If you’ve just started your journey into learning about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or maybe you’re after a little refresher on some of the basics – we’re glad you’re here.
We’re going to summarise some of the most important elements of SEO to give you a basic understanding to build on, as well as recommending a few places you can continue to learn SEO for free.
What is SEO and how does it work?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is the practice of enhancing a website and its content to ultimately increase traffic to that website. Core to that is how well you “rank” (where you show-up) on organic search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, to name a few.
Being the best at answering a user’s question (or need) is at the heart of SEO.
What are the basics of SEO?
It’s about understanding the wants and needs of your audience and creating the very best content (and website) so they’ll want to come back for more. There’s a lot of complexity sitting underneath that sweeping statement, but always try to remember – it’s about the user.
It’s a discipline that deals in the granular detail, so it can be very complex. But as you’re likely just beginning to learn the SEO basics, let’s start with the most common tactics; like creating high-quality and relevant content, optimising it around specific search queries (or “keywords”) and securing backlinks from high-ranking websites (we’ll cover backlinks next time).
Now you know what it is, let’s get to some of the nitty-gritty in this beginner’s guide to SEO…
Why is search engine optimisation important to a business?
SEO, also known as organic search marketing, is so important for businesses because the majority of potential customers or clients use search engines as part of their journey towards making a purchase decision. Appearing in organic search results for relevant keywords can transform a business and give a great return on investment.
SEO is a marketing channel that can complement and coordinate really well with other kinds of activity to maximise results and return on the budget and effort put into the wider strategy.
What is “Domain Authority”, “Domain Rating” etc.?
This is your “ranking power”: the likelihood a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s scored from low to high, usually from 0-100. The BBC is an example (above) of a high authority website, which is 89 right now (a real powerhouse).
SEO solutions like Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs all have their own names for it, but Moz’s “DA” is one of the most widely known.
“Authority” is a very popular metric that people monitor to gauge success, and hopefully you’ll see yours keep on increasing. But there are other important things to monitor too, here’s just a few:
- Clicks and impressions on Google Search Console
- Volume and share of traffic (organic search) in Google Analytics
- Keyword and SERP position performance – use a tool like SEMrush, Moz or Ahrefs to keep track of your ranking positions
- Content performance – regularly audit your content and keep on improving. High bounce rate? Low amount of time on a page? Dig deeper and figure out how you can constantly make it better.
The 3 fundamentals of SEO
There’s a lot of great advice and information on SEO for businesses and organisations out there, and in some cases, there’s also conflicting advice which can be confusing. However, there are three categories or “pillars” which SEO can essentially be bucketed into – technical, on-site and off-site:
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Technical
This is “under the hood” of your website. It includes optimising how your website is structured and improving its performance in a variety of ways.
What’s included in technical SEO?
Here are a few examples of some of the most common elements of technical SEO:
- Page speed optimisation – how fast is your website for desktop and mobile users? Speed means money, especially for e-commerce websites!
- International targeting – If your target audience is in multiple countries, then ensuring search engines understand that and rank the right content for the right country/language
- Crawlability – can search engines easily access and crawl your website? Do you have a good XML sitemap?
- Navigation – How users and search engines can navigate your website (think menus, breadcrumbs and information architecture)
- Being “Mobile-friendly”
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is such a vital part of a wider SEO strategy because without these foundational ‘unseen’ elements of a website being optimised properly, no other SEO activity or changes that you put in place will enable your site to reach its full organic potential.
Ensuring that your website follows technical SEO best practice isn’t a ‘once and done’ task which you can forget about after doing some initial work. Websites require monitoring and checking regularly on their technical SEO performance to ensure that everything is working as it should be. Technical SEO can be complex and is always evolving (as are the search engines themselves), so we’ll leave this for the more advanced SEO folk (for now).
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On-site (or on-page)
This is about the content on your website and ensuring it’s the best it can be for your audience (see E-A-T below). Writing your content with SEO in mind is vital, so make sure your keywords are incorporated where it’s relevant – you can have brilliant content, but it’s of no use if no-one can find it!
It needs to be laid out so both users and search engines can quickly grasp what it’s all about, so structure the page correctly (think heading tags i.e. H1 > H2 > H3 etc., which you can find more info on further down in this article).
