What is SEO ?

 3.5 billion searches are performed on Google every single day. Seriously, no matter what you do, people are looking for your products and services on Google; cell phone repair shop: 1,700 monthly searches. iPhone charger: 34,000 monthly searches. best smartphone: 41,000 monthly searches. And these search volumes are only for US-based searches. But here’s the thing: Even though there are billions of searches every single day, our recent study shows that 91% of content gets no traffic from Google. So how do you join the other 9% of web pages and start getting free, consistent, and passive traffic from Google? 

If you’re a beginner to SEO, then you’regoing to want to watch this whole tutorial because I’m going to show you how to start attracting customers from the world’s largest search engine.The SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors,and dominate your niche. This tutorial is called “SEO for beginners”because even if you haven’t got the slightest clue what SEO is, you’ll have very clearand easy action items that you can implement into your website right away. So we’ll be covering the most importantthings that you should know to ensure that your website is optimized for search. Let’s get started. 

So what is SEO?

 SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the process of optimizing your websiteand webpages to get free organic traffic from search engines like Google. Think of Google like a filing system in a library. The library has billions of books with hundredsof trillions of pages. So let’s say that you want to find somethingon, “global warming.” Then Google would search through these booksand extract pages that contain your keywords or closely related words. But as I’m sure you know, search resultsaren't returned in any random order. Google tries to return the most relevant resultsfirst by using sophisticated algorithms. And they're so good at this, that most ofus never have to click through to page 2 of the search results. Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work or the exact factors it looks at to rank a webpage, but we do know a lot of the so-called"Google ranking factors," so we are able to make some optimizations. So your job is going to be two-fold: Number 1, we need to make sure that it's easy for search engines to understand what your page is about and create that content that matches what we call, “the searcher’s intent," right? And number 2, we need to show Google and other search engines that it’s ‘worthy’ of ranking. So throughout this, let’s say that I’m a new and budding photographer and I live in India. I’m starting my new business called “Sam photography.” Yup, I’m pretty awesome... but I don’t have any friends, so referrals are out of the question. Alright great. Step 1 is to find relevant keywords that people are searching for and see how these search queries fit into your business. The easiest way to start finding relevant keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. So I would think that a bride or groom looking for some magical wedding photos would search for “wedding photographer in Toronto.” Makes sense, right? So I’ll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool, which is one of our SEO tools that provides rich data on Google searches, and I’ll enter in that search query here. I’ll also change the country to Canada since people in other countries, they probably aren’t looking for a Toronto-based photographer as often. 

Now, I’ll run the search. And you can see that there are only around60 or so monthly searches for this keyword phrase, which is far from exciting. But looking below, you’ll see that the parenttopic for our query is different. The parent topic determines if you can rankfor your target keyword, so the one that we originally entered here, while targeting amore general topic on your page instead. In this case, the parent topic is showingthat more people search for, “toronto wedding photographer,” over “wedding photographer in toronto.” Now, if we scroll to the bottom of the page,you can see the top 10 Google rankings for your target keyword and a bunch of keyword metrics. I’ll just touch on two of them for this video: traffic and keywords. Take a look at these two ranking pages. You can see that they generate well over athousand search visitors every single month and next to that, you’ll see that each pageindividually ranks for hundreds of keywords. If we click on the number of keyword rankingshere, you can see all of the different keywords and the ranking positions in Google search. This is a good thing to do because you alreadyknow that Google is ranking this single page for all of the keywords, so why wouldn’tyou be able to rank for these keywords and maybe even more? Try and remember this part, because we willbe exploring things like keyword usage multiple times throughout this tutorial. Alright, now that we have a list of keywords,it’s time to optimize your pages. In the world of search engine optimization,this is called “on-page SEO.” 

