would fit the broken link and ask the webmaster to replace the dead link with one to your website. You help them clean up dead links and you get a link in return. It may take a while, but it is actually a tactic on the rise as more content and more links inevitably lead to more broken links.

SEO Tips for Different Website Types

Different types of websites require different SEO approaches:

Ecommerce Site SEO

For an ecommerce site, focus on:

• Product page optimization with unique descriptions

• Schema markup for products

• User reviews

• Mobile shopping experience

• Category page optimization

Blog Website SEO

For a blog website, concentrate on:

• Content freshness

• Engaging topics that address user intent

• Long-form content for complex topics

• Strategic internal linking

• Comment engagement

Keep Working

Above everything else, the way to start your SEO on the right foot is to really consider it as just a beginning of a new phase in your online life. SEO is not something you do for a month or two and then stop.

Once you start doing it, there is no turning back. You will be monitoring your keyword rankings continuously, always looking for new ways to improve the performance of your site, learning about new SEO strategies and tactics and making sure you are staying ahead of your competition.

SEO is always fluctuating and the moment you stop paying attention, your competitors will move ahead and you will move back. Remember that other search engines like Bing and Yahoo also drive traffic, so don’t focus exclusively on Google, even though it dominates the search market.

Developing an effective SEO strategy is an ongoing process that requires patience, persistence, and adaptability. By following these guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to improving your search engine rankings and driving more organic traffic to your website.