SEO Guide for Beginners (7 Steps to Learn)

For many businesses, their website can be the biggest brand asset, which is why it needs to show authority, trust, and experience.

Optimizing your website to meet customer needs and showcase these characteristics forms the core process of SEO.

However, before we dive into the nitty-gritty of SEO, I always advise my clients to do a thorough analysis of their customer and consumer relationships.

My company does this in three ways:

Understanding and acting upon this data will put you on the first step to running a proper SEO campaign.

So, without further ado, let’s define the SEO process, what strategies to adopt and how it can help your online presence.

SEO Fundamentals

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to capture as much organic traffic through search engines as possible and convert that traffic into measurable business results.

Simply put, SEO is the process of trying to drive people to your website every time they type a search query into a search engine.

For example, if you type into Google [what is content marketing], there are about a million websites that have intentionally optimized a piece of content for that key phrase so that you click through to their website.

Once you click on that website, you’ll browse, familiarize yourself with their brand, and sign up for their newsletter.

Simple enough, but SEO also involves a lot of jargon and nuanced strategies that can be hard to understand at first. To make things easier, I decided to define some terms that I could put in this tutorial.

Defining SEO Terms

Keywords: Keywords are words that users enter into a search engine whenever they search for information on the web.

Organic traffic: Organic traffic is all traffic that comes to your site via a search engine search, excluding traffic that clicks on PPC links.

SERP: Search engine results page.

PPC: Pay-per-click advertising is an advertising strategy to rank products or landing pages above the normal Google SERP results. These links will say “ad” next to them.

User Intent: The intent of the keyword search (for example, is the user asking a question or trying to buy a product).

Meta tags – text snippets designed to describe a web page to a search engine. For example, the page title is contained in an HTML title tag attribute.

Ranking Factors: Any algorithmic factor designed to influence a page’s ranking in a search engine for a particular keyword search.

Crawling: The ability of search engines to find web pages on your site.

Indexing: The ability of search engines to include your web pages in their web index.

Technical SEO: The back-end details of a website, including web page speed and mobile rendering, that impact search rankings.

On-page SEO: A list of ranking factors, including meta tags and header tags, designed to help a page rank higher in search results.

Off-page SEO: A list of ranking factors, including link building and acquisition, designed to improve your website’s visibility and authority.

Link Building: The manual process of building backlinks or hyperlinks to a website, which is a vital ranking factor for most search engines.

Algorithm Updates: Any update to Google’s core algorithm (e.g. Penguin, Panda) that affects a broad range of search rankings.

Core Web Vitals: Technical SEO factors that Google deems important in determining a page’s potential user experience.

E-A-T: competence, authority, trust. A set of guidelines that Google suggests for marketers to evaluate if their content meets these criteria.

The Importance Of SEO

So the question becomes, why is SEO so important?

I’ve met many developers, advertisers, and even high-level executives who either didn’t understand SEO or didn’t think it was necessary. This is madness.

Done right, SEO is the gift that keeps on giving. I tell clients to think of it as compound interest on investments.

With these benefits in mind, the key to SEO now becomes understanding all its little intricacies and learning how to do it right.

7 Steps To Master SEO Once And For All

1. Build A Solid Technical Foundation

Unfortunately, everything I’m about to talk about is completely useless if your website has a substantial technical error that prevents it from ranking high.

I’ve seen countless businesses create great long-form content only to be hampered by page speed or indexing issues.

Google values ​​technical SEO because technical SEO has a big influence on user experience. For example, if your web page loads slowly and users tend to bounce around, Google will adjust based on this information.

To reinforce this, Google unveiled its Core Web Vitals project in 2020. Without getting too into the weeds, Core Web Vitals measures:

Core Web Vitals provide developers with baselines to hit in order to create a solid UX.

The Chrome UX Report (Chrome users only) allows you to test your website for these vital core elements to see if any changes are needed.

In addition, I recommend that you focus on the following factors to position your website in the best possible way to rank in the SERPs.

Write a list of problems you’re having with your website and work with a developer to fix them before you start posting content or researching keywords.

For a more detailed breakdown of technical SEO factors, read Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide.

2. Learn How To Properly Research Keywords

Once you have your foolproof technical foundation, it’s time to get into the more granular aspects of SEO: discovering keywords.