Since we know the keywords that people aresearching for in Google, it gives us clues on the language we should use to let bothGoogle and potential customers know what your page is about. For example, knowing that “Toronto wedding photographer” is a more popular search query than “wedding photographer in Toronto”,that will help us make smarter copywriting decisions. So for your homepage content, you might wantto say, “Hi I’m Sam, a Toronto wedding photographer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” insteadof “Howdy, I’m Sam and I do wedding photos for couples in Toronto.” But I do need to make two things very clear: First, you don’t have to use your exactmatch keyword since Google has gotten pretty smart at understanding what your page is about. And second, it’s very important to notethat you shouldn’t try to trick Google by using keywords where they don’t belong. Your first priority should be to optimizefor people because the last time I checked, robots aren’t going to pay you for your services. Here’s an example of what you shouldn’t do: "I’m a Toronto wedding photographer thatdoes Toronto wedding photography for your Toronto wedding.” This is known as keyword stuffing and longstory short, it does more harm than good. So key takeaway? Don’t do it. So for on-page SEO, I want to pass on 4 verybasic, but important tips that you can use on every page you optimize. First is to optimize your titletags and meta descriptions. When you look at the Google’s search results,you’ll see this part in blue and the text below. The top part is called your title tag and the other part is the meta description. The purpose of these is to entice someoneto click through to your page. And if people are actually clicking throughto your page, then that’s telling Google that your page is likely relevant to the reasonwhy they had searched for the query in the first place, right? And you can see that Google actually evenbolds these keywords and similar keywords within the search results making them stand out. With that in mind, I might create a titlelike, “Award-Winning Toronto Wedding Photographer,” and then my brand name.

 But of course, if you’re going to do somethinglike this, it should be true. Then for the meta description, you can explainin a couple brief sentences what the page is about. But rather than putting a generic descriptionthat everyone else is doing and calling yourself the best, you can put something like: “Sam Oh was rated the Star’s Best TorontoWedding Photographer. He combines creativity with science to capturelife’s happiest day in a million pixels.” Awww...how sweet is that? Now this would make me as a consumer wantto find out who this awesome photographer is. The last part of on-page optimization is themost important and that’s the actual content on the page. For a typical wedding photography home page,I might have some images, a short “about us” or “about me” section, possiblythe services that I provide, and some testimonials from happy brides and grooms. Without over complicating things, you’lllikely want to use your primary keyword phrase in the main headline, often referred to as an H1 tag. And looking at one of the top ranking pages,you’ll see that they did this right here. An example of what you probably shouldn’tbe doing is something like this: hello there. The H1 or heading tag here says, “hellothere” which doesn’t help anyone understand what the page is about. And remember, your job is to help Google bestidentify your page as being relevant to the user’s search query. I’ll go back to the organic keywords reportin Ahrefs to see one of my competitor’s keyword rankings and see if there are anyother ideas that might help Google better understand what my page is about. You can see some other relevant keywords inhere like bridal, photos, and GTA, which stands for the Greater Toronto Area. 

So as you’re writing the copy for your page,you might want to keep these in mind and sprinkle them in where it makes senseand reads naturally to visitors. Alright, so let’s take this Sam PhOHtographyexample one step further. Let’s say that my business was growing,I got a lot more experience under my belt and I found out that I have some mad skillsin areas like landscape, portrait, travel, product photography. So I decided, heck, I’m going to offer those services too! Rather than trying to rank my homepage forkeywords that aren’t exactly related, I could easily create new services pages. So I’d do the same thing by first goingto Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Then I’d type in something like “torontoproduct photographer," and I’ll quickly look at the search volume and see it has 100or so monthly searches in Canada. Then I’ll take a look at the parent topicthat has around 200 searches. And here’s a quick but super interesting side note. With wedding photographers, people seem tobe searching for “Toronto wedding photographer” the most. While people looking for product photographersin Toronto are searching for “product photography Toronto.” So this step is vital to ensure you’re targetingkeywords that will provide you with the most exposure for your pages. So for our services page, we would do thesame thing as we did before with the title tag, meta description, and the content on the page. The last thing you should do is to include yourprimary keyword phrase in the URL of the page. So for a product photography services page,your final URL might look like this: If you’re a Wordpress user, you can justclick here and edit it using hyphens to separate spaces. So in this case, I would change it to product-photography-toronto. A really quick hack you can do is to lookat the top 10 rankings and see how they’ve optimized those pages to rank there. So if we look at the Google search resultsfor, “Toronto product photography,” you can see that some of the pages are keywordstuffing in the title tags and that the meta descriptions are all kind of cheesy or they're truncated.

