With more and more businesses shifting online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people wondering what SEO is about has also steadily gone up. It is important to not go into this blind. So for today’s blog, we’ve decided to inform you about what SEO is, how you can start using it, and what sort of tools you can use for optimising your website.
WHAT IS SEO?
Let us explain it in simple terms. SEO is ‘Search Engine Optimization. Basically, its purpose is to help increase your website’s visibility on search engines (like Google or Bing). This way, more people can find your website online and see your products. If SEO is done right, you can be sure to achieve more sales as well.
HOW DOES SEO WORK?
SEO depends on a lot of factors. The main one most people are familiar with is ‘Keywords’. Each keyword has different rankings.
Keeping things simple, if we had to SEO optimise a website, we will write content that incorporates high ranking keywords. A high ranking keyword can be a popular keyword that your potential customers or target audience are usually searching online on Google.
By researching and identifying the popular keywords that are used online, you can easily incorporate them into your content, and increase your website’s ranking. Seems simple right?
In reality, though, SEO is actually a bit complicated. There are a large number of factors other than keywords that influence your website’s visibility, like the quality of your content and your website optimization.
HOW CAN I START OPTIMISING MY CONTENT FOR SEARCH ENGINES?
Firstly, we need to select and improve the content on the website. Depending on your target market, you need to choose specific keywords that resonate with your audience.
For example, let’s say that you run a bakery selling cakes. You want to target the audience in your local area.
The keyword ‘Cake’ probably ranks the highest because it is the main product that customers are looking for. However, most people don’t just type in cake on Google. Most people online type something along with ‘Cake’.
Since you are targeting the people in your area, you can use keywords like ‘Cake near me’, ‘Cakes (insert state/country)’ or ‘Bakery near me’. These are keywords that are used a lot and have a very high volume usage. This way, more people near you or in the state can find your business online when they search for cakes!
Here are the keyword rankings for cake related search times. Using WordTracker’’s Keyword Research Tool, we can see that the word ‘Cake’ has a search volume of 475K (in the USA). However, the term ‘’Bakery near me’ has nearly 1.2M searches, ‘Birthday cake’ has 273K and ‘Cupcakes’ has 344K searches. If you want to appeal to your target audience, it is important that you incorporate the majority of these search terms into your website, meta description and slug. In order to start optimising content, we use keyword tools to find relevant keywords and add them to the website.
WHAT TOOLS CAN WE USE FOR FINDING RELEVANT KEYWORDS?
Wordtracker
Wordtracker is a simple and easy website to start off your SEO journey.
We find it immensely useful when it comes to finding out relevant keywords. The great thing about Wordtracker is that it is easy to use for beginners, and it’s very easy to understand once you’ve got started with your keyword research.
The website gives you 12 free searches to start off with before you need to sign up for their subscription-based model. Wordtracker shows you the amount of volume each keyword generates, and the competition for each one. Remember to go for the ones with a high keyword volume, cause that’s what people are searching for.
UberSuggest
Other than Wordtracker, I also use Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. The website is a little bit more advanced, but still relatively easy to navigate once you’ve got the hang of it. Neil Patel also provides an SEO analyzer and shows how much your organic traffic is and which countries it comes from.
The website gives you 3 free keyword searches before asking you to sign up for an account and their packages. Ubersuggest is a lot more affordable, with its packages starting from $30/month and going all the way up to $99/month. The base package provides a lot of features intended to grow your SEO traffic.
Moz Keyword Planner
Moz Keyword Planner is also another very popular keyword research tool and is considered by many, to be one of the industry-leading keyword research tools. Moz’s metrics are very detailed, and still simple enough to understand.
The website makes you sign up for an account before limiting you to 10 search queries every month. Their packages start from $99/month and go up to $999/month. This unfortunately means that you will have to sign up for their base package to use its keyword research tool.
If you are a small business starting out, or just got into SEO, we highly recommend the other keyword planners in this article, like Google Keyword Planner.
Google Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner is probably the only free keyword research tool in this list. In order to start using this tool, you need to have a Google account. However, when signing up, Google requests you to create a Google Adwords campaign. There is a way to bypass this, so just follow the steps in this article here.
Google Keyword Planner has some very obvious benefits. Apart from being the best tool for small businesses to start with, there is no limit to the number of keywords you can search up! You can even find the keywords that are used locally. Most of the time, the keywords are refreshed daily.
SEO can be an incredibly complex task. Like we’ve said before, your website ranking depends on a lot of factors. You might have to optimise your website’s architecture, rephrase your meta descriptions and a lot more.
Even if you optimise your keywords, it doesn’t guarantee a spot on the top of the search engine results. But what if we told you that you could rank your website higher than all of your competitors? Sounds interesting right? Our team of experts at createX are there just for this reason. We know exactly what we need to optimise websites due to our past experience and services.
Look at the top right corner of this page. Do you see that ‘Contact’ button? We are literally a click away. Sign up and let us, the experts, help you!