Learn the basics of SEO and how to get your website discovered on Google with this beginner-friendly guide. We cover everything you need to know to get started.
Quick Definition: SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the action of creating, organizing, and promoting your content in the hopes of getting featured in search results for the terms your customers are searching for.
Is your website buried on page 10 of Google search results? Let’s bring it to the first page where your customers can actually find you.
To get your content ranking higher where people can find it, you’ll need to understand:
We’ll go into all this and more in this post to show you how to get your website discovered on Google—no tech jargon required.
This is a bit of a behemoth of a post, so get comfy, grab a coffee or nice drink, and settle in. If you’re not in a place to read this, email it to yourself for later! 📩
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the action of creating, improving, and promoting your content in the hopes that search engines will feature your content for certain search terms.
When we talk about search engines, we’re not just talking about Google. There are many search engines in the world, including:
But in this article, I’ll be talking specifically about SEO for Google Search. Google Search is the #1 search engine in the world, and today, it’s the best way for people to find your website online.
Should you care about SEO? Well, it’s the only way to improve your chances of getting found on Google.
You could just write whatever you want on your website and hope that people will find it. But that’s not really a strategy.
SEO gives you clear best practices to follow to make sure your content gets found by the right people when they need it most.
However, it’s NOT a promise that your content will be ranked.
When you follow the practices, and you have good content and a good business behind it, you will start to see your blog posts and web pages rank higher and higher for different keywords.
And THAT’s when things start to change for your website.
According to the SEO blog Backlinko, the website in position #1 gets the vast majority of clicks for any search query. That number drops sharply for the #2 and #3 spots. Anything under #5 doesn’t get much at all. (And if you’re not on page 1, forget it.)
Image Source: Backlinko
So getting a web page or blog post to rank for those coveted #1 to #3 spots really does make a huge difference for your business.
Not to mention, today, Google inserts YouTube video results, AI results, and other things at the top of the search results, so even the #1 and #2 pages don’t get as many clicks anymore. It’s more important than ever to get your pages into the top 1-3 spots if you want to get any traffic at all from search.
See in this screenshot how the AI Overview takes up half the screen, and only the #1 ranking page is showing at the bottom?
Search engines, like Google, are made to help people find the best content for their query.
(A query is what they type into the search bar. In other words, what they’re looking to find.)
Google looks through all the web pages it can find and “indexes” them, basically cataloging them in their huge database.
Then when someone types in a keyword like “best cage for my hamster,” Google picks out the pieces of content it believes will best answer that query and ranks the content in order of how helpful they think it will be for the searcher.
In this case, Google recommends a Reddit post, an Amazon review, and a hamster blogger.
That’s why you can’t just write tons of content and hope to coerce Google into ranking yours. Your content has to be the very best and most helpful for the person doing the search. And your business has to be trustworthy enough to back it up.
Right now, spammy, AI content is still ranking for many search terms, but Google is on a mission to eradicate any content that doesn’t really help the reader. (I’m sure you’ve found content like this, that says a lot but doesn’t say anything at all.)
So if you want your content to rank for the long term, your best bet is to focus on helping the searcher with the absolute best content possible. I will give you an overview of how that works in this article, and then break it down into more actionable step-by-step guides in other posts.
So why do you see so many of the same pages in search results, while others (like yours) lag behind? Let’s talk about the factors that go into ranking.
And by the way, Google only mentions *some* of the factors, because they know that spammy SEO agencies will try to game the system and force their clients’ content to rank. And that’s not helpful for anyone.
Here’s what it comes down to:
That can feel like a lot for a small business or organization trying to get into SEO. So in the next section, I want to share some practical things you can do to start building your own SEO strategy.
Now you know what makes a page rank higher or lower in search results. But what steps can you take to help your website rank more quickly?
There are 3 categories of actions that you can take, which I’ll explain here. They are:
Now let me give you some very beginner-level steps you can take for each one. Of course, you can spend hours figuring this out and spend thousands on specialists to cover every little detail. But I hope to give you a starting point here that you can launch off from 😊
The first step with on-page SEO is making sure every page of your website and every blog post you publish corresponds with one main search query.
Website SEO is outside of my area of expertise, so I’m going to focus on blog post SEO (also called SEO content) here.
Here’s how to do that:
See how I’m linking to other posts on my blog inside the steps above? That’s what you want to do with your blog posts, too.
Remember, off-page SEO is everything outside the content itself. So it has to do with your business or organization as a whole and whether you seem trustworthy or not in Google’s eyes. 👀🔍
Ultimately, what you need to really dominate search rankings in your industry is to become a well-known business with a good reputation. Yes, there are a lot of tactics you can try to get ahead, but ultimately the point is: Are you well-known? Do people know and like your brand? Do people see you as an authority?
So any steps you take to increase your visibility and brand reputation and get more reviews and mentions in the media will help you here.
