A Complete Beginner’s Guide to SEO

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is thrown around constantly when talking about marketing your business online. While it can sound like just a fancy buzz word, it’s actually an incredible digital marketing strategy that focuses on getting your website more visibility online, especially to your ideal customers.

In this complete beginner’s guide, you’ll get a high-level understanding of the elements that make up SEO, why this long-term strategy is worth investing in, and so much more.

Table of Contents:

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

So, you know what it stands for, but what actually is SEO?

SEO is all about making sure your website is built out, structured, and updated in such a way that when your customers are searching for a product or service that is relevant to your business, your website is presented in front of them.

But it’s important to keep in mind that SEO is not about manipulating your data to trick search engines into showing your content to everyone and generating the most generic traffic possible. 

You want your website to appear to your ideal customers in an organic way, meaning getting in front of them without paying for it as an advertisement. 

Websites that show up organically in search results are often seen as reputable websites that customers trust to do business with.

WHY SEO MATTERS

When you go to a search engine, what makes you click on one link or another? For many people, it’s a combination of things like how reputable the site is, where it is on the search engine results page (SERP), and whether or not the snippet that you receive seems like that site will answer the inquiry you had.

This is why it’s important to optimize your website to best fit the search queries that your customers are naturally interested in and searching for. 

For example, you’re a jewelry store owner who is looking to be known as the go-to place for custom rings in your town. You find that month after month, traffic in that area is going down or staying stagnant. You go to your preferred search engine and type in the keywords “custom engagement rings near me,” only to see that your website is nowhere to be found. Instead, many of your competitors are popping up. You scroll to page 2, and then to page 3, where your website is finally listed. 

How many people go to page 3 to find out where they can go get custom engagement rings near them, when there are reputable places listed right for them on the first page of their search engine?

Answer: not many.

That’s why SEO matters.

HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK

Search engines are designed to bring forward the content that is going to best answer the user’s keyword search. 

They go through a process of crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Crawling is when an automated bot searches the internet to find a website’s pages by following links. It takes note of what pages are live, as well as what has been updated.

Indexing is when it takes live web pages and puts them in a database. If your site is not indexed, it will be unable to come up as someone’s search result.

Ranking is the order in which your website appears on a search engine’s results page (SERP). Search engines will rank your content according to a few factors, including the site’s content quality, how relevant it is to the search query, how reputable your site is, and how user-friendly your site is.

Understanding Search Intent

When you type your keywords into a search engine, you’re typically looking for answers. These keywords are categorized by search intent. Search intent is broken down into 4 main categories. Google refers to these categories as know, do, website, and visit-in-person. Semrush, an SEO tool that we use frequently at Buzz, uses slightly different categories: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. 

For the purpose of this blog, we are using the Semrush categories.

Reviewing Intent

Informational: This is when a user wants to get more information about a particular search. They want an answer, a definition, or a go-to guide on how to do something. 

Navigational: This is when a user intends to find a specific website or a login page. The user knows what they want and just needs the right address to take them there.

Commercial: When a user is searching for information from a lot of different pages. They’re doing their research and are looking for information that will point them in the right direction before they make a final decision or purchase.

Transactional: This is when the user knows what they’re looking to do and their intent is to complete that action. For instance, if they’re ready to buy a specific product and pull the trigger on it.

It’s not uncommon for a keyword to have more than one intent. Using the example keyword from above, “custom engagement rings near me” shows that someone may have transactional intent, with high commercial intent as well. 

Once you understand what a user’s search intent is for a keyword you want to rank for, it makes it much easier to be able to develop content that will fit their intention.

Optimizing for Search Intent

To optimize your website and content based on search intent, you need to first identify which keyword you’re targeting. Search that keyword and take note of what type of content comes up. Is it mainly blogs? Is it service pages? Figure out what type of content comes up most often.

For instance, you may find that there is a common theme in titles, content types, and formats. Consider the primary and secondary search intent of these pages. Your new content should be structured in a similar way, but add additional value. 

Add value to your content by looking at the other topics that are shown under “people also search for” at the bottom of the SERP, but only include this information if it’s not too much of a stretch to include, and it makes sense given the overall page you’re creating. 

Then, as you’re creating your content, make it easy to consume. You can do this by adding bullet points, making your paragraphs short, and using words that are easy to understand.

Lastly, don’t forget to optimize the title tag and meta description (more on this later!)

KEYWORD RESEARCH

So, how do you know if you are targeting the right keyword for your content and audience? You need to engage in keyword research. This is the process in which you figure out what keywords your target audience is using to find a service or product like yours, how difficult it is to rank for, and what the search volume is for these search words. You may also be able to find out what the search intent is.

Doing keyword research matters because it can help you not only see how popular a search term is, but it can help you prioritize what keywords to focus on to drive the right traffic to your site. 

There are tools that you can use for this, including Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Answer The Public, that make it easier to find this information and optimize. 

