SEO for beginners: Why a plan and consistency are the key to success

There's no reason to feel bad about needing some sort of "SEO for Dummies" guide. If more professionals admitted that they didn't fully understand SEO, they would have a lot more success with it. SEO is one of the most powerful drivers of traffic, visibility and reputation a business can get. However, it is often misunderstood.

If you want to build a solid digital marketing strategy that has a cumulative effect, SEO is your foundation. This process increases the authority of your website when utilized to its fullest.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engines want to give users the most relevant information and recommend the best user experience.

To achieve this, search engines need to crawl websites and look for a variety of factors to determine if a website is helpful and useful. SEO is the process of optimizing a website and using certain ranking factors to become visible in organic (free) search engine results.

Many assume that SEO is just about using the right keywords. However, SEO is a much more comprehensive process, as there are more than 200 factors involved.

The most important ranking factors include:

• A website built on a well-coded platform with an https SSL certificate that informs users that it is secure.
• A fast loading website to give users a good experience.
• A mobile-friendly website, as most users today use mobile devices.
• Domain age, URL and authority: Search engines value domains with history, a keyword-related name and reputable websites to link to.
• Optimized content: Articles and topics that match the keywords users are actually searching for.
• Technical SEO: Optimization of titles, H1 header tags, subheadings, meta descriptions, image alt tags and page schema markup.
• Usability: This is assessed by Google's RankBrain AI. It measures the rate of people clicking through to visit your site, the bounce rate of people quickly leaving your site on the first page, and the total time spent on your site.
• Internal links and backlinks: Google counts how many other websites link to your website and the authority of those websites. Relevant content is measured by the linking of your content articles.
• Business information, such as name, address and phone number: This includes creating business listings on Google My Business and a Facebook page. It is also important to promote customer reviews on relevant directories that measure usage.

If you approach SEO correctly, search engines will rank your website and content higher in the search results.

The vast majority of traffic happens on the first page of search results. So if you're not listed there, fewer people will find you. Getting on the first page of Google for a select number of keywords is one of the most powerful things you can do for your company's visibility.

SEO can help your business increase its reputation and authority. By appearing more frequently in results, your audience becomes more familiar with your brand. Familiarity builds trust and increases customer loyalty.

Many companies know they need SEO, but go about it the wrong way. It's not uncommon to treat SEO as some sort of "project" where someone optimizes a website and then it's considered done. While it would be nice if SEO was a short-term project, that's not the case.

SEO should be a cohesive part of your overall online presence from the start and not be limited to a few posts that you want to rank for. By integrating SEO into your entire online presence from the start, you can make it clear what your brand is all about.

Your website as a whole needs to be optimized for usability, while content marketing helps to ensure that it is updated regularly. Posts on your website should be SEO-focused from the start so that they are optimized as soon as they are published.

ltsIntegrating SEO from the start means choosing your keywords, type of content, target audience and message when creating new content online. This requires planning and also some dedication to achieve the necessary consistency.

Google is perhaps the search engine that most readily springs to mind - but YouTube, Twitter and even Instagram have evolved into search engines in their own right. This means that content published on these platforms should also be optimized.

An important factor for the search engine ranking is the number and quality of backlinks. A backlink is a hyperlink from another (trustworthy!) website to yours.

It is not difficult to get a backlink, but it can be more difficult to get one from a website that is considered high quality by the search engines. Backlinks from large websites with a good reputation are better for your SEO than your friend's Blog with his five readers.

The easiest way to get quality backlinks is to create outstanding content that users want to share. When search engines can see that many important websites are linking to your business, they know that your business must be worth ranking.

SEO is an ongoing practice that never ends. It's an integral part of everything you create online for your business, and if you treat it as such, you'll see much better results.

While many businesses undertake an SEO project and then drop it, your brand visibility will skyrocket if you dedicate yourself to SEO consistently. SEO is a long-term issue. Your marketing is a constant, and SEO is at the heart of marketing.

Therefore, consider SEO as an integral part of everything your brand does online.