It’s not easy to get website traffic these days without paying for it. There are countless websites on the internet for every topic you can imagine. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd when you’re new.
If you want to start the process of getting traffic, Google is the best place to start. When there are 85,000 searches every second, it makes sense to target organic SEO traffic.
You have a lot to learn to get search engine optimization right. Keep reading to learn six SEO tips for beginners that everyone new to SEO needs to know.
- Get Keyword Research Right
You can’t rank a website if it doesn’t have authority and you only target high-competition keyword phrases. You may get indexed in Google, but you won’t show up anywhere near the front page. If you hope to have a shot at high-competition terms, you’ll need to spend a lot of resources building authority for your website.
You need to prove to Google that your site is worth ranking by targeting lower-competition phrases. Load a Google keyword planner tool to get a list of ideas about website topics. Your goal is to perform a search for low-volume terms that don’t have much competition.
Look for Reddit, Quora, forums, and other user-generated results. These sites ranking on the front page usually means low competition. It won’t be nearly as difficult to rank a well-optimized article that targets those phrases.
- Match User Intent
You used to be able to throw a few keyword phrases on your website and rank for them. Google didn’t have as good a ranking algorithm, so that’s much of what it could do when ranking content. While that made life easier for SEO professionals, it led to many front-page results that didn’t deserve to be there.
Google is much better at learning about content these days. It can figure out the general gist of an article and how well an author covers a topic. On top of that, Google can figure out the searcher’s intent.
That makes matching search intent to your content a critical part of SEO. If someone is looking for informational content, Google doesn’t want to rank a sales page. By matching your content with what searchers expect, you’ll provide a better experience for searchers and improve your chance of ranking.
- Improve the User Experience
Content isn’t the only thing you have to worry about today with SEO. Google wants its users to have a great experience on every website. That won’t happen if you have a poor user experience and a slow website.
The first place to optimize the user experience is page speed. You can’t count on your users having fast internet connections with mobile users. Optimize your website images and website code to make your page sizes as slow as possible.
If you use WordPress, many plugins are available that will do this for you.
The next place to look is the mobile experience. Make sure your website design is responsive and looks great on every device. If someone can’t read your page when they visit on a small screen, they’ll bounce quickly and head to another website.
- Optimize for Featured Snippets
In Google’s quest to provide better information to searchers, they added featured snippets to the front page. These snippets scrape answers to questions on authoritative websites and place them directly on the search results.
While this can hurt the click-through rate for the first search result, it does have an advantage. You don’t need to hold the number one spot on Google to get a featured snippet.
Look at the current featured snippets out there to see what they have in common. If you can replicate them on your website to answer searcher questions, you increase your chance of getting the featured snippet spot.
This is better and more cost-effective than taking the number one spot on Google in many cases.
- Create Internal Links
Google has a limited crawl budget for websites. That isn’t a big deal if you have a small number of pages on your site. However, it becomes a problem when you have a more extensive site.
If you have poor site structure, it’s hard for Google to visit every page you have. Sure, you can create a site map. But it’s hard to Google to make links between your pages and topics if you give it no point of reference.
Internal links help this situation. When you create internal links, you create topic silos on your website. This helps Google crawl your website and learn about your website topics by linking similar topics together.
- Build Backlinks
Even if you put a ton of effort into improving your on-site SEO, it won’t always be enough to rank your website. This is especially true if you have a website in a competitive industry. The sites on the front page have too much authority for an unknown site to rank.
That’s where backlinks help. Authoritative websites have many backlinks that raise their profile on Google. The more links you have from other prominent websites, the more authority your website has.
Many web admins start getting backlinks by guest posting. They reach out to other similar sites and offer content in return for a link. It’s an easy way of getting your first links.
There are many other backlinking methods, so look into your options or consider hiring a business SEO company to help.
There Are Many More SEO Tips for Beginners Out There
There are countless ranking factors to consider when trying to rank on Google, so it’s hard to cover everything in a single article. That means there are more SEO tips for beginners to learn if you want to master SEO. Keep learning all you can about SEO strategy to build a plan to rank your website on the front page of Google.
If you’re interested in learning more tactics that will drive traffic to your website, then head back to the blog to find more digital marketing posts.
