SEO Made Simple | What is SEO & Why is it important?
I’ve spent a lot of time learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I’ve scoured the internet and YouTube, read articles, listened to podcasts, and even taken a course.
While I have learned so much, and my confidence level in regard to SEO continues to increase, I do not consider myself an expert.
Yet.
I am a tech-savvy web designer who wants to lean more on SEO than social media for marketing purposes for my businesses. I also want to confidently guide my clients to ensure their websites are SEO-optimized.
I knew nothing about SEO when I started, and I will always be learning. But when I was starting out, I wished I had a place to go to learn the basics and not get sucked into an overwhelming deep dive of details that made me fear SEO more than want to embrace it.
Inspired, I decided to create this SEO Made Simple Series. Five short videos on my YouTube channel to give beginners that one thing I wished I had. Someone just like me who could explain the basics and help me get started, not stuck!
This series of blog posts will be a little different since they will be basically ‘show notes’ of the videos. Lightly edited transcriptions of the video for you to refer back to if needed.
Or read the whole thing if you prefer!
With that in mind, I welcome you to the first installment of the series: What is SEO & Why is it Important?
Welcome to the first installment of my SEO Made Simple series. I'm going to share with you at a very high level what SEO is and the different types of SEO that you can utilize to help increase traffic and visibility to your website and your business.
What is SEO?
So, what is SEO? Now, most people think, who doesn't know what SEO is? But a lot of people don't.
If you're new to running a website or the online business world, SEO is a term you'll hear a lot, and it can get overwhelming.
I want to show you in this series that SEO doesn't have to be as complicated as it seems, and everyone can easily get started on their journey.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and this is the way that search engines find, love, and serve your content to the world.
The goal is to, over time, increase your authority and trustworthiness to the search engines and the world so that your business and your website get served up higher in the search rankings for the keywords you choose to rank for.
Why is SEO important?
So why is SEO important? SEO is a way to get search engines to recognize your website and your business. And it's a way to gain visibility to potential customers all over the world. You want to drive organic traffic to your website and, therefore, to your business.
Hopefully, that traffic will turn into conversions or customers over time.
Now, it takes time.
SEO is more of a long-game marketing strategy. Not that it's not possible to get some quick wins and rank high right off the bat if you're lucky, but you really need to think of it and approach it as a long-term strategy.
You are going to be working on building up your authority, that know, like, and trust factor, not only for your users. but basically to the search engines.
The search engines are looking for content that is well structured, has a good user experience, is of high quality, shows a level of expertise, and if you're consistent, you will continue to build that authority and trust with the search engines, and over time, increase your rankings.
Now, of course, you can also employ an ad strategy by purchasing ads that target the keywords you want to rank for. And that might help speed up some of your rankings early on, but it can be a very expensive and hit-or-miss type of approach.
So, if you're just starting out, nailing the basics and starting to build your strategy over time is a much more beneficial way to go. And then, when you're ready, and you have more experience, you can target ads.
The great thing about SEO is that because it's a longer-term strategy, the SEO-optimized content that you create generally has a much longer shelf life than the things that you do on other social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
Where the amount of time that your content is visible or seen can be very short, maybe hours or days.
Whereas the content you're going to create from an SEO optimization perspective hopefully lasts for years.
I can say this from experience. In fact, a blog post that I wrote over two years ago for my yoga business is still the number one driver of traffic to my website!
If you take the time to do your research and structure your content in an SEO-friendly manner, it will serve you much longer than a quick reel or a fleeting post.
What is SEO Optimized Content?
I'm not just talking about blog posts when I'm talking about SEO-optimized content. I’m talking about an all-encompassing strategy that addresses the structure of your content, i.e., the structure of your website, the pages on your website, the structure of your blog posts…anything that you do outside of your website that helps to drive traffic to your website, such as YouTube videos or podcast episodes, and even your social media posts.
If you have a consistent SEO strategy, all of these can work together to help increase your results.
What are the different main types of SEO that you want to be thinking about?
On-Page SEO
The first is on-page SEO. On-page SEO is basically what it sounds like. These are the things that you're doing on the pages of your website to optimize it to be found by the search engines.
So what does this entail?
Well, we've hinted about it…
Keywords!
Making sure that you have done good keyword research and are optimizing your website pages for those keywords.
Now, we're going to go into the details behind this in future videos, so I'm only going to give you the highlights here, but in addition to optimizing your content and your pages for your keywords, you want to make sure to have quality content.
Quality Content
Search engines are looking for high-quality, relevant, and authoritative content that will address your users' needs, so you want that content to be longer and more comprehensive. When it comes to a blog post, think at least 1000 to 1500 words, but it needs to be valuable.
So, quick hint.
Just don't ask an AI tool to write a blog post for you; copy and paste it. You really need to make sure that you are putting value and time into it and addressing what your users are looking for. The search engines are smarter than you think.
Structure
We're also talking about things in your website's structure.
So, tags that you use for your titles and your meta descriptions. These meta descriptions are what you see when you go into Google, and you type in a search word, and when the results come up, you'll see the title. And what's below it that's a meta description.
Also, how your URLs are structured; do they include your keywords?