Generally, we segment keywords into two categories that we can use to build top-level navigation:

Your top-level navigation will include initial keywords related to broad topics, services, or product lines. For example, the top-level navigation of the Search Engine Journal website follows this format:

Screenshot from Search Engine Journal, November 2022

On the other hand, long-tail keywords will be used for evergreen informative blog posts or various forms of content that directly appeal to user intent.

In general, many small businesses like to focus on long-tail keywords for more niche services because they have less competition.

You might also consider creating separate pillar pages around the seed keywords on your website to help them rank higher in search engines. For example, having a general topics page related to mobile SEO won’t rank as high as an evergreen post discussing mobile SEO.

Again, Search Engine Journal provides another great example of a pillar page using a seed keyword and supporting pages that discuss subtopics taken from long-tail keywords.

Screenshot from Search Engine Journal, November 2022

Next, we need to filter our keyword search based on user intent.

There are generally two broad categories of user intent into which we can separate keywords:

To develop commercial keywords for top-level service/product pages and individual product pages, I recommend using the free Google Ads Keyword Planner.

To get started, type in a seed keyword related to your business.

Screenshot from Google Keyword Planner, November 2022

Google’s Keyword Planner also provides additional ideas for long-tail searches above, and you can separate keywords based on competition and other factors.

I like to filter keywords by ‘Top of Page Bid (High Range)’ to see which keywords advertisers have bid the highest on. This filter is also useful if you want to separate keywords based on intent, with the highest bids being commercial and the lowest bids informational.

Select a list of seed keywords, preferably with lower volumes, and export them to a CSV.

Next, we’ll look for long-tail keywords with question phrases. Question phrases allow us to answer user questions directly, have lower search competition, and can be used to build support pages for our pillars.

You can filter your keyword searches in Keyword Planner by incorporating ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ into your search, or use a tool like Semrush that does the job for you.

Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022

I highly recommend a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, which allows you to build keyword lists and topic ideas using related long-tail keywords. You can even filter keywords by difficulty, volume, and intent.

Also, tools like AnswerthePublic are great for finding additional question phrases.

Screenshot from Answer the Public, November 2022

Google Trends, Semrush, and Ahrefs also offer tools that allow you to view trending topics and keywords in your industry for new ideas.

Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022

Finally, take a look at what your competitors are up to if you’re looking for a list of keywords or topics and don’t know where to start.

Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs show you who your biggest online competitors are and let you explore which keywords and pages are driving the most traffic to a competitor’s domain.

Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022

Steal these keywords and content ideas to optimize your website based on what forms of content rank best for your competitors.

After compiling a keyword list in a spreadsheet, match seed keywords with top-nav URLs and use long-tail keywords to build topics for your content calendar.

3. Create Content That Ranks And Converts

Building a content marketing strategy from your keyword research will allow you to build topic authority and satisfy user intent across your sales funnel.

Creating top-notch content also helps you or your company become thought leaders in their respective fields.

For example, Neil Patel, Brian Dean and many others have used the content to promote their personal and professional brands at the top of our industry.

First, let’s look at the factors that influence content placement, such as:

In general, I like to create pillar posts using evergreen tutorials (like this one!) and then use long-tail keywords to create subtopics.

So, for example, each step in this tutorial might represent a subtopic, and my strategy might get more granular from there.

Next, we need to discuss content writing for each stage of the sales funnel. While informative content and blog posts are great for driving traffic, you need to create strategies to convert web traffic into sales or subscriptions once they land on your website.

The typical sales funnel consists of at least three major stages:

You’ll often find sales funnels on a customer relationship management (CRM) platform much more complex than this, but this should give you a basic overview of how you should approach your inbound marketing strategy using content marketing.

4. Optimize Your Web Pages For Search Engines

Once you start pumping out content and building your service pages, you need to make sure your content is properly optimized for search engines.

I know we’ve discussed several ranking factors and technical SEO, but now it’s time to dig deeper into on-page optimization and SERP factors.

Perhaps one of Google’s most important off-page SEO strategies and ranking factors remains the elusive link building, detailed below.

5. Build Links To Your Website

According to research, inbound links are still a powerful ranking factor, even if the quality of the links outweighs their quantity.

There are literally dozens of link building strategies to use, from HARO to guest blogging.

