Which SEO Strategy Is Best for Beginners? (5 Step SEO Guide)-SEO
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s organic visibility and performance on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. SEO can help you drive more organic traffic, leads, and sales to your website to help grow your business.
But SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are different strategies and techniques that you can use to achieve your SEO goals.
So which SEO strategy is best for beginners?
In this article, we will explore the most important SEO strategy for beginners to learn and implement to achieve higher website rankings and traffic. By following this guide, you can have a lot of success without having to worry about complex, or confusing, search engine optimization methods.
Which SEO Strategy Is Best for Beginners?
The SEO strategy that is best for beginners includes five steps: 1) Keyword Research, 2) Content Creation, 3) On-Page SEO, 4) Link Building, and 5) Technical SEO. Follow this beginner SEO strategy and you can experience good website ranking results.
Step 1: Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding what words and phrases your target audience is using to search for information, products, or services related to your website. Keyword research helps you understand what topics and questions your content should address, and how to optimize your pages for relevant keywords in the later parts of this SEO strategy.
To do good SEO keyword research, you need to use tools like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, Mangools KWFinder, or LowFruits low competition keyword finder.
You can check out these other guides below for reviews of those tools and more to find the best option for your needs and budget:
Keyword research tools can help you:
- Discover thousands of potential keywords for your niche.
- Analyze the search volume, difficulty, and competition for each keyword.
- Find related keywords, synonyms, variations, and long-tail phrases.
- Group keywords by topic, intent, or difficulty.
Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy for beginners. It helps you create content that matches what your audience is looking for, know how to optimize it effectively for on-page SEO, and rank higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Step 2: Content Creation
Content creation is the process of producing high-quality, relevant, and informative content for the keywords you chose in step 1. Content creation helps you attract and retain users, and establish your authority and trustworthiness in your niche.
To create content that ranks well, you need to:
- Choose your content format based on what’s ranking in Google for your chosen keyword. For example, if most of the results are listicles, then you should create a listicle too. If the top results are videos, then you’ll need to create a video. If the top-ranking sites are image-heavy, then make sure to include a lot of images in the content.
- Choose your angle based on what makes your content unique and valuable. For example, instead of writing a generic article on “how to save money”, you can write an article on “how to save money as a college student”, “how to save money on groceries”, or “how to save money for retirement”. Doing so is less competitive and makes it easier to create high-quality content that resonates with your audience.
- Craft engaging article titles that capture your audience’s attention and entice them to click on your website listing in Google to read more. You can use techniques such as asking a question (like we did for this article), using numbers or statistics (e.g., Top 10 SEO Tips for Beginners), making a promise, or creating curiosity.
- You also want to make sure your titles are optimized correctly for your target SEO keywords. See the next step in this SEO strategy for more details.
- Provide valuable information that covers all aspects of your topic and gives clear answers and solutions for your audience. You can use techniques such as providing examples, case studies, data, quotes, or stories to deliver the most value to your audience.
- Optimize readability by using short sentences and paragraphs, bullet points, headings, subheadings, images, videos, and other visual elements. You can also use tools like Hemingway Editor or Grammarly to check your grammar and spelling.
Content creation is the core of any SEO strategy. It helps you provide relevant and satisfying content for your audience and search engine algorithms. Without quality content, your articles will never rank high on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
Step 3: On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages to help search engines understand what they are about (i.e., keywords) and how they match user intent. On-page SEO involves techniques using descriptive title tags, meta descriptions, headings, images, links, and other elements to make your content clear for search engine crawlers and user-friendly.
You can visit these other in-depth guides that provide a complete on-page SEO strategy to follow from start to finish after reading the quick tips below.
To do on-page SEO, you need to:
- Use your target keyword and related keywords in your title tag, meta description, headings, and content. See: How to Optimize Title Tag for SEO.
- Write catchy and persuasive title tags and meta descriptions that entice users to click on your link in the Google SERPs. You can also use tools like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer or Portent’s SERP Preview Tool to check how your title and description will look on Google.
- Use headings and subheadings to structure your content and make it easy to scan while also including your target keywords. See: How to Optimize Header Tags for SEO
- Use images and videos to enhance your content and provide more information and context. You can also use tools like Canva or Lumen5 to create stunning images and videos for your content.
- Use internal and external links to provide additional value and context for your users and search engines. See: Internal Linking Best Practices.
