Did you know that Google processes over 3.5 billion searches a day? People use a search engine to find restaurants, products, services, and more. You want your business to be at the top of the results they get back after hitting that “enter” key.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that helps businesses appear higher in search engine results based on specific keywords. Keep reading as we guide you through 13 essential SEO tips for beginners.
1. Define Your Goals
Starting down the path of SEO for beginners 101 ensures you have clearly defined your goals. Every website is different based on the business it promotes, and you want to ensure you define your target audience and track conversions, engagement, and benchmarks.
SEO goals include increasing brand awareness, gathering leads, driving revenue, and more. For example, do you want 1,000 website visits and one download or 200 visits and 20 downloads?
Your goals should guide your strategy. You will reference these goals when measuring the success of an SEO campaign, so this is an essential starting point.
2. Competitive Research
In beginner SEO, researching your competitors is critical. You need to find out what they’re doing to be successful and how you can capitalize on this and find opportunities to grow your business.
Look at your competitor’s performance and see what you should focus on and how you can do better.
In particular, consider:
- Your competitor’s weaknesses
- What they’re doing well and how you can use it in your strategy
- Gaps in the market you can capitalize on
- Find your online competitors vs. your traditional ones
Your competitors’ actions act as a guide, helping you determine your strategy.
3. Keyword Research
Typically, starter SEO tips begin with keywords.
You need to find keywords that resonate with your product or service but are not used by many competitors. Then, you have a greater chance of dominating that traffic stream.
Online keyword research tools provide data based on specific keywords; look at short and long-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords are about 1 to 3 words and have high competition and traffic. Work on using these to rank higher since they are helpful in the long term.
Long-tail keywords are much more specific and are typically used when someone is looking to purchase a product or service.
4. Search Intent and Keywords
Do not choose your keywords based on what keywords are the most popular. Instead, think about your consumer’s search intent.
There are three types of searches:
- Transactional: When someone wants to purchase a product or service
- Informational: When someone is looking for information on a product or service
- Navigation: When someone wants to go to a particular website
For example, choose something like “How to build a TV stand” for an informational keyword versus “TV stands” to drive a transaction or product search. If you pull together keywords with a low difficulty score and high search volume, you are hitting the jackpot because it means people have not used this keyword.
This is a must in beginner SEO tips because it makes the keyword easier to rank for on a search engine and wins that website traffic from it.
5. Engaging Creative Content
Aim to create organic, engaging, and creative content. Search engines emphasize quality, so this should be your focus instead of overloading your website with a lot of “fluffy” content.
Write for your consumers and not for the search engine.
6. Check Your Title and Meta Description
If you’re looking for SEO help, you need to consider everything from the keywords to content and even the title and description. Most people do not think about the brief description under the title on a search engine results page, but it matters.
Ensure that your title is between 50 and 60 characters because if it’s too long or too short, it can affect your SEO ranking.
Keep meta descriptions 150 to 160 characters long and use your target keywords. The meta description should summarize what the content is about.
7. Mobile-Friendly Content
Make sure all of your content is mobile-friendly. People look at everything online on their phones, including social media apps, email, and search engines like Chrome or Safari.
Ensure your images, graphics, and text are clear and look equally as good on mobile as on your desktop.
8. Backlinking
A backlink is an external link that connects back to your website. This helps your website build credibility and is very important as an SEO tactic because it shows the search engines that other websites value your product or service.
Try it out for yourself because it’s an effective SEO strategy.
9. Imagery
Choose images that fit with your content. However, if the picture is too big, it could slow down your website’s speed. So you need to be aware of this.
10. Data Analysis
As you create content and test specific keywords, analyze your content’s performance and continue monitoring your SEO ranking. There are always ways you can improve, so test out different keywords.
11. Keywords in URLs
Keep your URLs short, targeted, and include a keyword. Your URL should depict what someone will get to your website, but it needs to be concise.
12. Long-Form Content
You should not only create short, engaging content, but you also work on the long-form range. Long-form content ranks higher on search engines, but be careful to have too much fluff when writing longer blogs.
13. Be Open to New Strategies and Tips
The best tip here is that you should always keep up with new SEO ranking strategies. Everything online is constantly evolving, and there will always be ways you can improve and make your content or strategy better.
Top SEO Tips for Beginners
Now that you know the top 13 SEO tips for beginners, you are ready to dive into an SEO strategy for your product or service.
To increase your website rank on search engines, you need to figure out your goals to develop a strategy. This includes using competitive data and research, establishing keywords, creating engaging, creative content, adding backlinks, and keeping up with new industry trends.
Find similar content in marketing and technology on our blog today.
