SEO for Beginners: SEO Basics in 2024

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the process of improving your website so it ranks higher for organic search terms and increases its visibility. The overall goal of SEO is to generate more traffic for your website to generate more leads and sales. There are three components of organic SEO, which include on-page, off-page and technical SEO.

On-page SEO represents factors directly related to your website’s content, which include things such as blog article quality, meta descriptions, keyword targeting and more. Off-page SEO comprises SEO factors that occur outside of your website, such as your overall backlink volume and quality. Finally, technical SEO represents your website’s overall performance and health, such as your desktop and mobile loading speed.

To rank your website higher for relevant and high-value keywords, it’s important to address all three of these SEO components. With this in mind, let’s discuss exactly how SEO works.

When someone searches for something on platforms such as Google, those search engines use proprietary algorithms to crawl the internet and rank the most relevant and high-quality content on a search engine results page (SERP). These pieces of content are typically blog articles targeting a specific keyword, but can also include other media types such as images or video.

To determine the most relevant results, Google and other search engines will first analyze the search term to understand the user’s overall intent, and then find content that best addresses the user’s query and overall intent based on a blend of on-page, off-page and technical SEO factors.

The goal of SEO is therefore to rank higher in SERPs for specific keywords—or queries—that are relevant to your business. To do so, it’s first important to do keyword research to determine which terms you should be targeting. From there, write high-value blog articles that directly address those keywords. Then, promote your content through off-page tactics that build backlinks and make sure your website is optimized to perform well for the user.

SEO is important for a multitude of reasons. It increases website visibility for relevant keywords that help you generate more leads and sales. But the benefits don’t stop there. Here’s exactly why SEO should be an important part of your digital marketing strategy:

• Increase website visibility: SEO helps you rank your website higher in organic SERPs for high-value keywords that are important to your business. This allows potential customers to organically find your brand online and can result in more sales.
• Build brand authority: Providing valuable content that ranks high for relevant search terms is a great way to build brand authority since potential customers inherently trust brands they see ranking high in search results.
• Generate organic traffic: Optimizing your website’s SEO will help you generate more organic traffic with high intent for your product or service since you can target specific keyword terms relevant to your business.
• Cost-effective and sustainable growth: Unlike tactics like social media or search advertising that only work if you’re actively paying for ads, organic SEO traffic is sustainable and cost-effective, generating long-term traffic you don’t have to pay for.
• Improve website experience: Optimizing your technical SEO improves the overall user experience of your website, which can result in higher conversions and happier customers.

Overall, SEO should be a key part of your ongoing marketing strategy. It helps improve brand visibility and authority as well as generates organic traffic cost-effectively and sustainably. Now that you understand the benefits, let’s discuss exactly how to perform SEO.

While SEO may seem complicated, there is a set of repeatable steps you can follow to execute an effective SEO strategy. These steps include defining your audience, identifying relevant keywords, crafting high-value content, generating backlinks and optimizing your website performance. Let’s take a detailed look at each of these steps:

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first thing you want to do is define your ideal audience, which will inform the topics and keywords you’re targeting. You can do this by creating an ideal customer profile or buyer persona that identifies things such as demographics, psychographics, firmographics and more. You can create one manually or use an online tool such as HubSpot’s Make My Persona to help you create one.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

With your target audience defined, the next step is to conduct keyword research to identify relevant search terms to target with high-quality pieces of content such as blog articles. The best way to do keyword research is to use a free tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner or a paid option such as Semrush.

Look up relevant topics using one of the tools above and note the overall keyword traffic and ranking difficulty for each topic. From there, put together a content runway of relevant and related keywords with high traffic potential and a reasonable chance of ranking based on the difficulty score.

3. Craft High-Quality Content

The next step is to write and publish quality blog articles each targeting one of the primary keywords on your content runway. To do so, start with an outline that identifies the overall header structure of your article and includes the primary keyword in elements such as the title and relevant headers.

From there, craft the entire piece, making sure to optimize for the primary keyword and adding elements such as imagery, statistics and more. Link relevant articles together using internal website links to help Google better discover your content.

4. Build Quality Backlinks

A backlink is a link from a third-party site pointing to your content, which Google views as a measure of authority. Once your blog articles are published, conduct off-page SEO tactics that generate quality backlinks, such as direct outreach. For example, research relevant websites that can benefit from linking to your content. Then, find their contact information and reach out with a suggestion to link to your site.

5. Optimize Your Website Performance

Make sure that you’re also improving your website’s overall health and performance, which includes things such as loading speed, mobile optimization and more. Google uses a Lighthouse performance score to rank your website on key performance metrics and assign you a score out of 100. Also included are scores for accessibility, best practices and overall SEO. The goal is to optimize your site to get these four scores as close to 100 as possible.

6. Iterate and Improve

Check your SEO metrics monthly to determine how your strategy is performing. You can use an SEO tool such as Semrush, Ahrefs or Google Search Console to track key SEO data such as traffic, ranking position and more. Iterate and improve your on-page, off-page and technical SEO tactics based on the results.

7. Stay Updated on Changing SEO Trends

Search algorithms are constantly changing, affecting the SEO best practices you should be following. Because of this, it’s important to stay abreast of the changing SEO trends and how they might affect your overall SEO strategy. Subscribe to or read online resources such as the newsletter Search Engine Journal to ensure you don’t miss any changes.

SEO is the act of increasing your website’s organic visibility by ranking its content for relevant search terms. To do so, first conduct keyword research to find valuable terms that are relevant to your business. From there, write high-quality content that matches the intent of each search term and promote that content to generate backlinks. Also, ensure your website is optimized for performance and speed. If you do these things, you are well on your way to mastering the art and science of SEO.