3 Tips for Dipping Your Toes Into SEO – Let’s say you’ve just built your first business website and are learning the ropes of running an online company. You may even have a reasonable budget for your marketing but not be sure where to start. What’s a long-lasting strategy you can use to grow your business online and maintain a high rank on search engines? In a word — well, three words — search engine optimization.
While SEO may be what you’re looking for, at first glance, it may seem an intimidating marketing strategy to invest in. It takes time to learn and understand SEO, and applying it to your online business may take months to show credible results. Given those realities, SEO may not initially seem like a good bet. Yet if you want to be found online, you need it.
Fortunately, there are three simple SEO tips you can begin executing today with little SEO knowledge. They’ll provide a stable foundation to build your business on as you learn and apply more sophisticated SEO tactics.
Table of Contents
1. Create High-Quality Content
High-quality content is content — blog posts, how-to guides, infographics, video, etc. — that readers find educational, useful, accurate, engaging, and relevant. Besides that, it should be content that search engines can crawl and index so your audience can access it on search engines.
One way Google tests for the quality of your content is by using a concept known as EEAT. That acronym stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So how can you use the EEAT to improve the quality of your content?
First, speak from experience. Searchers are often interested in your firsthand experience and count on your opinion and ideas to make decisions. For instance, if you’re writing a long-form content pillar about electric cars, you’ll produce better content if you’ve reviewed several different brands.
Next, demonstrate expertise. An automotive engineer will be better qualified to talk about electric cars than, say, a shoe salesman. In other words, show that you have the knowledge and qualifications to discuss a given topic. This can be demonstrated by writing using the appropriate research, tone, and nuance that suits your target audience.
Authoritativeness is also key in creating high-quality content. Ensure that you build the reputation of your website and content by getting other trusted sources to link to your content. Persuading a popular EV blog to link to your pillar will show you’re a good source of information.
Finally, your content must be trustworthy. Ensure you edit it for accuracy, fact-check your information, cite your sources, and credit its author.
2. Create Content that Matches Your Audience’s Search Intent
Much of the content that exists online fails to capture the user’s search intent. But, what’s that, really? Search intent is the reason someone searches for information online. If you’re just getting started with SEO, understanding the search intent of your target audience can give you a massive boost. It shows you have a deep understanding of who your readers are and what they need.
Understanding search intent can help you plan your content better and optimize it for search engines. Your goal is for target audience members to feel they can get answers to their questions just by reading your content. To achieve this, you must understand the four main types of intent a user may have when searching for information online. These intents are:
- Informational
- Transactional
- Commercial
- Navigational
Readers with an informational intent often include terms like “who,” “how,” and “what” in their search queries. Some of these queries may require a precise answer, for instance, when someone asks Google about the capital city of a country or state. Other queries may require in-depth discussions, like “what EV has the longest range?” Finding queries your target audience needs in-depth information about can be useful to your SEO goals.
Transactional intent refers to queries made by internet users looking to buy items or products. By knowing the pain points of your audience, you can target them more directly, since they’re already invested in making purchases.
Commercial intent is when a user is looking to buy in the near future. It’s similar to transactional, but the user likely requires a bit more research before actually purchasing.
Navigational intent involves searching for a specific website. That’s closely tied to transactional intent because users already know the website they’ve decided to visit.
No matter what you’re offering, understanding how your ideal customer thinks and behaves while using a search engine will help you develop better SEO content.
3. Boost Your SEO Efforts Through PR
Public relations outreach can help improve your SEO by putting your business or brand in front of the right sets of eyeballs. Receiving coverage from a reputable media website can help you create awareness about your business, brands, and products. That way, you get to reach an audience and customers you never had before.
Additionally, appearing in trusted third-party outlets can cause a wave of new traffic to your website. That can have a positive impact on your SEO because it can improve your domain authority, while increasing your conversions and growing your business. You’ll enjoy higher visibility across search engines, social media, and other platforms.
So how can you use PR to improve your SEO? Here are some suggestions:
- Use guest posting to create awareness about your business. Sharing your expertise on someone else’s blog puts you in the spotlight and lets you highlight your products and services to a new audience. It also creates an opportunity to link back to your blog and increase your domain authority.
- Use broken links to boost your backlink profile. By finding blogs and websites with broken outbound links, you can contact their owners and offer to replace the broken links with yours. Provided you do it right, you can increase backlinks to your website and boost your SEO.
Getting Your SEO Feet Wet
For a complete beginner, SEO may seem like a daunting strategy to implement, since you don’t yet understand its intricacies. But don’t let that stop you. Begin your journey to business success by creating high-quality content, satisfying your audience’s search intent, and using PR to boost your SEO.