To start link building, you need to create great content. So, once your link magnet is created, you’ll need to set your eyes on it so that people can start linking to it.

Thankfully, tools like Semrush have greatly simplified the manual contact process, allowing you to collect contact information for target websites and manage your manual contact through email.

You can even link to specific keywords or competitors to discover sites for link building opportunities.

Screenshot by the author, November 2022

If you don’t have a backlink tool, you can still manually contact people using site operators.

For example, you can find competitor links using the following search: site:www.competitor.com -competitor.com

Screenshot from [site search: searchenginejournal.com] research, November 2022

If there’s a site you want a specific link from, you can also conduct a “site:” search and write in a topic to see if they have any content written about that topic.

To find general trending topics to target for links, do an “intitle” search.

Screenshot from [intitle: “link building”] research, November 2022

Site operators can also be used to find resource pages or guest post opportunities to reach out to.

To summarize, I have written below a list of essential link building practices:

Editor’s Note: As a free alternative to tools like Semrush, you can pull Google Search Console data. For more information on how to do this, we recommend this resource.

6. Share And Promote Your Content

While I have discussed some strategies to help your content rank high and acquire some backlinks manually, sometimes those strategies aren’t enough.

Unfortunately, SEO is notoriously competitive.

Instead, we must also focus on various outreach strategies designed to draw attention to our website.

Below are a few strategies I’ve outlined to help drive instant traffic to your content and help it rank higher.

There are a dozen other strategies to help you promote content, especially if you’re trying to rank on specific mediums like TikTok, Substack, Twitter, or anywhere else.

7. Consult The Analytics

Finally, SEO is not complete without consulting our analysis.

The most important analytics tools I recommend to any business are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a competitive search tool like Semrush.

Screenshot from Semrush, November 2022

First, I like to use a tool like Semrush to see what content ranks that impressive distance (11-20 position) on Google to repurpose that existing content or create new content around that keyword and link back and forth between the two pages.

Your analysis will also tell you which pages generate the most traffic and which ones need more promotion.

However, to be more granular, we need to look into Google Analytics to examine how people interact with our content.

I recommend setting goals or conversion paths to track how many people are completing desired actions on your websites.

I also like to use Google Analytics Behavior Flow to show me which path users take when they land on my website.

Screenshot from Google Analytics, November 2022

Use the key performance indicators (KPIs) provided by GA to make changes to your website where necessary.

For me, the most important KPIs to keep in mind are:

Furthermore, Google Search Console is also a useful tool that allows us to see how many impressions our pages generate and how many people click on our links.

Setting KPIs and consulting your analytics monthly to find improvements can help you figure out which strategies are working for your website and which ones need to be trashed.

Put Your Skills Into Action

Now that you know the basics of SEO, you’ll learn more as you troubleshoot during a campaign.

Luckily, many mistakes you make while traveling won’t cost you big bucks like an advertisement, and any failed campaign can always be repurposed later for better success.

Featured image: Vadym Pastukh/Shutterstock

Simply put, the fundamentals of SEO can be boiled down to the 3 Cs: content, code, and credibility.

Is SEO still in demand?

SEO is more popular for Google because it is the largest search engine. However, there is a growing demand for SEO specialists who understand how to optimize for YouTube and Amazon search. YouTube is the largest video search engine in the world. At the same time, Amazon is the largest search engine for e-commerce.

Does SEO have a future? SEO will only grow rapidly in the future. Just make sure you are following SEO best practices like creating useful content, having a faster website, and following Google’s guidelines for better rankings.

Is SEO a good career 2022?

Yes. SEO is a good career option as it is among the most sought-after careers in the digital marketing field. There are several organizations around the world that hire SEO professionals to generate better content and thus produce more business leads.

Is SEO a good career for the future?

The simple answer is yes, SEO is a good career. SEO professionals can make good money, achieve a comfortable work-life balance, find a position in the industry that suits their natural abilities, and challenge themselves creatively.

What is the future of SEO in 2022?

By 2022, expect SEO ranking to be more competitive by providing high-quality content that is useful to internet users. Content that just tries to fish its audience by linking unnecessary sources won’t be as effective as it is today.

Is SEO profitable in 2022?

Yes, SEO is still a crucial component of every brand’s digital marketing strategy in 2022. As long as there are people using search engines to find information online, SEO will continue to be invaluable.

