SEO FOR BEGINNERS MSGWORKS.COM CONTENTS What is SEO? p3 Anatomy - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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SEO FOR BEGINNERS

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CONTENTS

• What is SEO? p3
• Anatomy of a Google search p6
• Paid search (PPC/Adwords/Google Shopping) p11
• Google Ranking Factors p12
• On Page vs Off Page p15
• How long does it take? p16
• Don’t do this! p17
• Do do this! p18
• Getting started - Google Analytics p19
• Getting started - Google Search Console p23
• Getting started - Google My Business p24
• Next steps - beating the competition with Semrush p25
• Semrush overview p26
• Next steps - keyword research using KW Finder p27
• Glossary p31

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WHAT IS SEO?

• Search Engine Optimisation - or

the tools you use to get your business found online

• It’s not just Google! YouTube and

Facebook are huge search engines in their own right - and then there’s smaller engines like Bing or Yahoo

• Finally, don’t forget mobile:

Nearly 60% 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 and presenting answers to their questions easily

• Your competitors are already

doing this!

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START WITH GOOGLE 


• EVERYTHING ELSE CAN FOLLOW
• Google still utterly

dominates the search market - nearly 65% of all searches, and over 90% of mobile searches

• Get Google right and

chances are, all other platforms will follow (you can still optimise for Bing and Yahoo, but that is for a future session)

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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 (local) search

listing, as seen on a large computer screen. Anybody ranking in position 7 or lower is 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
• f 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

• verall 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.

• This is a local listing, determined

by

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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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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 Google algorithm is called

Hummingbird (They also use an artificial intelligence engine called RankBrain)

• Those two use over 200 different ranking

signals to determine the quality and rank of a search result

• As of 2017, Google has 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?

• A secure site (https:// instead of http://)
• A mobile friendly site
• Page structure (e.g. use of Title Tags, H1 and H2 tags and schema markup)
• Page speed (Google needs your pages to load in under 3 seconds. So do your

customers)

• Optimised images (clear titles, captions and alt tags)
• Dynamic (i.e. regularly updated) content
• Social signals (mentions, links and interactions from social media, review sites, etc.)

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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)

• 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

• f as an ongoing process that never stops - and ideally should occupy a

budget line in your marketing plan.

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HOW LONG?

• 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 any agency that says they can get you to no.1 in a few weeks.

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DON’T DO THIS!

• Unnatural inbound links. 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, e.g. with noindex

tags on the duplicate pages, or by setting the duplicate pages to redirect to the main (canonical) version

• 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 (title, caption, alt tags)
• …and your videos
• Have a mobile responsive site that loads fast
• Optimise for mobile search
• Use https://

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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

• rganic 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 1 - GOOGLE ANALYTICS

• This is the Audience Overview screen. It

shows you how many visits your site has had

• ver 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
• n 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 1 - 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 1 - 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 2 - GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

• Google Search Console (formerly

Webmaster Tools) is a free utility that allows you to spot any technical errors

• n 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 3 - 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

• f 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 1 - 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
• rganic 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 2 - USING SEMRUSH IN DEPTH

• 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 3 - 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 4 - 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 4 - 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 4 - 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 issues (duplicate content): 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
• f 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

• n 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
• r typing in your url
• 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 signup
• KW Finder signup
• 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

• 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
• r 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