The Basics of SEO: How I learned to relax and love Google
Search Engine Optimization or more commonly known as SEO is often seen as the blackhole of online content strategy. “You mean you want me to trick … Google?” And it’s understandable - the practice of writing content so that it gains visibility on search results seems impossible.
I’m here to tell you it’s not. But the first hurdle in developing a strong SEO strategy is understanding what the basics of SEO even are to begin with.
Why does SEO matter?
SEO matters for so many reasons that this blog would explode if I tried to list them all. So we’ll stick to the high line items: it’s crucial to bringing visitors, customers, or leads to your website.
According to SEM Rush’s “State of Search” report, there are billions of Google searches every year. That’s billions of users looking for content, content that your organization may be the expert in! SEO is the practice of shaping your website and content to capture those folks.
Building an audience who is looking for your content is bread-and-butter to building leads, to retaining an audience, to bringing new eyes to your work.
Did we mention it’s (typically) free?
SEO vs SEM: What’s the difference?
The first thing to understand about SEO is that it’s (technically) a free, not a paid, practice. (Of course, paying an expert to help you build an SEO practice is another ball game altogether - hit us up to see how we can help!)
Search engine optimization is the practice of updating and writing your owned, on-page website content to make sure it ranks highly when your target audience searches for those words. (For example, I wrote this blog post in the hopes of increasing my rankings when people search for “SEO Strategy” - and to educate my blog readers).
You don’t pay Google to place your content when you are engaging in SEO strategy only.
Paying Google to place your content when folks search for specific words? That’s Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. You may want to engage in SEM for specific keywords or times of the year - but we’ll talk more about that in future posts.
SEO - free. SEM - paid. Burn it into your brain.
SEO Terms - What the heck does that mean?
Sometimes working with digital marketing experts feels like taking a second language course. We use jargon developed by Google, our peers, and honestly, sometimes ourselves. Here’s a crash course in some terms you might hear ‘round the hallways.
SERP: search engine results page. Aka exactly what you see when you Google something and a page of results shows up on your computer or phone.
Meta content: Content viewable to search engines primarily and users secondarily. Think of it as “the content behind the content.” These pieces of content are HTML descriptions of your content and help search engines categorize content.
Meta description: Short descriptions used to describe a single page on a website. These are shown on SERPs.
Title tag: the “meta” title of a page that is shown on a SERP. It should be a clear title to describe what a user can find on that page.
Alt-text: Descriptive text of images. Viewed by search engines and screen readers, so it’s an important part of meta content that helps with both accessibility and SEO.
CTR: Click-thru-rate: truly, the percentage of users who see the page in a SERP and then click to visit the website.
Ok so … how do I do SEO?
We’ll get into specifics over time - but here’s a few key steps you’ll need to do in order to start optimizing your content for search:
Audit: What content do I even have? Is any of it good? What content do I want my primary audiences even reading? What kind of content leads to the best conversions? Can Google even see my website? How’s the technical structure? Is Schema turned on?
Research: What keywords am I already ranking on? Do I even have Google Search Console turned on? What do my competitors rank on? What keywords should I add to my content? What do the people I want looking at my content search when they want to find me? What should they be searching?
Write: Is my meta content even written? Do I have keywords on key pages? Do I have landing pages? Can users find what I want them to find? Is my content written in brand-voice?
It looks like a lot, but with the help of an SEO expert, you can distill all of this work down into bite size chunks.
Give us a holler - establishing an SEO practice alone can seem daunting to be sure, but we’re available and ready to help simplify this all!
