Your Guide To SEO For Beginners

Your_Guide_To_SEO_For_Beginners

Although this acronym has the potential to fill rookies with fear, getting a grasp on SEO for beginners is actually much easier than you might initially think.

If you’re new to the online marketing arena, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Industry professionals seldom agree on the best paths to take for success – some go hard after social media growth, while others champion email marketing. However, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is the importance of SEO, and how it can make or break a website’s visibility on Google. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, all the major search engines like Google and Bing use SEO – otherwise known as Search Engine Optimisation – as somewhat of a library system for the internet. Every day, thousands of ‘bots’ crawl the many corners of cyberspace to see what’s new, to give their tick of approval to new content, and how to appropriately categorise this content. 

These bots allocate all types of online content by particular parameters, such as keywords, search intent and overall quality in order to deliver the best possible search results to queries from users around the world. For brands and businesses giving this form of marketing a crack for the first time, mastering SEO for beginners is a must. 

Five Key Steps To SEO For Beginners 

According to market leader Hubspot, brands are thirteen times more likely to see positive return on investment when they put regular blogging as a top priority. In addition, it also helps brands to cut down on paid advertising since well executed SEO strategies can last forever whilst still yielding results. If you’re new to this area, the good news is that SEO for beginners is as easy as following a few key steps. 

Step One: Conduct A Site Crawl –  If you already have a website, it’s always a good idea to start off by seeing how many of your pages are in the index. To do this, head to Google and type “site:yourdomain.com” into the search bar, and you can see which pages Google already has stored in its index and what parts of your existing content are actually performing. 

Step Two: Keyword Research – If you had to boil all of your website’s content or social media down to just a handful of simple phrases or words – and this includes all of the images, videos and text copy – these should be your primary keywords, or words that you need to target in your SEO. While many online tools offer a paid subscription model, one of the best options available is the free module that Google itself provides, known as the Google Keyword Planner

Step Three: Create Great Content – The bread and butter to any good content marketing strategy with a focus on SEO is your website’s blog. So long as it is written around your keywords, a blog or an article can come in many different formats. If you’re stuck for ideas, try writing a piece that is list based, is a how to guide, or even interviews in news style editorial, but aim to write evergreen content that will last forever and not expire. 

Step Four: SEO Optimisation – Once you’ve written a Pulitzer worthy blog that includes your keywords, it’s important to properly optimise it. What this means is taking the time to address the six pillars of SEO optimisation: title, meta description, headings, images, links, and length. Without these, Google can’t “read” your content properly in order to index it. Worst case scenario, failing to optimise your content means that all your work amounts to nothing. 

Step Five: Distribution – To add value to your SEO efforts, the theme, topic or message related to the blog in question can now be transferred – or repurposed – into a variety of different styles of content. To ensure that your work truly packs a digital punch, consider sharing that article to your social media channels, create an infographic to summarise visually what the text is all about, or use it to communicate with your customers directly via email marketing. 

Once your SEO efforts start to gain some momentum, if your audiences are liking what they’re reading, they’re also likely to spend more time on your website, reshare your content, trust your brand and eventually make a purchase. Provided that you’re able to follow a few of the key fundamentals involved with this form of marketing, SEO is the gift that keeps on giving. 

However, it’s important to note that writing doesn’t come easy to everyone. For some people, it’s a lack of confidence, while for others there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. One way or another, ignoring SEO as a business will eventually have a negative effect on your brand, as its absence provides a window of opportunity for your competitors to get ahead of you. Thankfully, outsourcing this task has never been easier. 

The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content

Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources, but avoiding these responsibilities altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice. Thankfully, investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier. 

Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.

If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.

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