Will SEO exist in 5 years?

SEO will not be phased out within the next five years because social media and search engines will most likely merge. Facebook has already started doing this: it averages more than 1.5 billion searches every day. Twitter has done the same; have joined in partnership with Google.

What is the future of SEO in 2022?

By 2022, expect SEO ranking to be more competitive by providing high-quality content that is useful to internet users. Content that just tries to fish its audience by linking unnecessary sources won’t be as effective as it is today.

Will SEO exist in 5 years?

SEO will not be phased out within the next five years because social media and search engines will most likely merge. Facebook has already started doing this: it averages more than 1.5 billion searches every day. Twitter has done the same; have joined in cooperation with Google.

Will SEO be obsolete?

And if you listen to the rumors, this time it’s search engine optimization. Rest in Peace, SEO: 1997-2022. There’s just one tiny problem. SEO is still alive and well.

Is SEO a long term investment?

Investing in SEO for your business is a long-term strategy that can help you rank higher in Google’s SERPs and bring you more business for years to come.

What are the 5 important concepts of SEO?

Some of the key things to focus on include:

• The mobile experience.
• Image compression.
• Information page content.
• Site speed and technical structure.

What is the most important part of SEO? Google’s ranking factor no. 1 At WebTek, we say that the most important parts of SEO and the most important Google ranking factors are web page titles and header tags. Titles are the primary property of any website – they’re your best chance to tell Google exactly what your website or webpage is about.

What is basic SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize the technical setup, content relevance and link popularity of a website so that its pages can be easily found, more relevant and popular than the search queries of the users and, consequently, search engines rank them better.

What are the 3 types of SEO? The three types of SEO are: On-page SEO â Anything on your web pages â Blog, product copy, web copy. Off-page SEO – Anything that happens away from your website that helps with your SEO strategy- Backlinks. Technical SEO â Anything technical undertaken to improve search rankings â Site indexing to help crawl bots.

What is basic SEO knowledge?

SEO involves keyword research, content creation, on-page SEO, link building, and technical SEO. Doing SEO is much easier when your website is set up correctly for SEO success. Google usually finds and indexes your website on its own, but sometimes you can speed up the process by submitting your sitemap.

What is SEO & How it works?

Well, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve the position of your website on search results pages. Remember, the higher up your website is listed, the more people will see it.

How much do freelance SEO make?

How Much Does a Freelance SEO Earn? As of November 6, 2022, the average annual salary for a freelance SEO in the US is $63,490 annually. In case you need a simple salary calculator, which turns out to be around $30.52 per hour. That’s the equivalent of $1,220 a week or $5,290 a month.

How much do SEOs earn? The most common SEO specialist salary in the US is between $60,000 and $70,000.

How much do freelancers charge for SEO?

Hiring an experienced SEO freelancer or agency by the hour typically costs between $50 and $150 per hour. Of course, you can find people charging much less or more than this hourly rate. For example, this breakdown of SEO hourly rate found that 6% of SEO providers charge over $200 per hour.

Is SEO good for freelancing?

If you want to become an SEO freelancer, you’re in good company. This is a popular choice for freelancers and a highly sought-after field. Any place with a website wants its web pages to appear in the first search results. It can make or break their business or income stream.

Can I hire someone to do my SEO?

If you want some extra help navigating these SEO tips, or if you don’t have time to spend improving your website’s SEO, another option is to hire an SEO specialist. If you find the right person, they can become a long-term partner as you improve your website and business.

How much does a SEO beginner make?

US-based entry-level SEO specialists can expect a starting SEO salary of $35,000, mid-career they will likely make closer to $47,000, and experienced SEO specialists will make an average of $65,000 in…

Is a career in SEO worth it?

The simple answer is yes, SEO is a good career. SEO professionals can make good money, achieve a comfortable work-life balance, find a position in the industry that suits their natural abilities, and challenge themselves creatively.

How much money can you make in SEO?

So how much can you earn doing SEO? As of September 2021, most SEO experts can earn between $113,518 and $131,590. Salaries depend on many factors including education, certifications, work experience, and additional skills.

Is SEO good for freelancing?

If you want to become an SEO freelancer, you’re in good company. This is a popular choice for freelancers and a highly sought-after field. Any place with a website wants its web pages to appear in the first search results. It can make or break their business or income stream.