SEO FOR BEGINNERS
For beginners, let’s talk about search engine optimization (SEO). We hope to assist you in generating more traffic to your website, ranking higher on Google, and simply getting a bigger profit for your business.
We pride ourselves on staying aware of the most up to date SEO strategies and techniques. Our goal is to be the best. We don’t just want to be the best SEO company in Leesburg Florida. We want to be the best in the world! But one step at a time, right?! lol Anyways, let’s get started.
SEO For Beginners: Keywords
First and foremost, we must have an understanding of keywords. What is a keyword? Where do I find my keywords? Where do I use my key words? Who do I tell my keywords about? These are questions we’ve heard many times and you may be asking yourself the same questions right now. That’s ok, because the best SEO company in Leesburg Florida is going to help you answer those questions!
Let’s make it super simple!
3 Simple Steps To Finding Your Keywords For SEO Strategy
1 – Sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. (or a computer with a word document)
2 – Have a conversation with someone who could potentially be a customer for your business.
3 – Ask that person what they would type into a search bar if they were looking for your service or product but didn’t know your business by name.
FOR EXAMPLE: Our name is Gunner Media and people do search for us, but we are looking for those search terms that people use when they don’t know who we are (organic traffic). Maybe they do a search for “Best Web Developer In Leesburg Florida” and they find us because we rank high for that term or phrase.
So, what is a Keyword? In the example above, “Best Web Developer Leesburg Florida” is the keyword. It’s a set of words that a stranger might use in order to find our business. Even though there are multiple words, Google still sees it as a keyword or maybe a better understanding would be a key phrase. But Google doesn’t call it a key phrase, so we’ll keep calling it a keyword for now. If you are still having problems thinking up keywords, try using the Google Keyword Planner.
SEO For Beginners: Content
At this point you should have completed the 3 step exercise to find your keywords. We recommend building a list of at least 10-20 assorted keywords. Then it will be time to start focusing on producing content. This content you create will need to be based around each of the keywords on your list. By content we mean new pages or blog posts on your website. The content you produce will need to contain the keywords that you have selected throughout the text of your businesses blog post.
So if we wanted to show up in Google for “Best Web Developer Leesburg Florida” we would need to create a whole page of content on our website, dedicated to explaining and proving why we are the best web developers in Leesburg Florida.
Does that make sense?
Now think about each of the keywords or “phrases” you would like to show up 1st for on Google. The list can be super long, since every variation is considered a different keyword in Google’s eyes. The goal should be to write a full page of content to be published on your website for every keyword you can think of.
You really shouldn’t ever be board. The more you publish content, the better the chance that you’ll be ranked higher and higher.
Plus, Google looks at your website more often when you update your website or post new content regularly.
SEO For Beginners: Quantity vs Quality
The posts you finally decide to publish on your website can short or very wordy. You might also find it difficult to produce high quality content. That’s when we need to ask ourselves, what is our goal when it comes to our content strategy? Do we need to write a lot and often? Or should we take our time and be super thorough? To us, we say the answer is both.
If you can update your website everyday with a little more content, that’s awesome! But we understand that you may not have a team of people producing content for you. So here is what the best SEO company in Leesburg Florida recommends for your SEO marketing efforts.
SEO Content Recommendations:
1- Publish something new or add to your existing content, at least once a week.
2- When you publish something new, it shouldn’t be any shorter than 300 words.
3- Download a plugin like Yoast SEO to help with the technical stuff
4- When writing your content, don’t leave anything out.
5- Don’t be afraid to publish, you can always go back and edit.
The average Google first page result contains around 2,000 words. We know that 2000 words sounds like a lot, especially when we only recommend a minimum of 300 words in step #2. Here’s the thing, you can write a little bit this week and add a little more next week and the week after, until you get the content where you want it. The main goal is to make sure your content is as thorough as possible.
The best habit to get into is to lay out all the details in a formatted structure and don’t cut any corners! While you may be focusing on a certain keyword for that post, naturally Google will find other keywords to rank you for as they review your content. But even more important than that, you want the reader to walk away having all the information and not have any questions as to what’s next.
If you can make your content that in depth, you will have happy readers, content worth sharing, and much higher chances of ranking on the first page of a search engine. Don’t hold anything back.
SEO For Beginners: Staying Consistent
You might wonder why the best SEO company in Leesburg Florida, (the world), is recommending you to publish new content at least once a week. Before you ask the question, we’re going to answer it! lol
So, the way Google recognizes the different content on your website is through their analytical algorithms. They have these little scanners that they call crawlers or spiders that come check out your website and all the pages on your site. The spiders report back about everything they found and determined what’s new and file everything where they believe it should go in the search engine.
These little crawlers come check out your website every couple weeks or so. But if they start to learn that your website is just sitting there without any updates, your website could be seen as an abandoned site. The spiders will come visit your website less and less often since there really isn’t a need to. This is not what we want for your business’s website.
That’s why we recommend publishing something new each week. This will keep your site fresh and help you provide more content for all your content marketing as a whole. On top of that, you will start to see more and more organic traffic, since you will start to rank higher in search engines. Just remember, it’s not necessary to publish a brand new page or post. Sometimes, just adding a few hundred words to an old post will do the trick.
SEO For Beginners: Reviews Are Gold
Another tip is, you need to try your hardest to get good quality Google reviews published about your company. No matter what industry you are in, encourage your happy customers to leave reviews. Please do not try to fake the reviews either. Google can detect the ip address and will sense that something is up. When Google figures it out, it won’t be pretty.
Dedicate some time to pursuing reviews. Ask for a review from a client after selling them something. After they have had some time to enjoy the product or service, it’s ok to ask again. At the end of a contract would also be a great time to ask for a review.. Pretty much any time in the customer relationship, it is a good time to ask for a review. You just need to ask. Heck, you can even automate the process if you’d like, and we could help with that!
Send your customers a link in order to make it easy on them. The more positive reviews you have, the higher you might rank on Google and the more money you’ll make! This is especially true for your local market, in the maps section, where Google makes recommendations of businesses that might serve you best.
SEO For Beginners: The Waiting Game
Now you’re wondering how long all this is going to take, right? Well, we wouldn’t be the best SEO company in Leesburg Florida if we couldn’t give you a little insight, right? But the answer probably isn’t what you are wanting to hear. Because it’s not super clear and with the data we’ve seen, it will take time.
Research shows that the average time for a website to rank on Google through SEO is between 3-6 months. That’s right, getting to the front page of Google’s results normally takes between 90 to 180 days, depending on the competitiveness of your industry and popularity of your keywords. Sometimes it can even take as much as a year!
It can be frustrating for developers and clients alike. We work together for weeks and do everything right, only to fund that people aren’t finding our website. But don’t worry. In the words of Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses, “All we need is just a little patience.” So sit tight and let Google’s algorithm scour the internet, you just keep pumping out more and more content. It will turn you into an authority.
In order to be ranked high in any Google search, you need to be seen as an authority on the subject you’re looking to be ranked for. The thing is, there isn’t a crystal clear path to being ranked number one. The search engines change their algorithms so often, plus there are at least 200 different factors that google uses to determine where your website will rank. And they don’t share all the secrets.
The main goal is to determine the keywords you want to rank for and start creating and publishing good original content on your website. Publish often and regularly. If you commit to that, you will see results. Not immediately but soon.
So let’s begin!