SEO For Dummies – The Best Digital Marketing Advice You’ll Ever Receive

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can provide an incredible ROI when done the right way.

However, if you’re new to the world of SEO you might not know much about SEO – let alone how to create a killer SEO marketing plan.

If you’re in such a situation, don’t worry.

I’m going to show exactly what SEO is and how you can benefit from it.

This SEO for dummies guide is going to arm you with the knowledge you need to generate incredible awareness and profit for your business, using SEO.

Let’s go!

What is SEO and What Are the Benefits?

As mentioned, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps improve the search engine rankings of your website. It is powerful because you can use it to get in front of your target market when they’re most likely to spend money with you.

SEO has the additional benefit of not costing you any money whenever someone clicks on your search listing.

How Does SEO Work?

It’s very, very, very easy to overcomplicate SEO.

But this is an SEO for dummies guide. So we’re going to keep it simple!

In simple terms, there are three basic elements of SEO:

1. Keyword selection
2. On Page Optimization
3. Getting backlinks

Keyword Selection

Keyword selection relates to the keywords being used by your target market and is very important. It’s the keywords that people use when searching, that define whether they belong to your target market.

If you run a dog grooming business, people searching cat grooming probably don’t belong to your target market. Certain keywords are better at producing customers than other keywords.

When selecting the keywords you want to rank for, it is important you select the keywords that are going to bring you the best return on investment.

On Page Optimization

On-page optimization relates to how effective a webpage is at letting a search engine know what it is about. It is important because it helps search engines work out which keywords a webpage should rank for.

It also helps search engines work out which webpage is better in relation to a specific keyword.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website. Backlinks are like little votes from around the web that vouch for the validity of the content on a given webpage.

Search engines, therefore, use backlinks to work out how trusted a given webpage is.

If you want your website to rank highly, you master all of these SEO elements.

If you don’t, competing websites will outrank you.

After all, certain keywords tend to produce a lot of customers and so your competitors will be working very hard to rank for these keywords too. Make sure your SEO strategy is comprehensive and doesn’t just focus on one aspect of SEO.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how you should think about creating an SEO for dummies strategy, using what we’ve just covered…

How to Develop an SEO For Dummies Strategy

So how can you create an SEO for dummies strategy that will deliver?

Well, in line with what we’ve just covered above, a successful SEO strategy will focus on the following:

1. Finding keywords that are being searched by your target market
2. Create content for those keywords (AKA On Page Optimization)
3. Developing high-quality backlinks to that content

Let’s take a look at the first step of the process – finding keywords.

Finding Keywords

Keyword selection is definitely one of those things that people over complicate.

But you don’t need the help of an SEO specialist to find the right keywords.

If you want to find out which keywords you should be attempting to rank for, head over to the Google Keyword Planner.

This is a tool that is designed to help people who use AdWords. However, we can use it to see which keywords are being searched on Google and how much they’re being searched.

We can also see how much advertisers are willing to pay for certain keywords.

That’s important information because it lets us know which keywords we should be trying to go after.

Once there, enter in a basic keyword related to your industry. You might also want to enter in a location if you run a ‘local business.’

Then take a look at the keywords that have returned and sort the keywords by their ‘estimated CPC.’

All the keywords that have an estimated CPC next to them, are keywords you should focus on ranking for. The keywords that have the highest CPC will tend to be the most difficult to rank for, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to rank for them in the long term.

On Page Optimization

With on-page optimization, you’re trying to make sure that a search engine deems your content, the best content available for a given keyword.

If you can make this a reality, you’ll have done a lot of the work that goes into improving your search engine rankings.

Remember – search engines want to provide a good user experience for the people using their service.

If they can show the best possible content for a given keyword, then they’ll be able to fulfill their ambition of providing a great user experience. And so if you help the search engines achieve their goal – they’ll help you achieve your goal of ranking higher in the search engines.

You can achieve this by doing the following:

1. Creating content that is more in-depth than what is already available (for your chosen keyword).
2. Including synonyms and related words within your content, so that search engines can be sure about the topic your content covers.

It can take a lot of work to create high quality, optimized content. However, if you want the search engines to take you seriously, then you need to be serious about your content creation.

Generating Backlinks

There are hundreds of backlink generation strategies you can focus on.

But when it comes to SEO for dummies, the best strategy for generating backlinks is ‘manual outreach.’

With manual outreach, is when you reach out to people who are in the same industry as you. You then let them know you’ve produced something they might find interesting. Ask them to link to it, if they deem it to be an interesting piece of content.

Another tactic is to find the people linking to top ranking content, letting them know you’ve created something better. If they like what you’ve created, they’ll adjust their link so that they’re now linking to you instead.

When done properly, this can help you get a lot of high-quality backlinks.

A New Way to Market Online?

There are dozens of digital marketing strategies you can take advantage of. But if you want something sustainable, that will provide a high ROI for years to come – SEO is a good bet.

In this post, we’ve taken a look at how SEO works and how you can take advantage. The more you learn about SEO, the better equipped you’ll be to develop little SEO tactics that work for your industry. But if you ever find yourself becoming overwhelmed with SEO, just come back to this SEO for dummies guide.

If you’d like to learn more about SEO, be sure to contact us!