Side note: One of my clients had amazing brand authority but no blog when we started working together. So when I started writing content for them, a lot of it got ranked in the top 3 almost instantly. A year and a half later, they’re getting 20K monthly visits to these blog posts now with almost no off-page SEO tactics at all. That’s the power of a good online reputation for your business.
Also, here are some more traditional SEO strategies for off-page SEO.
Again, this is all Google’s way of gauging whether you’re an established brand, if you’re truly who you say you are, and if people like you or not. Those tactics above are just signals that they watch.
Ultimately, building a strong business and having happy customers and industry peers who spread the word is the best way to do off-page SEO.
Technical SEO is outside of my area of expertise, too, but I will go over the main things you should know. To really implement this for your organization, you’ll need someone who’s willing to learn a lot about the techy side of things, or you’ll want to hire a professional Technical SEO provider.
The way I see it, there are some technical things that you NEED to have. For example:
If you don’t have these basic things, you could really hurt your chances to rank.
But beyond that, a lot of this is just extra cherry-on-top technical stuff. Without good on-page and off-page SEO, spending extra money and time on the technical stuff is a waste of time, in my opinion.
So here’s what you can do now to get the basic foundation in place:
Pop your website URL or specific page URLs into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It will score your website performance on mobile and desktop and tell you what to fix. You might still need a techy person to help you fix the issues, but at least you can see where the problems are.
Other than that, you’ll really want to talk to an expert in this area. But writing good content and doing on-page and off-page SEO is the first priority.
Interested in learning more? Here’s where I recommend learning more about SEO with more details than I can go into in this post.
My favorite free SEO course is Ahrefs’ SEO Course for Beginners. It’s free, and you don’t need to give them your email or sign up for anything to watch. You get 14 short-ish lessons that take only 2 hours to complete. By the end, you’ll have a good idea of the ins and outs of SEO for your business.
But I will warn you, by the end, you’ll probably want to use Ahrefs’ software. That’s how they got me hooked 😉(I’m not complaining, though, it’s the best tool for SEO in my opinion.)
By the way, I'm not affiliate with Ahrefs in any way. I really just like this course, and it helped me when I was starting out.
They also have other free courses about blogging for business, link building, and more.
One thing you should know is that SEO is always changing. Google is always updating its algorithm and ranking factors, so what works today will not necessarily work tomorrow.
But one thing I can say for sure is: helpful content and building a successful brand that people like will always put you on top. The tactics will change, but the importance of being a helpful and trustworthy resource will not.
This is my approach to writing content for myself and clients. This is what will give you the best chances of getting found on Google and cementing your position on that coveted first page of Google results.
Best of luck on your SEO journey! If you want to consult with us about SEO or get help with your SEO content strategy, get in touch with us here.
Local SEO is all about optimizing your website to show up for searches made in your area. This is necessary if you have a physical location and want to attract people to your business.
For example, if you make cupcakes, you can take certain actions to help you website show up when someone in your area searches “cupcakes near me.”
This is a whole ‘nother side of SEO. It’s not really useful for blog posts. Local SEO is for your website pages, like your home page, service pages, etc.
What works for Google will generally work for Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others. Google has a lion’s share of the market, so it’s smarter to focus on optimizing for that.
AI-based search engines like Perplexity and even ChatGPT may work differently, and I can’t speak to that. These are the search engines for web pages.
For other types of content, you’ll need to make content on these specific platforms and then learn about their specific SEO strategies. For example, you can learn about YouTube SEO to figure out how to make good content that will rank for YouTube searches. You can learn TikTok SEO to learn how to find topics for your TikToks and get them found in TikTok search.
(Gen Z is searching for brands on YouTube and social media more than Google, so you should certainly consider other search engines as part of your content marketing strategy.)
Source: Emarketer
Wouldn’t it be great if you could check a few boxes and guarantee that your content will rank in the top spot? SEO agencies have been promising this for decades, but this kind of strategy is wishful thinking at best, and spam at worst.
If you want to absolutely rank for a search term, pay for Google ads. Other than that, you have to compete by creating the best content, being the best online resource for your topic, and building a real brand presence online. You have to be an actual expert in your field and know what you’re talking about. You can’t just generate stuff with AI and hope to win over the long term.
Google’s job is to give searchers the very best content, and that’s what they are trying their hardest to do. Anytime they sense that a website is trying to artificially improve its rankings without actually having the best content, they knock it down a few notches. If it continues, they even take manual actions and scrub them out of search results entirely.
Don’t be like those spammy SEO agencies. If you do it the right way, just like all things in business, you will win out in the end.
SEM stands for search engine marketing. This is another word for paid search ads.
You have an SEM strategy if you have a plan for creating and placing paid ads for certain search terms. Those are those “sponsored results” at the top of Google searches. This means you are paying to be featured at the top of the page for that keyword, and when you stop paying, your ad disappears.
This is an example of a Google ad at the top of search results. This came up for “best SEO checker.”
On the other hand, you get ranked for keywords for free if you have a good SEO strategy. You don’t need to pay anything to be featured, but you do need to maintain your content and keep up your SEO efforts to keep your spot.