7 Beginner SEO Tips

Intro

Getting started in the SEO and digital marketing industries isn’t necessarily difficult but there are a lot of things that you’ll have to keep track of. Keeping your thoughts organized so that you can understand the differences between key terms and strategies is a crucial part of ensuring that you’re successful when working in SEO.

However, if you’re looking for a few quick ways to ensure that you’re following the best practices in SEO, these tips should help you out. We’re going to explore what beginners can do to make themselves better at digital marketing and SEO, ranging from implementing the right strategy to varying the kind of content that they create.

1. Strategy is Key

If you’re in a position of power when it comes to planning out a digital marketing campaign, the first thing that you’re going to need to do is focus on your strategy. Failing to do so runs the risk of all of your efforts being in vain because you were targeting your efforts properly, which almost guarantees they won’t work out.

You need to start by understanding what your business is trying to accomplish with this marketing campaign. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to doing so because every business is different and success means different things to various businesses. Some businesses may be trying to grow their brand while others may be trying to maximize downloads.

Write down what your main goals are and then consider how you’re going to make those goals a reality. Don’t make the mistake of considering traffic or higher rankings as a goal because those are tools that you will have to use to get to your goals. They shouldn’t be the goals themselves.

2. The Importance of Keyword Research

Failing to do the proper amount of keyword research will surely come back around and bite you. You’ll want to make sure that the keywords you find are pertinent to your business but you also want to make sure that you don’t have a huge amount of competition that’s targeting the same keywords.

There are plenty of tools that you can use to do your keyword research, including our very own Keyword Finder. Using the Keyword Finder, you’ll be able to see which keywords can get you the best results and you’ll also be able to ensure that you’re not going up against any competition that’s too stiff.

3. Find Out What the Competition is Doing

Not knowing what the competition is doing is never good in any form of marketing, but it’s even less ideal in digital marketing. Pay close attention to what your competitors are doing so that you can determine what they’re doing right that you can copy and what they’re doing wrong that you can avoid.

This will also make it easier to determine which keywords will work best for you because you’ll be able to see which of them are competitive and which of them aren’t. Don’t focus so much on what the competition is doing to the point that you’re unable to come up with original strategies, however.

4. Don’t Write Like a Robot

One of the most crucial things to account for when it comes to writing content is that you don’t want to make it sound robotic. The worst thing you can do is write content that doesn’t sound natural and doesn’t read well because it won’t be a good look for your site or for your client’s site.

Google’s algorithms have also gotten a lot better at noticing when you create content that isn’t quite up to par and doesn’t sound like proper English. This will get you penalized, dropping you in search rankings and making it so that all of the keyword research that you did wasn’t even worth it.

Some of the main things that you’ll want to avoid include keyword stuffing and mistakes in syntax. Keyword stuffing is when you string together long lines of keywords that don’t make much sense in the text. Google notices this and penalizes your SEO value for content that looks like this accordingly.

5. Intent-Based Searches

Google’s most recent algorithm updates have made things far less mechanical than they once were. Now, a user’s search intent matters quite a bit more, and there are a few different forms of intent that people can have when they’re putting a query into Google’s search bar. For example, if someone wants to buy something, they have a transactional intent.

On the other hand, if someone is looking to answer a question, that means that they have an informational intent. Finally, someone can also have a navigational intent, meaning that they want to go to a specific site without entering the URL directly. Know the difference between these intents and choose your keywords accordingly.

6. Lengthen Your Content

Long-form content is growing more and more important over time, and many content creators are hesitant to create it because they’re worried that audience engagement will drop off. However, it’s becoming apparent that more and more of the top ranking articles on Google consist of content that’s around 2000 words.

If you’ve mainly been creating blog posts that hover around the 500 to 1000-word mark, maybe it’s time to branch out into more long-form content. Keep in mind that you need to gauge your visitors’ intent as well. If they’re looking for info, there’s nothing wrong with producing longer pieces of content.

7. Mind Your Site’s Technical Aspects

Failing to take note of your site’s technical health is a crucial mistake that far too many people in the SEO industry commit. It’s important to understand that Google cares just as much about the technical side of your site as they care about the number of keywords that you’re able to include.

If your site loads slowly, your user retention will suffer and you will end up losing visitors and popularity in the eyes of Google. Be sure to perform audits of your site using Ranktracker’s tool to ensure that your site is functioning smoothly.