If you've clicked through on this blog post, it's likely you're looking for tips on how to start your SEO journey. You're in the right place! I specialise in helping those with absolutely zero knowledge about SEO to understand the basics, why it's important and how it can help your small business to reach its online potential.
When starting your SEO journey, one of the first hurdles you'll encounter is likely the huge amount of terminology that is used. What is a keyword? What's a search engine? What's a backlink? To help with this issue, I've created a free SEO Dictionary that has simple explanations of all of the jargon I come across in the business. You can bookmark this page and refer to it as you start to read about SEO.
But wait - maybe we should take one step even further back. What even IS SEO? SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a way of improving websites to make sure that they come up in Google search results, bringing more people to your website (where they can buy your amazing products). A search engine (like Google) uses an algorithm (code stuff) to organise all of the squillions of websites that exist, attempting to provide useful and relevant sites to its users.
So basically, with SEO, we're doing a number of optimisations to our websites to make sure that the Search Engine knows when to show our website to people. For example, if someone types "soy wax candles" into Google, and you sell soy wax candles, you would want your website to be in the search results.
SEO is a valuable part of any business strategy because it effectively markets your website to the people who want to find it. By following the rules of SEO, you can make sure your website is visible and your website gets lots of visitors (also known as traffic).
The basic rule of SEO is that your website should include relevant keywords that match what someone would write into Google. In the example above, the keyword is "soy wax candles". In short, by using the words "soy wax candles" in the right places on a website, it will come up in the search results whenever someone types that into Google.
Of course, those words need to match what you actually sell - and how do you know what people are searching for? You can use tools like the Ahrefs keyword generator to look for some statistics on how many people use certain search terms (known as the Search Volume) and how difficult it will be to have your website come up on the first page of the google search results (known as Keyword Difficulty).
Choosing keywords is one of the most important steps to take when considering how to start your SEO journey. There are squillions of websites that exist, and there are huge corporations with insane manpower and resources to dedicate to their SEO - so if you sell a similar product to a big business, you can't really compete with them on some keywords. Finding keywords with a low difficulty is crucial - and this can be done by just making your keywords more specific.
For example, you'll notice i didnt just use "candles" above. I used "soy wax candles" - far more specific and likely much less difficult. Have a play with the Ahrefs generator to find a keyword that matches what you sell with a difficults of 0-5, if possible.
Choosing your keywords then using them in the right places on your website is always what I suggest people do when wondering how to start their SEO journey - if you need some advice on this, feel free to book a free consultation with me and I can give you some pointers, as well as advice on SEO for small creative businesses or how to improve your Faire SEO.
