Search Engine Optimization Simplified – For Business Owners and Search Engine Optimizers
One of my biggest pet peeves today is the state of the SEO industry – and how many small business owners that can benefit from SEO that are scared to invest in it. It is a real shame to see many small businesses with so much promise and a beautiful market ready for a strong industry leader not build and develop a SEO strategy and system. That is why today, I want to take you back to the basics of SEO. And, listen up, if you take the basics of SEO that I am about to teach you and collectively and individually master them, you will be very successfully with any SEO project you work on.
SEO is simple, do not make it complicated. It’s easy.
“Provide searchers what they want and need consistently – and search engines and the searchers you are ultimately helping will reward you handsomely for it.” Baba Ajayi
Research and planning
The key to successfully completing anything in life is to figure everything out first before acting and doing – and planning how you are going to accomplish your mission first.
In this important first phase of SEO, all you have to do it sit down and grind – to find out all of the information you need to make sound and solid business and website optimization decisions.
In this phase of SEO, you want to study your target market – and your competitors that are already succeeding in this market. You want to look into your competitors’ content assets and backlink profile to see what you must replicate and improve upon – and what you must omit from your strategic SEO execution and campaign.
Do your research. Perfectly understand your market and competitors – and SEO will be a breeze.
Hint: When learning about competitors – consider their data, website, content, assets, branding, profile, activity on social media, public perceptions on them, and everything you can find qualitatively and quantitatively.
After ample research, use your findings to make a strategy and SEO plan for your company. Incorporate all of the strong strategic moves of competitors and the plan to exploit their weaknesses.
Actual SEO and website optimization
This is the part of the whole SEO journey that is fun and easy (in my opinion) – you get to put everything you discovered during the research and planning phase to use and to work. You get to validate all of your hypotheses – and it will feel amazing when you find out that you were right the whole way through.
Here is where you fully optimize your website for search domination. This includes ensuring that your website is a machine that performs.
Your website must be fast and easy to navigate for searchers. No questions about it.
Moreover, you must ensure that you have a lot of awesome content on your website. As much awesome website content – videos, blog posts, guides, etc. – as you can possibly produce. Content matters a lot when it comes to ranking on search engines. You must have the best possible content – and as much quality content as the market demands (you must satisfy searchers needs).
Finally, visually, your website must be organized for engagement. Google tracks user engagement with your content and pages – and the way you deliver your content visually affects engagement. You must deliver your content in a digestible format to be successful with SEO.
To sum things up, in this phase of SEO, you get to design, build and paint your website as you like. This is the art (artistic) side of SEO.
Ensure great website infrastructure, a beautifully-crafted website, lightning-fast page loading speeds and an all-around awesomely researched and composed website – and you will be successful.
Offsite SEO and backlink building
This is often seen as the sexy or scientific part of search engine optimization – as a whole. This is the part of SEO that most people know, understand the most and like. This is where you can build your profile – to your specifications. Within reason, you can source all types of links in numerous ways – to build up the authority and popularity of your website so that the content you put out will rank highly (quickly).
This part of SEO is simpler than most people believe it to be. If you source contextual links from authoritative and/or laser-relevant websites and successfully attain and sustain them, you will rank very highly on search engines.
WARNING: This is the wild and dark side of SEO that can get bloody. Please be careful – and do not trust this to just anyone or any company if you are a small business owner. Do your best to keep things clean, natural and organic by creating and distributing (or encouraging and investing in the development of) awesome content assets that can (and actually) help searchers of search engines and visitors of websites linking to you.
Data interpretation and tracking
This is the mathematical side of SEO that most people hate – but is so important for success. SEO is constantly changing – and results and rankings (although are usually consistent because of some websites’ insane entrenched authority on the web) are always changing. This means that you must react to changes and developments based on the data Google and SEO or analytics tools provide you. This is the hardest part of SEO because it never ends. You will always have to stay on top of your numbers and react to what the data is telling you – forever and all the time (it might get sickening to be honest with you). Get comfortable doing these two things – looking at website performance and analytics data and reacting to them in a way that aids the organic growth of your website.
If you can properly track and stay on top of your data to effectively and accurately make SEO growth decisions, you will dominate Google (and other search engines) for a very long time. As long as you want – potentially.