On-page SEO is the secret key to every SEO strategy, yet many beginners overlook it. On-page SEO helps you optimize your content for both users and search engines and is often the missing ingredient for outranking the competition in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Step 4: Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring links (called backlinks) from other websites that point to your website. Link building helps you increase your website’s popularity, authority, and relevance, as well as drive more referral traffic.
Google’s ranking algorithm uses a system called PageRank to measure the popularity and importance of web pages on the Internet. Therefore, you need to make sure your website has high-quality backlinks pointing to it.
Many beginners in SEO mistakenly think that more backlinks always equals higher rankings. However, backlinks cannot compensate for low-quality content or poor on-page SEO. That’s why you need to follow the first 3 steps of this SEO strategy guide to make sure your content is well-written and optimized correctly for SEO.
Doing so means you can often get away with fewer backlinks to your web pages to get them to rank for competitive keywords. Only after you’ve satisfied those two parts of the ranking process should you start a link building campaign for off-site SEO.
To do link building, you need to:
- Create high-quality, relevant, and informative content that other websites would want to link to organically. You can also use tools like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer or BuzzSumo to find popular and link-worthy content in your niche so you’re not guessing at what is popular.
- Find potential link prospects by searching for websites that have linked to similar or related content in the past. You can also use tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, Semrush’s Backlink Analytics, or Moz’s Link Explorer to find websites that have linked to your competitors or industry leaders.
- Reach out to these websites with a personalized and value-driven email that explains why they should link to your content. You can also use tools like Hunter.io or Voila Norbert to find email addresses of website owners or editors auotmatically.
- Follow up with these websites until you get a response or a link. You can also use tools like Mailshake or Lemlist to automate and track your email outreach campaigns.
Link building is the most challenging but rewarding SEO strategy for beginners. It helps you build relationships with other websites and boost your website’s ranking and traffic in the process. The fact is that all websites need links to rank for competitive keywords. And the best strategy for a new site is to work on collecting those backlinks as soon as possible.
Step 5: Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that your website is easy to crawl, index, and access by search engines and users. Technical SEO involves fixing issues such as broken links, slow loading speed, duplicate content, mobile-friendliness, security, and more.
As you can imagine, technical SEO can be intimidating for a beginner. However, the steps required to ensure your website passes technical inspection are not too difficult to perform.
To do technical SEO, you need to:
- Use tools like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to monitor your website’s performance, errors, warnings, and recommendations from search engines. All of the data is presented to you in an easy-to-understand format in the dashboards.
- Use tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl your website and identify technical issues such as broken links, redirects, missing tags, duplicate content, etc. You can then tackle each issue one by one to make the process less complicated. For example, learn how to fix a broken link, then apply that technical SEO strategy across the rest of your site before emoving on to missing tags, etc.
- Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to measure your website’s loading speed and optimize it for faster performance. Google PageSpeed Insights will even give you tips on how to fix issues it uncovers.
- Use tools like Google Mobile-Friendly Test or BrowserStack to check your website’s mobile-friendliness and responsiveness across different devices. If you find problems here, then you can choose a new website theme, hire a mobile web designer, or work on the HTML and CSS yourself to get the issues resolved.
- Use tools like SSL Labs or Sucuri SiteCheck to check your website’s security and encryption status. If there are any problems here, reach out to your web host to help get them fixed.
Technical SEO is the last step of a good SEO strategy for beginners to follow. It helps you ensure that your website is functioning properly, can be crawled and indexed by search engines, and provides a good user experience.
Again, don’t worry about technical SEO until after you’ve completed the first 4 steps of this SEO strategy guide. Conduct your keyword research, create the content, optimize it for on-page SEO, build a few backlinks, then tackle any technical issues you find on the website.
Summary for Which SEO Strategy Is Best for Beginners
On the surface, SEO is a complex and evolving field that requires constant learning and experimentation. However, by following these five SEO strategies—keyword research, content creation, on-page SEO, link building, and technical SEO—you can start your SEO journey on the right foot and achieve your online goals. The best SEO strategy for beginners is not complicated, and, in many ways, is all you need to have a successful website that ranks high on the search engines without having to ever worry about advanced methods for search engine optimization.
The Editorial Staff at SEO Chatter is a team of search engine optimization and digital marketing experts led by Stephen Hockman with more than 15 years of experience in search engine marketing. We publish guides on the fundamentals of SEO for beginner marketers.
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