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SEO FOR BEGINNERS

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CONTENTS• What is SEO? p3-5

• The Customer Journey p6

• Types of search p7

• Anatomy of a Google search p9-12

• Paid search p13

• Ranking factors p14

• What is Google looking for? p15-19

• On-page vs Off-page p20

• How long does it take? p21

• Don’t do this! p22

• Do this! p23

• Anatomy of an optimised page p24-28

• Google Analytics p29-32

• Google Search Console p33

• Google My Business p34

• Beating the Competition p35

• Using SEMRush p36

• Keyword Research p37

• Using KWFinder p38-40

• Glossary p41-45

• Useful Links p46

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WHAT IS SEO?

• Search Engine Optimisation - or the tools you use to get your business found online

• This course deals with websites, but search is much bigger: social media, YouTube, wherever you are, can you be found?

• And don’t forget mobile: Nearly 70% of all searches now performed on mobile! And what about Siri, Cortana or Alexa?

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IT’S JUST WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS DO

• There’s a lot of jargon and tech speak in SEO (not to mention the mysteries of Google’s algorithms)

• But ultimately, it is about understanding what your customers want and presenting answers to their questions easily

• Your competitors are already doing this!

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BEFORE WE CONTINUE,

• INFORMATION

• ENTERTAINMENT

• REPUTATION

• COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

• MARKETING

• SALES

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

YOUR OBJECTIVES:

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THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

©vendasta.com

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TYPES OF SEARCH

• Informational

• Commercial

• Reputational

• Transactional

• (Regional)

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START WITH GOOGLE - EVERYTHING ELSE CAN FOLLOW

• Google utterly dominates the search market - 92% of all searches, and 95% of mobile searches.

• Get Google right and chances are, all other platforms will follow

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ANATOMY OF A GOOGLE SEARCH

• This is a snippet - a bite size chunk of information that Google thinks does a great job of answering a question without the user having to click any further

• This is a typical search listing (minus ads), as seen on a large computer screen. Anybody ranking in position 7 or lower is considered ‘below the fold’ and unlikely to be seen. If you are off page 1 (position 9+) you are really going to struggle

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ANATOMY OF A GOOGLE SEARCH

• This is the page title. It is usually (but not always) set by the Title Tag on your webpage

• This is the URL

• This is the URL, showing breadcrumbs. This means the site has been optimised to show the internal site structure make it easier to navigate - the breadcrumbs are clickable, unlike the basic URL

• This is the meta description, a summary of the page contents. It should be around 160 characters in length and next to the title is the most important piece of your search listing

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ANATOMY OF A GOOGLE SEARCH

• These are sitelinks - clickable links to pages within your site. Google decides whether to display these depending on the overall quality and structure of your site. You can have up to six, but Google is selective in what it shows. You are most likely to see them if you search for a specific brand or company name.

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ANATOMY OF A GOOGLE SEARCH

• This is a local listing, which depends on having a Google My Business page, in addition to your webpage.

• This is an example of how Google prioritises Google My Business pages in local search queries. Those first three links are not to the companies’ web pages but to the Google My Business listings. You can’t even see the traditional search results on this screenshot, they all fall of the screen.

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PAID SEARCH (& GOOGLE SHOPPING)

Often, the first three or four results are paid ads (they are labelled to the left of the URL)

Google shopping results are also paid for

Paid search is beyond the scope of this training, but worth bearing in mind, especially if you have very active competitors.

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GOOGLE RANKING FACTORS• So how does Google determine how to rank a

website?

• The answer is that only Google really knows and they keep it secret

• We do know some information, from Google and from research done by 3rd parties

• The current core Google algorithm is called Hummingbird. They also use an artificial intelligence engine called RankBrain and you might also hear about ‘Pigeon’ (for local search) and Exact Match Domain - to penalise spammy sites with thin content. For example if I created a domain called seo-a-beginners-guide-newcastle.com just for seo purposes and filled it with low quality content and dodgy links - Google would now penalise me)

• Those two use over 200 different ranking signals to determine the quality and rank of a search result

• In 2017, Google started rolling out ‘mobile first’ indexing, which prioritises the mobile version of a site in search results

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SO WHAT IS GOOGLE LOOKING FOR?

