Your website is the heart of your online presence. It’s where your potential customers go to learn more about you, your products, and your services. And if your website isn’t optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) and conversions, you’re missing out on a lot of potential business.
Whether you’re a blogger looking to increase the number of visitors that your blog draws on a daily basis or own an e-commerce site and would like your site to rank highly in organic search results, knowing how to leverage SEO can mean the difference between obscurity and popularity.
This guide will teach you the basic concepts of SEO so that your website can start benefiting from increased traffic coming through organic search results.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the basics of SEO and offer tips for optimizing your website to achieve better search engine rankings and more conversions.
SEO 101
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website, specifically how high up on a search engine result page it gets. You’ve probably used Google or Bing at least once in your life to find a website that you could purchase something from, or perhaps solve a problem that you were having.
Well, the websites that you found on those search engines are what SEO is all about—helping people like yourself find it when they’re looking for it. By identifying the terms and phrases people use to find content and businesses like yours, you can optimize your website to be found for those terms.
To do this, SEOs use certain techniques to make it easier for the search engines to find the site’s content and understand what it’s about. When you implement some of these techniques, you can increase your rankings on a search engine result page (SERP) and get more organic traffic.
How To Get Started With SEO
Now that you understand a little bit about what SEO is and how it can help your website, let’s take a look at how you can start optimizing your own website.
1. Determine What Your Audience Is Looking For
The first step in optimizing your website for SEO is to figure out what your audience is looking for. What are the terms and phrases that people use when they’re looking for businesses like yours?
You can do this keyword analysis by playing around on Google with different keyword combinations and adding words that come up as suggestions. You can also use a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest, which not only suggests keywords but also shows you the number of monthly searches for those keywords, so you can more easily determine what terms to target on your site.
2. Focus On Providing Value
The overall goal of SEO is to improve the quality of your site so that people searching for it will find exactly what they’re looking for. So before you worry about page visits and Google rankings, you need to make sure you’re doing your part by providing value for your users.
Once you know what your customers are looking for—specifically the questions they’re trying to get answered—it’s up to you to fill those gaps.
This is where conversion optimization comes in. If people are looking for an answer to a specific question, you want to make sure that they leave your site with that question answered, whether that means they buy your product or sign up for your email list.
3. Optimize Your Site’s Structure
Now that you know the basics of SEO and how to provide value for your audience, it’s time to start thinking about the structure of your website. This includes the design, layout, and organization of your content.
When you have a website, the different pages you have should be organized in a way that makes it easy for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Think about how someone who is searching your site would find a specific page or post—what terms would they search in Google? How would they navigate to that page from other related pages on your site?
You can use Google Search Console to see how people are finding your site and use a plugin like Yoast to optimize the pages of your site.
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SEO is a long-term investment and results may not be seen immediately. However, if you’re patient and continue to put in the effort, your website will see improved rankings over time.