4 Types of SEO

There are 4 types of SEO to pay attention to: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and technical SEO. Each of these SEO strategies is an important piece of the puzzle to getting your website in front of your target audience. 

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is optimizing the visible parts of your website, both the content itself and how it appears on search engines.

This includes:

  • Making sure that your main keywords are incorporated throughout the web page
  • Ensuring your content is unique, clear, and relevant to the main keyword
  • Having your content match the main search intent of your keywords
  • Updating title tags and meta descriptions
  • Having correct heading hierarchy
  • Making your URL clean, short, and descriptive, featuring your keyword
  • Including internal and external links in your content
  • Adding descriptive file names and alt text to photos
  • Optimizing page speed
  • Adding Schema Markup

Important terms:

Title Tags & Meta Descriptions affect how your web page appears on search engines. For instance, in the example below, the title tag is in blue, while the meta description is in gray below. The meta description gives more information about what you’ll find on that web page. If you choose not to optimize it, that content will be pulled from the web page itself.

Heading Hierarchy refers to the different heading types (h1, h2, h3, etc.) and is used to organize the information in a way that makes it easy for both readers and search engine crawlers to follow. 

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the effort that you put in off your web page that may affect your search ranking. 

This includes:

  • Link building
  • Brand mentions
  • Digital public relations
  • Influencer marketing
  • Local business listings

Important terms:

Link Building is the process in which you earn backlinks and get brand mentions from other reputable sites to link back to your website. 

Local SEO

Local SEO is the process of optimizing the visibility of your business or website and changing how it appears in local search results on Google. 

This includes:

  • Getting and optimizing a Google Business Profile
  • Having a location page on your website
  • Getting positive local reviews
  • Securing backlinks from local businesses

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimizing a website’s code and infrastructure. 

This includes:

  • Crawlability 
  • Indexability
  • Site speed & Core Web Vitals
  • Mobile-Friendliness
  • Site Security (HTTPS)
  • Schema 
  • Canonicalization

One of the best tools that you can use for tracking indexing status and crawl errors is straight from Google itself: Google Search Console.

USER EXPERIENCE AND SEO

User experience and SEO go hand in hand as they directly influence each other. Metrics such as a visitor’s time on your website, how many pages are visited, and the bounce rate can all affect how a website is ranked with search engines. This is why it’s imperative to ensure your website gives visitors a great experience.

User experience refers to any user interaction and focuses on the user’s interactions and how easy it is to do what they intend to do on your website. 

To have an incredible user experience, your website should be:

  • Easy to Navigate
  • Relevant
  • Have high-quality content
  • Be responsive
  • Generally enjoyable to be on

You want to do what you can to keep users on your website as long as possible, clicking on more than one page, and generally engaging with your website.

All of these triggers signal to search engines that your site is reputable and fulfilling its duty as a relevant search result for that keyword.

E-E-A-T & BUILDING TRUST

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is used by Google as a framework for how they evaluate websites. Using this as guidance is a great way to ensure you’re following SEO best practices.

Experience

Experience refers to whether your website displays direct experience with the industry or product that is on your website. Using the jewelry industry as an example, your website listing custom designs with first-hand examples, hosting jewelry events, and having inventory on your website for sale all impact experience

Expertise

Expertise evaluates the actual knowledge hosted on the website. This could include skills, credentials, and background on the subject at hand. For jewelry websites, having an education section, a blog, and having built out pages that showcase your knowledge are all a great start.

Authoritativeness

Authoritative websites have other reputable websites link back to their site through backlinks. This is doable with high-quality content, guest posting, and having relevant content for your main audience. It’s important that your website contains original content, is done with topic clusters, and that you display your knowledge wherever possible to encourage backlinking.

Trustworthiness

Being a trustworthy website refers to how safe and transparent your website is. For instance, your website should have accurate information across your website (not inconsistent information in different areas of the site). Additionally, getting your site to have HTTPS security and honest contact information conveys to search engines and your target audience that you are a trustworthy business.

MEASURING SEO PERFORMANCE

It’s important to measure your SEO performance so that you can identify what is working or what may need a bit more optimization. Along that same line, it can be tricky when search engines perform updates to their algorithm. It’s important to know and understand what changed so you can adjust your strategy accordingly. 

To get a good idea of whether or not your SEO efforts are working, you’ll want to measure the following items:

  • Organic Traffic
  • Keyword Rankings & Visibility
  • Click-Through Rate
  • Conversions and Revenue
  • Backlinks
  • Technical Health & Core Web Vitals

SEO Tools

To help you measure how well your SEO efforts have been performing, you can use certain online tools, including Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEO platforms like Semrush.

Google Search Console – Google Search Console provides data straight from Google about how your website is doing with impressions, clicks, keyword positions, and crawl errors.