• Above all, Google wants its search results to be relevant and do a great job of answering queries. It does its best to guess people’s intent and show only the best results.

• Out of the 200-odd ranking factors, here are the ones that make the most difference (and which you can influence yourself:

• Site traffic and user engagement. If you have lots of people visiting your site, clicking through to multiple pages, spending a long time on your site or buying products, you are probably a trustworthy source that your customers value

• High quality content. This means in-depth, well written content that answers the search query. You should be looking at an absolute minimum of 300 words (and as high as 2000 words - which is what the world’s top ranking sites have on average) if you want to rank for content.

• High quality backlinks from reputable, relevant sites

• A well structured, easy to navigate site

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SO WHAT IS GOOGLE LOOKING FOR?

#1: CONTENT! Above all, Google wants its search results to be relevant and do a great job of answering queries. It does its best to guess people’s intent and show only the best results. This means in-depth, well written content that answers the search query. You should be looking at an absolute minimum of 300 words (and as high as 2000 words - which is what the world’s top ranking sites have on average) if you want to rank for content. It helps if your content is media rich, with (appropriately tagged) images, infographics, videos etc., internal links to other areas of your site and high quality external links to authoritative sites to support your copy.

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SO WHAT IS GOOGLE LOOKING FOR?

#2: TRAFFIC! Bit of a chicken/egg one, this. But if you have lots of people visiting your site, clicking through to multiple pages, spending a long time on your site or buying products, you are probably a trustworthy source that your customers value.

If visitors also spend a long time on your page and your bounce rate is low, these are also good signs of quality.

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SO WHAT IS GOOGLE LOOKING FOR?

#3: USER EXPERIENCE!

Is your site secure?Is it mobile friendly?is it easy to navigate?Do all the links work?Is it fast?Is it set up with the right tags/structure? Is it regularly updated (i.e. do visitors have a reason to return)?

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SO WHAT IS GOOGLE LOOKING FOR?

#4: BACKLINKS

From reputable, relevant sites. These were once the cornerstone of SEO. They are not as important as they used to be, but definitely still have an impact.

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ON PAGE VS. OFF PAGE

• On page SEO is largely the technical stuff: the site structure, tags and markups that enable Google’s bots to crawl your site and deliver results. Only needs to be done once (or whenever new content or pages are added, or the competitive landscape changes)

• Off page SEO is everything that happens away from your site: the backlinks you build, your social media presence, content published by third parties, PR mentions, customer reviews… it doesn’t take technical knowledge, but does require an investment in time. It should be thought of as an ongoing process that never stops - and ideally should occupy a budget line in your marketing plan.

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HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?

• SEO takes time. A lot of time. It can take several months before you start to see the rewards

• It also needs to be thought of as an ongoing process - Google algorithms change, your competitors change and your business changes. Every time something new happens, it could affect your rankings.

• Build SEO into your overall marketing plan and budget - and don’t trust anybody that says they can get you to no.1 in a few weeks.

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DON’T DO THIS!• Bad backlinks! If your site has lots of links from dubious sources (for example a Private Blog

Network / PBN - in which lots of very similar sites point to each other)

• Keyword stuffing or hidden text.

• Incorrect, misleading or spammy page markup (e.g. marking the site up for shoes but selling life insurance…)

• Thin, low value content

• Duplicate content - easier said than done sometimes, but problems can be dealt with, through correct use of the rel=canonical tag.

• Slow site speed

• Letting your site get hacked / having a low security site

• Non mobile responsive site

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DO DO THIS!• Provide clear, well written content

• Have a clear, easy to navigate site structure

• Get quality backlinks from respected sources

• Optimise your images and videos (title, caption, alt tags)

• Have a mobile responsive site that loads fast

• Optimise for mobile search

• Use https://

• Have a 404 page and set up redirects for urls that are no longer in use, for www and non www versions and for http to https

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ANATOMY OF A WELL OPTIMISED PAGE

• 1) TITLE - start your title with the Keyword. Make sure the title is easy to read and relevant. 60 characters max.