It’s also important to identify other pages within your website that could also be relevant, and link to them within the text (this is “internal linking”). This is especially useful when you have a highly successful page, and you want to improve the “ranking power” of an under-performing page. But, as we said before, the user is king here. So, make sure any links you add are relevant and will provide value for your audience (making it clear in the text you link from).
What are the on-page SEO factors?
As well as the main page content itself, there are other factors for on-page SEO, some of which can be ‘seen’ and some of which can benefit your site from behind the scenes. These include:
- Using a standardised URL structure with every page
- Best practice title tags on every page
- Best practice meta description on each page (which appears in search engines results and can help encourage people to click on your page)
- Implementing structured data correctly
- Optimising images with appropriate alt text
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Off-site (or off-page)
These are things that aren’t on your website but directly influence your performance on search. Examples of this are other websites that link to you (also known as backlinks or external links). This is where link building comes into play. It’s the process of building quality relationships with higher-performing websites and influencers, and trying to get a relevant link back to your website (or leveraging Digital PR for the best results!). By gaining a link from a higher-performing website, they’re effectively vouching for you, and in doing so, they pass on a bit of their power to you – helping boost your Authority and performance.
What are the off-page SEO factors?
Essentially, off-page SEO is all about trust and relevance in relation to your own website, and while search engine algorithms and the factors or activity that they use to rank sites are always evolving and never fully disclosed or made public, our experience tells us that some of these include:
- Links from other websites to yours, known as backlinks
- Brand mentions on other sites that are not linked to your website
- Social media mentions of your brand and social content engagement
- Consistent local citations (i.e. the same address and company details used in every citation)
- Influencer marketing
- Guest posting/thought leadership content on other strong and relevant websites
- Reviews about your business
- Providing useful expertise on online forums
- Hosting or featuring on relevant podcasts
- Hosting or running events
What is E-E-A-T (EEAT), and why is it important for SEO?
In 2013, Google published the ‘Search Quality Guidelines’ document – a 168-page guide that gave SEOs an insight into what Google sees as a high-quality, trusted site (and would therefore value and rank highly) and regularly updates the guidelines. In December 2022, a change was introduced to update their previous acronym (EAT, which stood for Expertise, Authority and Trust) to EEAT, which adds ‘Experience’ to the previous term. Understanding EEAT and its uses is vital for determining your SEO and content strategy.
What does E-E-A-T stand for?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust:
Experience
For the content creator to have personal experience of the topic or themes included in the content, with this context being a way to help indicate content quality to Google.
Expertise
To have a high level of knowledge or skill in a particular field. It’s evaluated primarily at content-level, not at the website or even organisational level. Google is looking for content created by a subject matter expert.
Authority
It’s all about reputation, particularly among other experts and influencers in the industry. Quite simply, when others see an individual or website as the go-to source of information about a topic, that’s authority. This is where link building can help.
Trust
The legitimacy, transparency, and accuracy of the website and its content. Raters look for many things to evaluate trustworthiness, such as whether the website states who is responsible for published content. Being transparent pays.
Although it won’t be right for all websites, building an SEO-led content strategy based on EEAT principles is a great approach and will pay dividends for most businesses.
How can the buyer persona be integrated into an SEO strategy?
As a fundamental part of any marketing strategy, buyer personas can (and should) also inform and help to shape your SEO strategy. Your target audience and what they need from you in order to become a customer or client of yours is pivotal to all aspects of SEO and the website user experience.
Integrating your personas into your SEO strategy from the start will essentially feed into everything from the ideal navigation options to present to users, to the keyword research you’ll do, the types and themes of content you’ll produce and the influential sites you’ll want to be mentioned on and linked to by. By benchmarking current SEO performance with your target audience, you can also track and measure your improvements over time in reaching and converting the users that are most important to your business.
Keyword research and intent: the backbone of successful SEO…
So, we’ve talked about the key things to consider and how E-E-A-T is important, but the backbone of this needs to be your keywords, and importantly, the “intent” for them.
“Intent” is all about purpose. Ask yourself “what is the user wanting to achieve when they search for this?”. Search intent is a very real thing, which can be categorised into a few categories:
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Informational
This is when they’re looking for information about something, like advice, guides or news. People often add “how to”, “where”, “why”, “what is” and other questions to their queries to find the best answer for them.
