The basics of SEO

Transcript

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the basics of SEO.
So Chelsea, SEO complicated, often mis sold by people really bad industry reputation. If I know nothing about SEO, what is it?
SEO is essentially search engine optimization. So it is how you get found on Google, by the people who are searching for what it is that you offer. So really, it’s very simple. But industry standards in the past have just over, organised it completely and put like a barrier up so that the average Joe doesn’t understand it, which isn’t great. But it was a way for a lot of people to make a lot of money very quickly. And there’s industry jokes about like, we can get you to the top of Google for 100 quid and things like that. And so yeah, rightly so to ask, it’s not got the graph greatest of reputations in the industry. But really, it’s something that’s incredibly simple is a few key principles that you can use, that will help you get the most out of any spend that you put into SEM. So the thing that you need to realise is, Google likes good quality content. So anything that helps Google deliver a good website to people that are using their search engine to look for things, is going to go down well in their SEO rankings. So if you look at search engine optimization as a clean slate campaign, so you’ve got a website that sells sell shoes, and you want to get found for people searching, I don’t know, like black clever chelsea boots, if your website is geared towards selling those, and all of your data is set out to that, and you’re creating really good quality content, based around black clever chelsea boots, then you gain to rank quite highly in Google. But it all has to match up. So there’s a lot that you need to consider. But it’s not overly complicated when you take it as a step by step approach. So the first thing is having a good quality website that works well, that is geared up to what it is that you’re putting content out about or selling. So take the shoes example, again, you, you have an E commerce site that sells the shoes, and the page that the product is on has metadata attached to it. So that’s got a tag, and you tag that up as the key word black leather, Chelsea boots. So that tells Google what is on that page, you’ll also have some content written on there about the shoes that you’re selling, you’ll probably have an image on the on the image, you can add an alt tag to it. So it says what’s on the image. So you’d title that image, black clever chelsea boots. And so everything on that page then is marrying up to what it is that you’re actually selling on that page. So in terms of your SEM, it’s it’s all coherent, and it’s all cohesive. So if that page then works really well, and it loads quickly. And all of the data marries up to it, it’s going to start ranking quite highly, you can do things as well to boost your SEO. So if you want to, if you want to get more links back to your page, you can look at people who maybe are stockists. So I know shoe for example, or footasylum, and then try and get them to sell your products as well. And then you’ll get links back to your site and work with influencers on social media and get them to put their links with your link on their own profiles as well. And then the more people that come to your page, the more valuable Google will see it as being so therefore the higher it will rank organically as well.
Great. So what you’re saying about that and getting links back from other websites, how important is that? You know, it sounds quite a technical process.
But it is that absolutely essential as part of the SEO mix? It’s absolutely essential. Yeah. And if you think about it in terms of like, old style marketing before SEO was a thing, I’d say links are effectively like a part of a PR strategy. It’s just about how your site relates to everything else that’s going on in the world. So therefore, the more high quality links you have from trusted websites that come back to your sites, then the higher your authority will be. So Page Authority is quite a big thing that Google uses to Essentially, it should trustworthiness ranking. So if you’re a trustworthy page, then you’re going to rank higher. And then you’ll also sit higher in Google. And links are really a, they’re an integral part of building that authenticity score up.
So we’re talking about links and inbound links, can can getting a link, a link you’ve not asked for, let’s say, for example, can that affect your website if they’ve got a poor domain authority and a poor ranking?
Yeah, so it can affect it. So, for example, this is, this is why SEO doesn’t have a great reputation. Because back in the day, there was a lot of black hat SEO techniques where people were just, they create websites or like, dodgy directories, and just stuff them with links to random websites. And then they’d charge people to have their link on this website and Google cottoned on to that pretty quickly and saw that there was like, no, no context, no context around these directories. So it then started reaching their authority scores pretty low. So anyone who’s got like existing links from dodgy directories from back in the day, when they paid the 30 quid to get them on the top of Google, it’s, it’s gonna be damaging your site now, because it doesn’t align with Google’s ethos of marrying people up with good quality content. But the good thing is, you can disavow those links. So you can break ties with any bad links that you have from back in the past. And you just need to know how to do it. And you can do it through Google itself. And, or you could look at the directories and ask people to take them out of that
was interesting. So basically, these bad backlinks could be dragging the web your own website down, and you may even don’t even realise that’s what’s happening.
Yeah, it’s just like reputation management, really. So for example, if you had like a strategic partnership with a company once, and then that company did something bad. And you kind of tarred with the same brush, and that’s the way that Google would look at it.
Right? Okay, that’s quite interesting. And so how long would it take? If I’ve got a new website, and I want to sell my chelsea boots to get to page one of Google?
It’s kind of like the How long’s a piece of string question. It’s always going to be a long game with SEO. And it depends on a lot of different things. So it depends on your competitors, their domain authority score, what their SEO strategy is. But one really good thing about SEO is, it’s really good for competitor analysis, because you can literally go on to your competitors websites and view their page source and look at what keywords they’re using. If it’s not already apparent in the content anyway, scroll over their images, and it shows your alt tags are using on the images. So you can see what keywords they’re going after. And it might just be that you need to go after slightly different keywords so that you’re not competing directly, or you think, you know, actually, like I can take these guys like give me a few months, and my my ranking for this keyword will be higher. But it just depends on how you want to incorporate it into your strategy.
So from from we’re discussing SEO, what’s it actually made up of? You mentioned things like all tags, and meta tags, can you can you actually list all the things out for the listeners? So we can, we can, we can let them know of all the things that you can do for SEO that aren’t just image tags, for example.
So we’ve got image tags, you’ve got metadata, which is kind of like your off page SEO. So it’s kind of like the focus keywords that people use them? What shows up actually on the page of Google and how they should essentially, like if you were writing an index, what keyword would you use for people to notice that and then go to it quite quickly. And then you’ve got like slugs as well. So URL, slugs that also help with that. And then on page SEO as well. So making sure that you actually talk about the key words on the page that you are kept like keyword in up with that data. But then you’ve also got less intangible things as well like PageSpeed, like your content marketing strategy and having a dynamic page that is updated regularly. And then yeah, links to like favourable sources.
So it can actually be extremely complex unless you tie it all together with a good plan. So So from an SEO perspective, I know that a lot of people do their own basic SEO With the keywords when they’re writing content, or page titles and alt tags, these are some things that we encourage our clients to do to know the basics really. And then I think after that, like the phase two of SEO really would be ideal to get an agency with somebody who’s a marketing manager, like yourself to tie it all together to make sure it’s consistent to make sure you’re ticking all the boxes, doesn’t it seems complex to the, to the end user in a way, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be long to know what you’re selling and what your key products are. We could tie it up into a marketing campaign.
Yeah, definitely. And I think as well, it’s, especially for larger e commerce stores. If he just going through and putting in like the data in for each individual page, you’re gonna have quite a sporadic SEO strategy. Whereas like if you actually have someone that can look at it objectively, who also has like an in depth understanding of your brand and where your brand wants to go, in terms of like the brand growth strategy, they can then tie in your kind of minor keywords for your products with like the more kind of major ones that you want your brand to be known for in the long run.
Thank you for your time today. If anybody wants any more information has any questions about some of the SEO things we’ve discussed today? Please drop us an email at Hello So marketing calm