• 2) URL - go for short, obvious urls, e.g. msgworks.com/training/seo-training/ , not msgworks.com/category/1320/2019-08/blog/training/128892 (I just typed that at random. I wonder what happens if you click on it?)

• 3) <H1>your headline</H1> make sure it includes your keyword

• 4) <H2> subheading </H2> you probably don’t want your keyword repeated straight after the headline, but you use <H2> (or H3) tags for similar, related or long tail keywords

• 5) COPY - write some great copy. Make it informative and relevant. Include your keyword in the first paragraph (100 words)

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ANATOMY OF A WELL OPTIMISED PAGE

• 6) SNIPPET - Google will attempt to generate this from your content, but it’s better to set it yourself. Include the keyword and make it a good summary of your content (include a call to action too if it’s a marketing page)

• 7) IMAGES & MULTIMEDIA - make sure images have good titles, captions and that you have set the Alt-tags (Alt tag is a piece of descriptive copy that describes what the image is, e.g. “an image of the painting by Leonardo DaVinci of the Mona Lisa on display in the Louvre Museum”).

• Make sure images are sized correctly and don’t slow the site down (also avoid having sound files or video with sound automatically play - this can incur Google penalties)

• 8) TAKE CARE WITH NON-SEARCHABLE CONTENT - some things can’t be crawled by Google’s bots, including animations, slide shows, etc. Be careful if including this kind of content.

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ANATOMY OF A WELL OPTIMISED PAGE

• 9) INTERNAL LINKS - Links to other pages within your site can aid navigation and user experience, so Google likes seeing them

• 10) EXTERNAL LINKS - outbound links to good quality, relevant sites can improve your authority and credibility, so Google likes seeing them

• 11) USE LSI KEYWORDS IN YOUR COPY - LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords are related or synonymous keywords. So for the KW “SEO Training” I might want to include “SEO courses”, “improve SEO skills”, “how to learn SEO”, etc. - just make sure your copy is still natural and readable. If you can’t think of any, try tools like KWFinder, Answer the Public or LSIKeywords

• 12) ENCOURAGE SOCIAL SHARE - social only indirectly affects your search, but it does encourage visits. More traffic - more authority!

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ANATOMY OF A WELL OPTIMISED PAGE

• 13) SCHEMA MARKUP / RICH SNIPPETS - have you ever seen search results that include star ratings, or other additional information?

• That supplementary information is structured data added to a page that identify the relevant content to Google’s bots. A comprehensive guide to Schema can be found here

• 14) REL=CANONICAL - if you have duplicate content anywhere on your site, it is important that you tell Google which version to show in the search results. The best way of doing this is to set the ‘Canonical’ version of the page (i.e. the original or most authoritative). A good guide for how to do this can be found here

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ANATOMY OF A WELL OPTIMISED PAGE

• IF YOUR WEBSITE USES WORDPRESS, there are a number of plug-ins that can make the process easy. The market leader is Yoast SEO, but I personally prefer (and use) RankMath

• There are also a number of plug-ins available to assist with Rich Snippets / Schema markup. A good list can be found here.

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GETTING STARTED - GOOGLE ANALYTICS

• Google Analytics won’t give you much information about specific keywords, but it will give you important insights into your customers’ behaviour.

• By understanding Google Analytics, you can work out who your current customers are (demographics, location), how they reached you (acquisition) and what they do on your site (bounce rate, time on site, no. of pages browsed, behaviour flow)

• You might also find out where your weaknesses are (e.g. hardly any traffic from organic search, high bounce rates etc.)

• Importantly, it provides the best benchmark for performance over time - allowing you to see whether the changes you make are working.

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GETTING STARTED - GOOGLE ANALYTICS

• This is the Audience Overview screen. It shows you how many visits your site has had over a given time (and you can compare that to a previous time as well)

• Sessions: the total number of site visits. Higher is better.

