Fundamental Steps In SEO

Do you feel that SEO is too hard and not worth the effort?

SEO isn’t that complicated. It’s quite simple—or at least the basics are. But the basics aren’t enough to get you ranked, right?

Wrong.

Here’s the truth:

Most people who run websites have a limited understanding of SEO, so you often only need to get the basics right to succeed.

In this post, you’ll learn the five fundamental steps to SEO success:

1. How to figure out what your customers are searching for
2. How to optimize your web pages for your target keywords
3. How to make sure your website is accessible to both search engines and humans
4. How to get other websites to link to your site, and finally:
5. How to start measuring your SEO success

I’ve made every effort to keep this as jargon-free as possible without scrimping on actionability.

Step 1: Learn what your customers are actually searching for

You can’t optimize your website without knowing what your customers are searching for—that much is obvious.

How do you figure this out? The best starting point is to use common sense.

Imagine that you run a hotel in Dublin, Ireland. It doesn’t take an SEO genius to guess that your customers are probably searching for things like:

• ‘hotels in Dublin’
• ‘place to stay in Dublin’
• ‘accommodation in Dublin’

Before you do anything else, think about what your customers might be searching for and jot your ideas down in a notepad. You could even ask them directly.

No need to go overboard here—a handful of ideas will do.

Done? Good. Let’s do some more research.

a) Figure out the most popular way people search for your business

It’s likely that some of your customers are searching for your business using the words and phrases you jotted down. Whether the majority of people are is another story.

So the first step is to figure out the most common way people search for what you do.

You can use the ideas you’ve already jotted down to do that. Start by doing a Google search for one of the words or phrases on your list. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous or long-winded this phrase is.

b) Understand other ways people may be searching for the same thing

Let’s take a look at the SERP overview in Keywords Explorer.

Take note of the “Kw.” column, which shows how many keywords for which each of the top 10 web pages rank.

The average here is around 150–200 keywords.

In other words, each of these web pages gets traffic from hundreds of other long-tail and related keywords. That means not everyone types “Dublin hotels” into Google when searching for a place to stay in Dublin. Other people search for the same thing in different ways.

You can start to get a sense of what these other keywords are by analyzing more Google search results.

c) Delve deeper into the more granular searches your customers are making

Now that you know how people search for your business, it’s time to delve deeper into the more granular searches people make in relation to what you do.

A simple way to start is to look at Google autocomplete results.

Go to Google and begin typing a query in the search box, but don’t hit Enter. Google will immediately suggest some additional search terms that people have used.

d) Find popular and engaging topics in your field

Content marketing is the art of creating useful and valuable content to attract your target customers or clients. But don’t just start a blog and hope for the best—figure out what topics are popular and engaging in your field and create content related to said topics.

e) Expand your keyword list by looking literally anywhere else

Google search results and professional keyword tools can give you a lot to get started with, but it’s in no way enough.

To be successful with SEO, you need to understand how people are talking about the niche you’re operating in, what problems they have, and so on. Use every opportunity to speak to customers and take notice of the language they’re using.

Doing this in person is great, but also very time‐consuming.

So here are a few places where you can find the words people use while talking about your topic of interest:

• Forums: There are quite a few communities where people discuss traveling. For example, a simple search led me to the TripAdvisor Dublin Travel Forum.
• Quora/Reddit: Quora is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you’re looking for travel advice, but you’d be surprised by the amount of information you can find there even on this topic. Where it comes to Reddit, the adage that there’s a subreddit for everything is generally true.
• Facebook/LinkedIn Groups: LinkedIn is more geared towards B2B markets, but when it comes to Facebook, there are groups for almost everything.

Any website or social network with a large number of visitors and user‐generated content can serve as a source of inspiration and keyword ideas.

Podcasts can also be a good source of inspiration…

f) Understand the metrics behind the keywords you’re targeting

Most people focus entirely on the following two metrics when doing keyword research:

• search volume (the number of monthly searches, on average), and
• keyword difficulty (an estimate as to how easy or hard it will be to appear on the first page of search results for that term).

These are important as they provide useful insights into the potential of the keyword and how difficult ranking for it is likely to be.

However, instead of looking solely at search volume, you should try to figure out the true search traffic potential for each keyword. That way, you can focus your efforts on ranking for the ones that are likely to send the most targeted traffic your way.

