Let’s Get Back to the Basics on SEO

When was the last time you’ve read an article or tutorial from an SEO insider? Truth be told, they can be pretty brutal. Check out this one.

Structured data and machine learning. I’ll give you a minute to digest the details mentioned there.

Let’s be clear: I love the experts at Moz, Search Engine Land, and other SEO expert sites around the web. I also think that, for most businesses and entrepreneurs, they don’t matter all that much. Because if you don’t get the basics of SEO right, you don’t have to bother about the advanced stuff.

Don’t get me wrong: the types of details these experts mention are important. But they don’t really matter if they don’t build on anything. Without those basics, even the best-structured data and most perfectly built-out XML Sitemap won’t do much for your website.

Yes, at some point, as you fight for the top spot on nationally competitive keywords, you’ll have to dust off your technical knowledge. The truth is that most small marketing and solopreneurs never really get there.

To succeed in SEO, you have to make sure your basics are covered.

The good news is that these basics, at their core, are actually pretty simple and intuitive. You don’t have to be a coder to know or follow them. You just need to know where to start.

That’s what I want to help you with in this article. If you’re in charge of a small business, that like many of its peers, is struggling with SEO, start here. Those technical details can always come into play later.

In SEO, Everything Starts and Ends With Your Audience

Allow me to get cheesy for a moment. Search engine optimization, at its core, is really audience optimization. If you start with that fact, you begin to realize how much the basic fundamentals truly matter.

Google’s core goal is to show its users the most relevant content possible based on what they search for. Its livelihood depends on that. If users start finding search results irrelevant, they’ll turn elsewhere. Your SEO strategy needs to account for that singular focus.

Yes, the search engine uses hundreds of factors to determine its rankings. You don’t have to memorize those. All you need to know is that they all come back to relevance and user-friendliness. Internalize that fact, and you’re halfway to successful SEO.

Keyword Research as a Way to Determine Audience Intent

No matter how you slice it, keyword research is essential to SEO success. It helps you clarify your direction and the keywords and phrases you need to focus on. It can also get pretty complex.

Don’t get confused by competitiveness index and commercial intent. Instead, focus on the basics of SEO: use keyword research to determine what your audience is interested in and how they tend to search for it. Tools like Google’s free keyword planner can help you find related keywords based on phrases you type in. It’s a great and simple way to understand audience intent.

The takeaway: SEO is impossible without considering your audience. If you know what type of content they’re interested in and how they search for it, you know where to focus your efforts.

The Ever-Growing Importance of Great (And Relevant) Content

SEO is so important, it spawned content marketing as an entire subcategory of digital marketing. As the concept has become more complex, that importance hasn’t vanished. If anything, it’s only become more prominent.

Again, the individual ranking factors don’t matter much. What matters is that they’re designed to elevate content that is unique, relevant, credible, and well-liked. If your content fits that description, you’re in pretty good shape.

Still, let’s dig in a little more to see what exactly that actually means.

The Simple Truth Behind RankBrain

RankBrain is one of those terms that confuses non-SEO experts. Once you hear things like core algorithm and machine learning, it’s easy to turn away. Distill it down a bit more, and you begin to realize what it actually means.

RankBrain, above all, provides context to searches. It ensures that search results are relevant, even if they don’t match the exact term used. You might search for get food, and the search query goes to restaurant instead. Context clues that get smarter over time as you and others search more tell Google to not just spit out search results for identical keywords, but interpret what you actually mean.

The algorithm goes even further. As explained by Google, it uses past search results to predict what content a user is most likely to click on. It also uses interactions with search results as an indicator of relevance.

I promised not to get technical, and here I am. Still, that point is important, for a simple reason: yes, keyword research is fine. Content relevance, though, matters more. Rather than trying to match an exact keyword, Google’s emphasis is and will continue to be on content your audience actually wants to read.

Yes, Sharing is Still Caring in SEO

Remember those 200 ranking factors? You don’t have to memorize them, but one of them stands out. According to Google, the single most important factor in where you rank is who and how many other websites link to you.

Now, consider how you get those links. If they come from questionable pages, they’ll actually hurt you. Relevance, again, matters. All of that leads to a clear conclusion: in SEO, how many people share your content doesn’t just matter, it’s as close to the end-all-be-all as you could get in this complex of a topic.

How do you get people to share? Surprise: we’re talking about good content again. The more relevant, credible, and unique, the more others will link to it. The more people share, the more others link to it. You need that great content to succeed.

The Takeaway: Based on your audience research, build content your audience actually wants to read, interact with, and share.

Do You Know What Your Content Looks Like on Results Pages?

Add description

So far, it’s been all about you. Let’s turn that around for a second.

Say your audience types in a keyword or phrase that’s relevant to your line of business. Lo and behold, your page shows up among the search results. What does it actually look like? Relevance can only get you so far. If the initial impression isn’t right, your audience will click elsewhere.

This is the point where I want to bring up metadata without making it too technical. Within an SERP (search engine results page), they’ll see a headline, short description, and the link to the page you’re ranking for. Optimize these, and you have a great shot of getting that click:

• Your page title is the headline of the search result. Make sure it’s short enough to fit, but accurately describes your content.
• Your meta description appears as the preview text. Leaving it blank results in the first few lines of content being shown — not always ideal. Instead, sum up the page in a sentence or two (max).
• Your link URL also tends to show up. Shorter is better and if you can get a keyword in there, great.

If you have the time and expertise, dig into the various types of content that might exist on your website, and how Google might feature them. But if you get these basics right, you’re in good shape.

The Takeaway: Always take it back to your audience. If you know what they see when they see your content, you can optimize it for their needs and wants.

Accounting for SEO Trends in an Everyday Fashion

SEO is ever-changing. In fact, one of the reasons it’s so daunting for marketers and entrepreneurs who also have a bunch of other responsibilities is that new trends are constantly popping up and need to be accounted for. Google itself releases countless new algorithm updates every year.

It’s easy to be daunted by that. That shouldn’t mean you need to be discouraged entirely.

Instead, many of the trends tend to actually be pretty intuitive and consistent with other current marketing issues. You’re probably not shocked about any of these:

• Google is placing more importance on how pages look on mobile devices, as more users browse on smartphones and tablets.
• Google is adjusting to more natural language search queries, thanks to the rise of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa.
• Google is leveraging machine learning to try to figure out user intent, rather than just matching keywords one for one.

All of them make intuitive sense. But they tend to be presented in much more technical terms. That’s why, sometimes, it makes sense to just get some internal perspective. If you notice general internet trends, they typically apply to SEO as well. Accounting for them might just mean making sure that your website wasn’t built in 2005, but has received some updates since then.

The Takeaway: Most SEO trends are actually pretty intuitive. Examine your own search behavior and start drawing conclusions. Then, use surface-level research to confirm (or reject) your conclusions and adjust accordingly.

The Simple Question: Are Your SEO Basics in Shape?

Yes, SEO is complex. No, that doesn’t mean you need a PhD just to build a great, search engine-optimized website. Knowing the basics of SEO is half the equation, and gets you well on your way to success. That means:

• Building your entire audience with your audience in mind.
• Focusing on great content that’s relevant, specific, and unique to your audience.
• Understanding what that content looks like from your audience’s perspective.
• Continually improving your website to account for the ways we all use the internet.

Sounds simple, right? Sure, it will still take time and significant effort. But suddenly, it’s become a realistic goal for your website, even if you’re your own marketing team. If your SEO basics are in shape, you can feel confident looking forward to the more complex stuff.

This article was first seen on Jefflizik.com