• Users: the number of visits from unique IP addresses. Higher is better.

• Page views/pages per session: the number of pages clicked. Higher is better.

• Avg. session duration: how long people spend on your site. Higher is better

• Bounce rate: how many site visitors immediately leave without doing anything. Lower is better.

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GETTING STARTED - GOOGLE ANALYTICS

• There are a number of other useful screens - you can check demographics (age, gender), interests, language and geographical location (down to city level)

• You can also see which browser and operating system visitors use - which is important for assessing how much traffic comes from mobile

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GETTING STARTED - GOOGLE ANALYTICS

• Possibly the two most useful screens are

• Acquisition - which allows you to track where your traffic is coming from (e.g. organic search, social media, PPC, email marketing)

• Behaviour - which allows you to see which pages your visitors click through to. For example, if you have a shopping cart page and all your users drop off before they get to it, you might have a problem

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GETTING STARTED - GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

• Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is a free utility that allows you to spot any technical errors on your site and also analyse your search traffic.

• You should definitely have your site added to Search Console and verified.

• You will need to make sure a sitemap is submitted

• You may need to speak to your webmaster to set this up

• Once set up you can see at a glance which search queries are driving traffic and what your average page rank is.

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GETTING STARTED - GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

• If you want any chance of ranking in local search, you will need a well set up Google My Business page

• Mostly, this is a question of claiming your page and then simply filling out all the details

• For you to claim your page, Google will need to send a code to your physical address - this arrives as a postcard through snail mail and can take a couple of weeks.

• Make sure you include images, opening times and allow customer reviews - and don’t forget to include a link to your website!

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NEXT STEPS - BEATING THE COMPETITION

• Go to semrush.com and enter your domain name

• You will now be able to see what keywords you rank against and how many backlinks you have

• You will also be able to see your main organic competitors

• By clicking on them, you can analyse their sites - see the number of visitors, which keywords *they* rank against, your comparative positions in the rankings and what backlinks they have

• Using this information, you can start to target them, either through organic SEO targeting the same or similar keywords or through paid search (PPC)

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NEXT STEPS - USING SEMRUSH

• Semrush is an incredibly powerful tool that could be all you need to monitor and develop your SEO

• It will report on on-page SEO and site errors and give you suggestions for site improvements

• It will also allow you to manage your of site SEO, with backlink building tools, a social media tracker, content templates and more

• All in addition to giving you instant insights into your competitors.

• A free account will give you a limited number of searches (enough to get started). When you are ready, you can purchase a subscription here.

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NEXT STEPS - KEYWORD RESEARCH

• In order to optimise your site for your customers, you first have to know what they are looking for.

• Start off by asking them! A simple question like ‘how did you hear about us’ or ‘what were you looking for’ on a sign up form can provide very valuable insights

• Then, type in some of those queries into google and see what the Google suggestions are and see which sites show up in the results

• You can also go to Google Search Console and see a list of organic keywords that your site visitors have used.

• Enter all of these into a spreadsheet and organise them by categories

• Think about alternatives. E.g. for SEO training, you might want to add ‘SEO training near me’ or ‘how can I get SEO training’ - add these to your list too.

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NEXT STEPS - KEYWORD RESEARCH USING KWFINDER

• Although Semrush allows you to do detailed keyword research, it can be fairly clunky

• A much simpler tool is KWFinder.com

• By entering (or importing) your target keywords, you can see

• which ones get the most traffic

• which have the most competition

• what good alternatives might be

• Helpfully it will also show you results for Google’s Autocomplete feature and related questions (e.g. “why do I need SEO training”)

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NEXT STEPS - KEYWORD RESEARCH USING KWFINDER• You will be able to store all of the keywords you would like to target in a list, and then

create content or landing pages to target them - or change the existing targeting of your site or pages if they are only ranking for low quality keywords

• Questions to ask yourself:

• who is the competition? can I realistically go head to head with them?

• is search volume everything? Would I be better off targeting keywords with lower search volume if there was less competition?