Are your site's headings and content structured properly using H1/H2/H3 hierarchies?
Do your images have alt text and file names using keywords?
Again, I’ll be going into detail about these later in the series. I'll show you exactly how to do this, so make sure you stay tuned for that.
LINKING
You also want to think about internal and external linking from your site.
Internal linking means linking within the pages of your website. So, if you have, for example, a services page, you're linking that to an FAQ page, or your home page links to your services page.
Everything is linking together to send the message that this stuff is related.
If you have blog posts, you may be linking to other relevant blog posts or back to a relevant service page. So, creating that map that the search engines can look at and see makes sense; these things all relate together.
There's also external linking to pages of your site. The key with external linking is if you are linking out to relevant content or information that is not on your website, you want to make sure that you set that up to open in a separate tab. That way, when the traffic moves over there, your website is still open on their browser, and you're not losing that SEO traffic.
Responsive Design & User Experience
You also want to make sure that your website is designed in a responsive manner so that it is easily viewed on multiple different device types, from phones to tablets to desktops. Also, page speed can affect your users' experience and your rankings.
In fact, all of these are things that will affect the overall user experience. And the better that is, the more highly valued the search engines are going to find your website.
Finally, search engines are going to want to know that you are keeping information fresh and updated.
They will notice if things have seemed stagnant for a while or if you aren't consistently adding or updating content. So make sure you're keeping things up-to-date and fresh. That sends a signal to the search engines as well.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the activities or things you do off the pages of your website that will still help drive traffic to your website.
BACKLINKS
One of the most common ways of doing this is through backlinks. Backlinks are when a link to your website is on another business or person's website. The key to that link is making sure that it is linked on authoritative, high-quality, relevant websites.
Much like you will see people trying to sell you followers or email addresses, you will find people trying to sell you backlinks.
Don't do it!
Focus on finding organic, high-quality, relevant backlinks with people, businesses, or clients in your industry or your specific niche. That is going to send a huge signal to the search engines that you are the real thing.
This can take time, but the more reputable, high-quality backlinks you can have driving traffic to your website, the better the search engines will rank you.
One way of getting backlinks is through clients listing your site on their websites if relevant. As a web designer, for example, my website is linked in the footer of my clients' websites.
GUEST BLOGS/PODCAST GUEST
Another popular way of getting reputable backlinks is through guest blogging or being a guest on podcasts.
If you can collaborate with people in your industry or adjacent to your industry who would find your content and your expertise valuable, being able to offer blog posts for their websites or being a guest on their podcasts is a way for you to serve content to a larger audience and having them link back to you.
SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
Also, your social media engagement is important. While your social media posts and things don't have as long a lifespan, you want to make sure that your social media engagement is relevant and that you're driving people to links to your website.
Also, if you're commenting on posts, offer valuable comments where you are showing that authority and helping drive people to your site either by offering a link or saying, "Hey, I wrote a blog post about this particular topic. You can check it out here.”
So, general engagement will also keep you relevant and show that you are active in the field that you are proclaiming to be an expert at.
ONLINE FORUMS & COMMUNITIES
Other great areas to target would be online forums and communities or Q&A platforms. So think of relevant Facebook groups to your industry, places like Reddit, and Quora. Areas where you can engage as an expert in your field to offer commentary and provide good resources or information to people will help build trust and drive them to your website and business.
You can also serve content on different platforms like YouTube and Pinterest. YouTube and Pinterest may often be considered other social media platforms, but the reality is, is there are also giant search engines.
Google owns YouTube!!!!
If you are consistent in your strategy, you can create content for those two platforms that will also help drive traffic back to your website and to your other content.
ONLINE DIRECTORIES
And finally, think about online directories.
If there are relevant directories for your industry where you can get your business or your name listed and links there, that will also help increase your authority and have you seen in more places.
Local SEO
Finally, I want to touch upon one last type of SEO that basically encompasses both on-page and off-page SEO: local SEO.
This is particularly important if you have a local business or local brick-and-mortar location for your business, and you want local people to be able to see and find your business.
One way to achieve good local SEO on-page is to make sure that on your website, your business location, hours, and all of that relevant information is up to date and visible on your website. In addition to having that info behind the scenes in your settings, list it in your footer and in your website copy.
For example, on your homepage, instead of just saying ‘Yoga Studio,’ you would say ‘Yoga Studio serving Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge’.
This helps to ensure that when people are going and searching for ‘Yoga studios near me,’ and they're in Boston, Brookline, or Cambridge area, you have a better chance of showing up in their search results.
Another important component of that is to have a Google business profile and, whenever possible, to encourage your customers to leave reviews on Google.
All of that will help increase your visibility, increase your authority locally, and make sure that you get seen higher up in the search results when people are looking for local businesses in your industry.
What's next in the series?
Okay, so that wraps up what SEO is and the three types of SEO you will want to tackle as a part of your SEO strategy.
Next up in the series, we're going to be talking about keywords.
What are SEO keywords?
Different types of SEO keywords.
Ways of researching them and helpful tools and resources to make that easy.
If you found this helpful, be sure not to miss the rest of this series and future topics! Subscribe to my channel or get on my email list so you’ll be the first to know when new videos/articles are published!
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