Taught by Tina May
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it basically just means optimizing your website to try and rank highly in search engine results like Google.
If you do SEO really well, it becomes a steady flow of free targeted traffic to your website, and if you do it really poorly, people can’t even find your site when they are specifically searching for you.
Organic search is responsible for driving more than 50% of all web traffic. As a comparison, all the social media networks combined are only responsible for 5% of web traffic.
When people go online to find a new product or service, their journey almost always starts with a search. They may have an idea of what they want, but they look to search engines to guide their research. If they find all your competitors but not you, then it doesn’t really matter if your product or service is better. They can’t choose you if they don’t know you exist.
Our goal with SEO is to get as high on the search results list as possible because the distribution of click-throughs looks roughly like this:
And being on the second page of Google is basically useless. Even though you’re ranking higher than 6,900,000 other websites, you’re still likely to get very little traffic if you’re not on the front page, and especially in the first couple of results.
Search engines like Google attempt to ‘crawl’ the internet, reading and categorizing every single web page. They then use a complex algorithm to filter through all of those indexed pages and deliver the most relevant results based on the keywords you’ve searched.
If I were to search ‘how to make a pizza’, in less than a second Google is going to give me a list of 1.2 billion website results.
Its algorithm has read, categorized and organized every single one in an attempt to serve the most valuable results possible. And it’s a multi-trillion dollar business that Google is the undisputed champion of. So when people talk about SEO, they most definitely talk about optimizing a site for Google search results.
But other than that, the factors that influence how each search algorithm ranks websites don’t matter too much. So, while we’re focusing on Google, this is relevant to Yahoo and Bing and other search engines as well.
Most businesses generally just want more customers or more traffic to their websites, and they have heard that SEO is one way they can do it. And this is the biggest misconception about SEO. Because when it comes to optimizing your website and your content for search, what matters is how your site ranks for specific searches or keywords.
Our actual goal for SEO is to strategically figure out the keywords we want to rank for, and then optimize our site to rank for those keywords. The two parts go hand in hand, and you can’t start ‘optimizing’ anything until you know what to optimize it for.
And for all the technical articles you’ll find if you Google SEO, it ultimately comes down to three things:
SEO isn’t about checking some boxes. It’s a race against every other website for the keywords you want to rank for. What that means is we need to target less competitive keywords to increase your chance of success.
What does it take to win a race? You can train every day, you can eat well, you can practice visualization. These are helpful at increasing your capabilities, but the number one factor in determining your success is actually who you are racing against.
You wouldn’t challenge Usain Bolt to race thinking that you could train for a few weeks and beat him, so don’t do the same thing with SEO. Going up against big players who are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in SEO and competing for the same keywords is likely going to be an uphill battle. The first step in effective SEO is understanding this key idea. SEO doesn’t exist by itself, only in relation to the specific keywords that you are trying to rank for, and the more strategic you can get about the keywords that you’re competing for the easier it will be.
Let’s look at this example of possible keywords you could target:
And as we move down this list, the keywords get more niche and more specific. The ones at the bottom are what we would call long tail keywords, which are more targeted and less competitive. You’re more likely to rank for more niche and more specific keywords, but it’s also important to make sure they aren’t too niche that nobody is searching for them.
There are lots of techniques that can help your content rank in search engines, but that can never come at the expense of making sure your content is actually relevant and engaging to your audience.
At the end of the day, people need to read and get value from your content. No amount of SEO can make up for poor content. This is especially relevant for businesses trying to use SEO to drive sales or grow long-term readership. If you aren’t making a good impression with the traffic that you are driving to your website, then there is no point using SEO as a strategy.
To do this you need to really know and understand your audience - who they are, what they value, how they think and be able to almost anticipate their reaction to something before you share it. It’s not just an evaluation of what they want in general, but also what they want specifically from you. The same person probably doesn’t want to hear the same things from their local doctor that they would want to hear from a travel blogger or a financial expert. So what you say and how you say it, has to be specific to the audience you’re talking to as well as the brand your building. If it doesn’t fit both of those things seamlessly, then it’s really hard to build an effective SEO strategy.
Creating content your audience loves matters because if they don’t find value in what they find when they come to your link, they will leave and they will be less likely to come back. This doesn’t just impact you directly, it’s also a signal that Google looks for. If they see lots of people are coming to your site, leaving quickly and never coming back (bouncing), they could interpret that as a sign that you didn’t really satisfy what they were looking for.
If we’re trying to rank highly in search engines, we have to remember what the search engine’s goal is. Google wants to deliver the most relevant, high quality results to their users and they’re really good at that. People tend to find what they are looking for 3-5x faster with a Google search than with any other search engine.
And the reason I put a lot of stress on this is because a lot of SEO techniques you’ll hear about are focused on trying to hack the system. But let’s be real, the system is a lot smarter than you and I. So rather than trying to trick the system, we want to understand what it’s looking for and give it exactly that - to deliver content that’s relevant, engaging and better than existing content out there.
Since Google is trying to find the most relevant site for every set of keywords, it’s generally more likely to rank if you have a dedicated page or blog post for a particular topic. So SEO is going to work best where you either have a blog, or detailed pages for each product/service you want to rank for.
That’s a wrap for today’s lesson and hopefully you’ve gained a better understanding of what SEO actually is and how it works. See you in the next lesson!