• is the keyword related to an action or just to information. For example: “where can I get SEO training near me?” is very action oriented. There may only be a very low number of searches, but those searchers are very likely to want to purchase. On the other hand, “what is SEO” is very information focused. It will have very high search volumes, but it is unlikely that those searchers are going to be potential customers

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NEXT STEPS - KEYWORD RESEARCH USING KWFINDER• A word of caution: keyword research can be time consuming - and

optimising your content for the keywords even more so.

• Set yourself realistic goals

• limit the number of keywords you want to focus on

• set a clear schedule for completing the work.

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GLOSSARY A-B• adwords: the brand name for Google’s own paid search tool

• algorithm: A program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query

• alt text / alt tag: a brief description of an image, which is used to describe the image if the image is undeliverable, or to tell the search engine what the image is (very important, as otherwise the search engine has no way of telling one image from another

• anchor text The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

• authority (trust, link juice, Google juice) The amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from related incoming links from other trusted sites.

• back link (inlink, incoming link) Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.

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GLOSSARY B-C• black hat Dubious / shady search engine optimisation tactics that are counter to Google

Webmaster Guidelines.

• bot: (robot, spider, crawler) A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for exploitation by the Spammer.

• bounce rate: a brief description of an image, which is used to describe the image if the image is undeliverable, or to tell the search engine what the image is (very important, as otherwise the search engine has no way of telling one image from another

• bread crumbs: Web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.authority

• canonical canon = legitimate or official version. - It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content. However these issues can be dealt with in several ways including - using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.

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GLOSSARY C-L• conversion (goal): Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and

sales are examples of conversions. Conversion rate is the percentage of visits that convert.

• CPC (or PPC): cost per click / pay per click - the usual pricing method for online advertising

• keyword density The percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalised (for example if the page uses the black hat technique of keyword stuffing).

• link farm a group of sites which all link to each other. Another black hat technique. See also Private Blog Networks (PBNs).

• link spam (Comment Spam): Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.

• link text (Anchor text): The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.

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GLOSSARY L-N• long tail: longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter

broad queries. For example a search for “widgets” might be very broad while “red widgets with reverse threads” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches.

• META tags: Statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which furnishes information about the page. It is very important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because they may be the information that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about. Also, they are the first impression that users get about your page within the search results.

• nofollow: A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link. Many of the links on Wikipedia or news sites are nofollow.

• noindex: A command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link.

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GLOSSARY O-T• Organic: traffic that arrives at your site through natural searches, as opposed to clicking on paid adverts

or typing in your url

• Robots.txt a file that sits on your website back end that contains instructions for Google’s bots so that they know how to index your site

• SERP: search engine results page. What people see when they perform a search.

• site map: A page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages. The XML sitemap is also used by Google Search Console to provide information on your site

• time on page: The amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.

• TITLE TAG: a piece of HTML code that sits on your website and determines the name of the page. Next to the Meta Tag, this is probably the most important bit to get right. The title tag should be unique and around 50 - 60 characters in length

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USEFUL LINKS• SEMRUSH

• KW Finder

• Answer the Public - a site that provides lots of suggestions for possible content, based on the keyword you enter. A good source of inspiration if you need to write some content for a keyword and especially useful for bloggers

• LSIKeywords.com - a dead simple free tool that suggests LSIs, together with estimated search traffic.

• Search Engine Land - a fantastic resource, full of tips, information, how-to guides, glossaries and all of the latest news about SEO.

• MOZ blog - MOZ provides SEO software similar to Semrush. I much prefer the Semrush tools (plus they are cheaper), but MOZ does provide an excellent blog full of SEO tips, ideas, best practice and news.

• Google Webmaster Learning - Google’s own source of training and guidelines

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THANK YOU• I hope you enjoyed the session and

that you will soon see your rankings climb!

• If you get stuck or need advice I am always happy to help. Simply call or email.

• I also really appreciate all feedback, good or bad, so please let me know how you found the session. If you loved it, please recommend Msgworks to your friends and colleagues.

• Get in touch: mike@msgworks.com+44 (0)191 666 6716