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Transactional
When a user wants to achieve an action, like buying or ordering something. For example, typical transactional keywords in ecommerce SEO could include “buy”, “cheap”, “order”.
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Navigational
This is when a user knows exactly what they want, it could be a brand name or even something like “Facebook login”
Thorough keyword research is a vital aspect of any SEO-led content strategy because it allows you to uncover the terms, phrases, questions and answers that are important to your users or customers – and their intent, allowing you to unlock them with your very best content.
A key consideration here is “search volume”. That’s the number of times a query/keyword is searched for each month. You may be tempted to go for something with a huge amount of searches, but these are often the most competitive and difficult searches to get a slice of the action. Try to focus your efforts on “long tail” queries (3+ words), anything under that is “short tail” (1-2 words) and usually has that larger search volume (because it could cover such a broad range of sub-topics). Mix in your users intent with your long-tail keywords and you’re off to a great start!
SEO takes constant care and monitoring and that includes keyword research. It’s essential because important keywords and phrases will inevitably change. Stay on top of what is changing and identify new opportunities or competitor gaps that may appear.
Similarly, your audience grows and evolves too, as does the way we, as audiences, use search engines. Search engines evolve too, and algorithms get more advanced to better understand content to match users’ intent (we’ll cover algorithms another time).
There’s a variety of ways to do your keyword research, but we’d definitely recommend some type of SEO software (Moz is a good starting option for relatively low cost). They also have some great guides on how to do keyword research too!
What skills are needed for SEO?
A wide range of skills are needed to plan, implement and constantly improve a comprehensive SEO strategy. When you take into account the technical aspects, the analysis and research involved, the content creation and all of the off-page activity required, all with a high level of expertise needed, it shows SEO is truly a multi-disciplinary channel.
For many businesses or organisations, a team made of specialists in these various areas is needed for the best SEO results, whether it’s an in-house team or an SEO agency who provides these skills. Utilising the skills and experience of an agency is often a more cost-effective option, with access to senior specialists in all of these areas who can also handle the day-to-day management of all aspects of the strategy, including reporting.
Quick ways to optimise your website content today
Content consolidation
If two or more pages on your website have similar content, consider combining the best performing elements or both into one lengthier, more detailed page. As we’ve explained, search engines (and users) love quality content, so this is a quick win!
New content
This is an opportunity to use your lovely keywords research and SEO strategy to create new pieces of content that you know will resonate with your audience.
Content pruning
Sometimes your website needs some well-thought-out TLC. By pruning thin or low performing content, you’re effectively culling the weak spots from your site and making it stronger. Just don’t forget those redirects!
Once you’ve audited your content and either kept, consolidated or removed content – start thinking about how you can further tweak the pages. Incorporate your keywords and add those relevant internal links, but then think about the structure of the page. Here’s a couple more considerations:
Heading tags
Does each page have a clear title (H1), with clear sub-categories (H2’s and H3’s). Think of them as the H1 being the title of a book, with H2’s being your chapters.
H1’s and H2’s etc are all “Heading tags”. Your CMS (Content Management System) page editor will usually have an option to apply these in your text.
Meta titles and descriptions
When you look at a search engine result page, you’ll see each result has a title and a bit of blurb underneath – your CMS should have this in a specific section (if you use WordPress, check out the plugin called Yoast, it’ll add what you need and then some). Incorporate your keywords (naturally) into both of these, but also remember that this is your unique opportunity to tell the world why your content is worthy of a click-through!
SEMrush have a great infographic that dissects what a good page (for SEO) looks like:
Where can I learn about SEO for free?
Fortunately for eager learners, there are tonnes of useful resources to help learn more about SEO. One of our favourites for SEO beginners is Moz and it’s ‘Whiteboard Friday’s, which offers easy and digestible tips for those wanting to improve their understanding.
Similarly, SEMrush offers lots of tips on improving SEO knowledge and contains simple “how-to” guides and infographics, ensuring that you can become a Google guru in no time. Other notable resources include the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress websites and The Ahrefs Blog, which offers more detailed tutorials.
Check out Twitter too, it has a large SEO community that shares amazing content every day, plus they always welcome newcomers – take a look at #SEO and start following (we’re obviously going to suggest our very own @lauraherself too!).
