If you produce any content online you are probably familiar with SEO. The importance of SEO in digital marketing cannot be underestimated. It is indeed, the lifeline of your business. It doesn’t matter how much content you produce. If you don’t follow SEO guidelines, you will simply not get the results you are after. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me go down to the basics for the purpose of those who might not be well familiar with the topic.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Wikipedia describes SEO as the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. I would also say, that some SEO rules also apply to video and podcasts to a certain degree. We also have local SEO which applies to websites for businesses with a physical location. It is a lot different than the standard SEO for online businesses. The process of setting up your SEO differs with the sort of website you are setting up but the ultimate goal is the same. Getting traffic to your business. Traffic equals customers which in turn translates to revenue.
What is worth noting is SEO as a strategy does not involve spending money. We are talking about free traffic that comes organically. People will do a google search, find what they are looking for, and go to your site. It does however, involve sweat equity. You will need to put in a fair bit of work to succeed.
Paid traffic involves paying for visitors who come to your site. If you are just starting, you might be tempted to start paying for traffic. My advice would be to steer clear of it. You need to know what is working before you can start with paid campaigns. You could easily burn through a chunk of money and not get any results. SEO is always your first port of call. Once you know where your visitors are going then you can think of running some ads.
How does SEO work?
Before I answer how long it takes, lets start with how the heck it works. So, you have a brand new website and you ready to start laying down your content. Follow these steps to optimize your site.
- Keyword research.
This is the first order of business. Keywords are a grouping of words that search engines use to target the information that people are looking for. In simple terms, keywords are what people type on the search bar when they are looking for particular information. They form the basic foundation of your content. You basically want to target keywords that have high volume of traffic and less competing pages. To read more about keywords check out this article.
- Keyword in title.
Once you have identified what keyword you want to go with, you want that to appear on the content title. As an example the keyword for this particular post is “How Long Does it Take SEO to Work” - Keyword in body text.
Your keyword should appear at least once within the body of your text. Some people say it’s good to have it on the first paragraph but you don’t want it to appear like you are forcing it there. Remember, you are writing for people, not search engines. - Keyword in SEO title and meta discription.
To do this you will need to upload either All in One SEO or Yoast plugin. There are others but out there but I think those two are the most popular. This plugin enables you to enter your SEO title and meta description. This gives you the power to control how you want your post or page will appear in search results.