Google Analytics – When you want to measure the behavior of website visitors, Google Analytics is your friend. For example, Google Analytics will tell you what pages get the most hits, how users engage with your website, how long they’re on your website, and if they completed their goals based on their original organic search.  

Semrush – Semrush or other SEO platforms can help you to do competitor analysis, keep further track of keyword positions, and help you do site audits so you get a comprehensive overview of what needs to be improved on your website.

COMMON SEO MISTAKES TO AVOID

While there are a lot of things you can do to optimize your website, you want to make sure that what you’re doing is not accidentally harming your website. Here are the top 5 things you want to be aware of that are super common mistakes to make when you’re first implementing SEO as a beginner.

Keyword Stuffing & Cannibalization 

Keyword stuffing is the process of putting your keyword in as many times as possible so the search engine believes that content is more important and will be more likely to show up first on a SERP. This technique used to be very popular in the 1990s and early 2000s when search engines were less complex.

Today’s search engines look out for keyword stuffing and penalize your site for doing it. That’s because it not only can come across as spam, but search engines look to put out the best results to match the search query. Featuring a keyword many times, especially in an unnatural way, will not help you. Instead, what you can do is use a keyword as a direct match, as well as reworded throughout the web page. 

You want to also be aware of keyword stuffing in your meta description and title tag as well.

The general rule is to make your web page sound natural and written for humans, not for search engines.

Keyword cannibalization is when you have multiple pages on your website that are trying to target the same keyword. While you may think this would be a good thing to associate your website with that keyword, it instead will penalize you. This is because having the same target keyword often means that you have too similar or duplicate content. 

You can fix keyword cannibalization by ensuring that each unique page has its own distinct purpose. 

Under Optimized Metadata

Your metadata is the blue title and description that comes up on a SERP. If you choose not to optimize this, it will automatically be pulled from your page directly. The problem with this is that it will not always represent your web page the way you want it to look.

The job of metadata is to give a little snippet to potential website viewers of what they will find on that page. 

Unoptimized metadata could look like putting too many characters in the title tag or the meta description. Titles should have no more than 65 characters, while descriptions should stay under 150 characters. When you go over that character limit, it could be cut off in the search results.

Neglecting Local SEO

For businesses, having local SEO is incredibly important to optimize so that people are able to find you in your own community. Local searches are incredibly important to brick-and-mortar businesses to get traffic in your door.  

To work on your Local SEO, you’ll want to ensure that you have a fully functioning Google Business Profile, as well as optimized listings wherever possible. You want to make sure that you have accurate business hours, high-quality photos of your business, and reviews.

On your website, you can also have a dedicated location page that helps search engines understand that your business belongs to that area.

Image Issues

There are a few common image issues that happen: images that are too large, having broken images, and having images without alt text.

Images that are too large will have trouble loading on the website, which ultimately makes for a bad user experience and can slow down your site as a whole.

Broken images can happen when the image no longer exists or gets accidentally deleted. This also adds to a bad user experience.

Alt text is HTML that briefly explains what the image is showing. It not only helps crawlers be able to get a better understanding of what’s on the web page, but it also helps with screen readers. 

Poor Crawlability

Crawlability refers to how easy it is for search engine’s bots to access your site. Having poor crawlability could look like having bad navigation, pages that can’t be accessed, redirect loops, link issues, and pages blocked in a robots.txt file. 

This goes hand in hand with technical SEO and is relatively easy to fix. 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

How long does SEO take to show results?

At Buzz, we always tell clients that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. What we mean by that is it could take 3-6 months to see the results of your optimization, simply based on how often search engines crawl your site and notice updates. With millions of web pages out there on the internet, this takes time.

The best time to optimize a page was 3 months ago; the next best time is now.

Does blogging help SEO?

Yes – Blogging does help SEO! This is an excellent area to not only show your website is constantly being updated, but also showcase your authority on the topic at hand. Each blog post gives you another opportunity to attract a new customer and do some internal linking. 

How often should I update my website for SEO?

You should be continuously updating your website for SEO, minimally on a monthly basis for high-traffic pages. You should also evaluate your SEO strategy on a quarterly basis to ensure you’re aware of any Google updates and update accordingly.

What are backlinks, and why are they important?

Backlinks refer to other websites linking back to your website. You want to have reputable websites and local websites link back to yours when it makes sense. Getting quality backlinks helps to show that your website is trustworthy, as well as authoritative.

What is the difference between SEO and GEO/AI search optimization?

SEO and GEO go hand in hand, but there is a difference between the two. SEO refers to optimizing your website to come up in search results. While GEO refers to optimizing your website to perform well with AI engines like ChatGPT and Google AI overviews. Both are important for ensuring that your website gets the most high-quality traffic possible. 

Hire Buzz For SEO

SEO is not only complicated and consistently changing, but it also takes up a lot of time. If you’re looking for SEO to be done consistently, strategically, and with your website and business’s best interest in mind, take a look at our SEO services here.