In Ahrefs, you can do that by looking at the traffic stats for the current top-ranking pages in the SERP overview in Keywords Explorer.

Step 2: Create pages optimized for search

Keyword research is only the first step towards attracting more organic search traffic.

You also need to make sure your pages are structured well and satisfy the person behind the search to rank for the keywords you selected.

Your optimization efforts should start with making sure that your visitors are enjoying the user experience (UX) your website provides. Use design and typography that makes it easy to consume the content, and remove any unnecessary elements such as pop-ups, opt-in boxes, etc. that can annoy your readers.

On‐page optimization is the next step in your SEO strategy.

Even targeting the most profitable keywords with the “best” content won’t help you if your pages are not optimized for search engines.

There are many ways to implement the features I discuss in the following sections, but if you’re using WordPress for your website, I first recommend installing an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO. It’s free and simple to use, and it’s perfect for those who are new to on-page SEO.

a) Create content that aligns with ‘search intent’

Wanting to rank for a keyword doesn’t mean you deserve to, even if your traditional on-page SEO elements are on-point. That’s because of something called search intent.

In short, there are three main ‘types’ of searches people make:

1. Navigational: They’re looking for a specific website, e.g., ‘Dublin airport’
2. Informational: They’re looking to learn more about a specific topic, e.g., ‘things to do in Dublin’
3. Transactional: They’re looking to purchase a specific product/service, e.g., ‘book hotel in Dublin’

c) Create compelling meta titles and descriptions

Web pages have two specific features that search engines use when building up search results:

Contrary to what the name suggests, the meta title tag does not appear anywhere on your page. It merely sets the name of the browser tab, and Google and other search engines use it when showing the page in search results.SIDENOTE. Google doesn’t always respect the title tags you set. They sometimes choose to display something slightly different.

The title tag is a great opportunity to write a headline which:

1. includes the keyword you want the page to rank for, and
2. is compelling enough to make searchers click and visit your site.

Conventional wisdom also suggests keeping yours under 60 characters to avoid truncation in full in search results. However, it’s not so much about the number of characters but rather pixels. Therefore, it’s a good idea to use a SERP pixel tool to make sure your titles don’t get cut.

Meta descriptions are also important, mainly because they too can affect the click-through rate. SIDENOTE. Click-through rate is not thought to be a direct ranking factor, but it does directly affect how much traffic you get from search.

Step 3: Make sure your website is accessible to both search engines and humans

When doing SEO, it’s important to remember that you’re working for two separate customers—your human readers, and the bots search engines use to index your website.

While bots are becoming more intelligent and human-like, many differences still exist between the two. Therefore, your goal should be to create a positive experience for both humans and bots.

Understanding how to create pages optimized for bots can be challenging. That’s why, while it’s important to have a strong understanding of the features we discuss in the following paragraphs, I encourage you to delegate them to a professional (preferably a developer).

Step 4: Build backlinks from other websites

Link building is critical for the success of your SEO strategy, so if you’re prepared to spend resources (time, money, etc.) on producing content, you should also be prepared to commit at least as much time to promoting and generating links to your content.

Why? Because there’s clear evidence showing that backlinks are one of the factors with a strong influence on Google’s ranking algorithm.

Step 5: Tracking your SEO success

The final step in setting your SEO strategy is figuring out how you’ll track your performance. There are many methods and metrics you can use, so it’s easy to get confused.

My advice is this: focus on the basics.

The most important metrics when it comes to SEO are a) organic traffic, and b) the average ranking position for the keywords you’re targeting.

ABOUT US :

The point of existence of any website is to provide the best possible user experience. But for that you would need to attract users to your site. To have an effective virtual presence, it’s a must to get noticed on various search engines.

We at Prodigitaly do not treat Search Engine Optimization(SEO) as an afterthought, but our whole website development process is centered around it. We follow the white hat optimization practices to improve your organic search rankings. These include: size of the page, search engine readable format of the contents, research of keywords using analytics through consoles/webmaster tools of major search engines, and more.

Your work demands attention and we can get you noticed.

Our experience has also taught us one critical thing with respect to how we see our business. And it is that our clients are not just looking for a website. Rather, they are looking for a channel to grow their engagement with their clients leading to greater amount of business profits, and our efforts were aimed towards it.

TAGS :

SEO

Content in SEO

Source : https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-basics/