SEO For Actual Beginners
Do you keep seeing “SEO” around and you’re worried it’s too late to ask what it is? This is for you
SEO. It’s in every writing or content marketing job application. Sometimes employers don’t even know what it means, but know that they want it and that it looks good, so they paste it on there in hopes that someone else will come fill in the blanks. What is SEO, and how can you use it?
This is a “just the basics” crash course for the absolute beginners, the people who are digital natives and thought that they knew how to market things but aren’t familiar with the terminology — or the people who have less online experience, but are willing to get started learning, but need a foothold somewhere. This is your foothold.
When I first started looking into content marketing jobs, I realized that I had no idea what SEO meant (despite interning in web content creation and social media) and there were very few resources for people who kind of knew what to do, but had no real words for it. This is, hopefully, that content. If you read through this and think “well, duh”, then you’re past the complete beginner stage and I have no content for you, friend.
The Basics
SEO means Search Engine Optimization, or optimizing content for search engines to scour and locate and then, if useful, push towards the top of the search for more readers to access easily. There are different things that go into SEO, though, and making something easy to attach to for a search engine is only one part of it.
Recognizing the audience is also important. Who are you writing for? What is this person likely searching when they’re on google looking for your content? What keywords are appealing to them, and which ones are no longer in use? Furthermore, what kind of content does this person want to see? Do they want to see a page full of synonymous keywords repeated over and over again in hopes that one of them will stick? Probably not. Your content still has to be enjoyable, useful, and real — not just marketing fluff.
Organic SEO (so, getting to the top of the search engine without use of ad purchases) is valuable to businesses, bloggers, and content creators of all kinds. Many search engines feature a long list of ads now, generally easily visible by a small “ad” symbol after the name or url, but getting to the top without the use of advertisements means that the SEO is effective.
Who cares?
Overall, young people (and more and more people in general) are less susceptible to obvious advertisements (hence the shift to influencer marketing, a “one of us” approach). The small “ad” symbol is enough to turn off some potential clickers. Similarly, advertisements continue to cost money over time (and have a low rate of return) whereas a good article, webpage, or other piece of SEO content gives a business that leg up for as long as the content is available online and SEO strategies continue to work, while also providing necessary framework and content for the website in question.
Basically, it’s free advertising over time if you’re doing it yourself, and included with a package deal if you’re getting a content creator to optimize the content that they’re creating for you for search engines.
How do I do it?
Big question there, friend. SEO comes loaded with a lot of different categories, some of which are more complicated than the average blogger, business owner, or content writer is ever going to need. For the bare-bones basics though, consider yourself as a consumer.
If you’re working for a client who’s selling a product, imagine yourself searching for that product (and then actually search for it). What comes up? What other keywords would likely bring up that same product that other consumers might use?
Those keywords are essential for your content, but you don’t want them to look abrasive. As a consumer, if you clicked on a website and the product description was just varying forms of “WARDROBE BROWN WARDROBE WOODEN ARMOIRE MAPLE WOOD CHEST CLOTHING CHEST” (as we sometimes see on some cheap, poorly optimized Amazon listings), would that be appealing?
Similarly, as a consumer, you want a website to be friendly, shareable, and have revisit value. How easy is it to navigate? What do the urls look like? Are navigation buttons clear and easy to access? Is content well-written and useful?
Think like a consumer, because that’s exactly what the search engines are trying to do.
It seems easy to game the system. Can I…?
Well, not really.
SEO means that the thing that someone is searching for should be found on your page. People are going to be very disappointed if they’re searching for “cat trees” and they find your website for a lumber mill. Using it in that way also doesn’t really benefit you, as those won’t be return customers or long term pageviews. You won’t have any useful return on your SEO investment if you aren’t providing the customer with what they’re looking for.
We basically want to measure our SEO success with different KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. If you’re not meeting these, the SEO isn’t really doing any work, even if people are initially clicking on your website due to being misled originally. You want these people to do things like sign up for email lists, join your campaigns, buy your products, subscribe to your blog, or some other useful measure of actual user gain.
If thousands of people are visiting your page every week because they’re being misled, it’s very unlikely that many of them are going to be a future customer just by chance (although there are the lucky few that slip through).
Some search engines also punish bad SEO practices by lowering the ranking of websites that engage in them, if not blacklisting them altogether. This would obviously not be good for a business, so it’s best to avoid anything like that. Basically, without getting too technical in this beginner’s guide, anything that sounds sheisty when you’re explaining it to someone else is probably a no-go.
Including different forms of keywords organically in content? Great!
Keyword-stuffing to the point that it’s no longer an article but a garbled advertisement? Not great!
Providing a direct answer to a question someone could be searching for? Great!
Providing a misleading target to not answer a question someone was searching for? Not great.
Anyway, more engaged traffic to your website is more beneficial to SEO than any tips and tricks. People linking back to your content (or, obviously, spreading it via word of mouth — the old fashioned way) is also incredibly useful to your ranking.
….
People make SEO out to be some very complicated marketing term, but (as far as the basics go) it boils down to writing with common sense and thinking like a consumer — which you are! You’re constantly consuming web content, most likely, so write in a way that would help you.
If this was all old hat to you, you’re a more advanced SEO user than I was when I first dug into my research and I apologize that this wasn’t incredibly useful. I hope it helped someone who needed a foundation.
