How to start with SEO

Introduction

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of improving your website’s ranking in search engines. The goal of SEO is to make sure that when people search for something online, your site appears on the first page of results.

Understand your target audience

The most important step in any SEO campaign is to understand your target audience.

• Demographics
• Age, sex, income level and education level of those who will be searching for products and services like yours (and the same across all platforms)
• The same demographics for people who visit your site regularly or have recently visited but aren’t returning frequently (and the same across all platforms)
• Demographics of search results pages that rank highly over time based on keywords related to what you’re selling (and the same across all platforms)

Brainstorm keyword ideas

To start brainstorming, open up a keyword tool. There are many free ones available online, and they’re all pretty easy to use. You can also purchase paid tools that you want more detailed information on—just be sure not to spend too much!

Once you’ve got your keyword tool open, choose a search term based on your product or service. For example: “pets” or “quilting supplies”. Then type that into the appropriate field.

Now you have an idea of what sorts of searches people are making for this term. The next step is going through each one individually and thinking about whether it’s relevant to your product or service at all (if it isn’t, ignore this). If there’s still some doubt in your mind as far as relevance goes, look up similar terms (e.g., “pet supplies”) and see if any of them fit better than the original word did; often times these will have better results because they’re more specific than just one word was before!

Analyze Google’s first page

Now that you’ve got a keyword, it’s time to see where it ranks in Google. It’s easy to do this by typing your keyword into the search bar and hitting Enter:

After doing so, you may notice that there are a lot of results! That’s because Google is showing its top ranking sites for your query in order from best to worst. We’re going to start at the bottom and work our way up by looking closely at these first few pages of results.

Study the basics of SEO and avoid the mistakes of your competitors.

• Study the basics of SEO and avoid the mistakes of your competitors.
• Know what your competitors are doing, but don’t copy them or you’ll be flagged as spam by Google.
• Use content marketing to build up an audience over time so you can convert them into customers when they’re ready to buy from you (or anyone else).

Research what your customers are searching for

When you’re starting out with SEO, the best thing you can do is research what your customers are searching for. You’ll want to know what keywords they’re using when they search for your product or service.

There are a number of tools available that can help with this:

• Google’s Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner)
• Google’s Auto Suggest (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
• Google Trends (https://trends.googlelabs.com/)

Optimizing site pages for SEO

• The first step in optimizing your site for search engines is to create a Title, Description and Keyword Meta tags for each page of your website. These are the titles that show up in search results, so make sure they are descriptive and relevant to your content.
• Next, you need to add them into your page headers. The header is the header of the site itself so it’s important that you include keywords here too! For example: How To Start With SEO.
• Finally, make sure that any links on these pages point back towards other sections within that same website rather than linking outwards (unless there’s an internal link). This will help Google know what type of site you have and how related it is to others like it – making it easier for people who land on one page but want more information about a particular topic.”

Understanding your audience, having a plan and executing it are key.

• Understand your audience: As a business owner, you need to know what your audience wants to find. This will help you with your content planning and site architecture.
• Have a plan: Having a plan will allow you to stay focused on what needs to be done in order for you to achieve your goals.
• Execute the plan regularly: You should be analyzing how well the plan is working and make changes as necessary.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can get started on your SEO journey and you’ll be well on your way to a successful website. If you need help with SEO in Kansas City, shoot us a message today!