Just getting started? Not sure how/where to start your SEO journey?
Here's a simple introduction to the SEO world.
At the end of the day, SEO boils down to the following factors:
Technical SEO, or, how well you optimize your website by SEO best practices. Technical SEO alone won't get you rankings, but good technical SEO will act as a strong foundation for your growth.
SEO content. How much content you have on your website, how good it is, and whether it matches the search intent behind the keyword you're trying to rank for.
Backlinks. The more quality backlinks you get, the faster you're going to rank. In competitive niches, you won't ever rank without backlinks.
On-page optimization. How well are your pages/articles optimized according to SEO best practices.
More often than not, a big chunk of your SEO processes are going to involve creating quality content, interlinking it with your other pages, and driving backlinks.
In case you're trying to do
local SEO, then the SEO process is a bit different. Check out this guide to
learn more about local SEO.
First off, learn the basics:Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz
SEO Basics by Backlinko
SEO in 2022 by Backlinko
Awesome SEO tutorial on Reddit
Then, learn how to do technical SEO, set up tracking, and optimize your website:
Create a sitemap.
Create a robots.txt.
Setup Google Analytics and Search Console.
Improve load speed. Check out this
article by Moz.
Learn about technical SEO and how that works.
Optimize your web pages for SEO. For this, you can use
Yoast or
RankMath if you’re using WordPress, and Content Analysis Tool if you’re not.
Compress all your images. This should save ~75% of space for your images and drastically increase site load speed (which improves SEO). If you’re using WordPress, you can use
Smush to automatically compress all images on your site. If you’re NOT using WP, you can use
Compressor.io.
Learn how to do keyword research:How to do keyword research by Backlinko
Beginner's guide to keyword research by Ahrefs
Learn how to create SEO content:
Backlinko’s skyscraper strategy
How to create top content with the
Wiki StrategyHow to optimize article headlines
Learn how to do link-building:
Learn link-building basics
Learn how to do outreach
Another awesome guide to outreach
Discover ALL the link-building strategies out there
Learn the how and why of internal linking:
Basics guide
Internal linking case study by NinjaOutreach Theory is one thing, practice is something else entirely. Read some case studies to see how other companies achieved success with SEO.
3 Months to Rank an eCommerce Store: An eCommerce SEO Case Study
Local SEO Case Study: How To Achieve 16x Search Traffic In 5 monthsThere are hundreds of SEO tools out there, and yet, you only need a maximum of 10.
The tools we recommend are:
Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both are all-in-one SEO suites and are absolutely essential. Not too much difference between the two tools, so pick the one you like better in terms of user experience.
RankMath or YoastSEO. On-page SEO tools. Again, the two are very similar, so just pick one you like better.
Screaming Frog. Must-have for technical SEO. Let's you crawl your entire website and find potential technical improvements.
Snov.io, PitchBox, and other outreach tools. You'll need a tool for link-building outreach. There are a ton of these on the market, so pick the one you like best. I personally prefer Snov.
And some of the more optional tools are:
Surfer SEO, Page Optimizer Pro or onpage.ai. Helps with on-page SEO, but not something you can't live without.
ClusterAI. Helps with keyword research. Again, useful, but not something that's mandatory.