 Clicking through to this result, you can seethat it’s just a classifieds site, similar to Craigslist, so it’s clearly not optimized. Clicking through to this one, you can seethat they included their keyword phrase in the heading and title tags, but then there’spretty much no content on the rest of the page. And then clicking through to this one here,this one seems to be over optimized for their keyword target. And if I do a ‘find’ for the word “photo”you can see over 110 instances of it on this page, which again, will do moreharm than good in the long run. What you’re seeing here is an opportunityto overtake these search results. Basically, Google has no choice but to choosethe best options from a bad pool of pages. Alright, so by this point, we’ve optimizedour main pages for our different services, and we've covered the basics of on-page SEO. And if you’ve done this for all of yourkey pages, then I can assure you that you are miles ahead of a lot of your competitors. The next part and arguably most importantpiece of ranking high on Google is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO often refers to link building. And link building is the process of gettingother websites to link to your web pages. Basically, links act as votes or other peoplevouching for your website saying: “hey, these people are really good at whatthey do and I trust them enough that I would send my visitors to their website.” It works in a similar way that you would referyour friend to buy a product from whatever store because you’ve tried it, used it, and loved it. In general, the more quality backlinks youcan get from relevant pages, the higher you’ll rank in Google.

 Now I’m putting the emphasis here on theword “quality,” because there are a lot of different types of links you can get fromlike forums, directories, and editorial links to name a few. But if you think about it, a place like aforum where virtually anyone can place a link will likely hold less value than a link from someone else's blog. But to be clear, other types of links willstill hold some kind of value, but probably not as much as links like editorials would. So if you’re focusing on quality, then you’llprobably want to prioritize editorial links. And the main way to get links from other people’sblogs is through something that SEOs often refer to as “outreach.” And outreach is exactly the way it sounds. You’re contacting people and asking them for a link. But you can’t just email someone and be like, “yo! I need a link. Hook it up.” It doesn't work that way. There are a three things that you need inorder to make your outreach campaigns more successful. 1. You need people who are actually interested in the stuff that you do. 2. You need a good reason to contact them. 3. You need a pitch that somehow benefits them. Let’s go through a few examples, shall we? First we need to identify people who are interestedin what you are doing. The most commonsensical one in the contextof link building are websites that have already linked to your competitors. You can find these pages by going to Ahrefs'Site Explorer and entering in a domain or URL.

So I’ll enter in mangostudios.com, who also does wedding photography in Toronto. I’ll also narrow our search down to pages that are linking just to their home page. From here, I can click on the backlinks optionin the left column. And here, I’ll use this filter to narrowdown the backlinks to only links within content, since I mentioned that I want to get someeditorial links. On the left side, you can see the websitesthat linked to the target URL or domain and on the right side, you can see which pagethey linked to and the context of the backlink. Next, let’s click through to this one on"Jaw-Dropping Gorgeous Wedding Flower Ideas." You can see that there are a bunch of picturesof flowers. And hey! I actually have a great one that’s way betterthan all of these. So let’s check that off on our checklistfor successful outreach. We now have a prospect. So I can contact the author, Nicole, and lether know about one of my pictures that was published in some kind of wedding magazine,because it’s that awesome. So this now fulfills checkbox #2. We have a good reason to contact her becausewe have something relevant to her piece. And of course, I’d be giving her rightsto publish my photo, which also checks off #3. As a side note, it doesn’t mean that she’llpublish my photo or give me a link. As a general rule of thumb, the better the‘excuse’ you can come up with to contact the author, the better your chance will beto get the link. Another good reason to contact someone isto offer a guest post.

 Blog owners are always on the hunt for newcontent and since your site is new, you’ll be getting in front of someone else’s audiencein exchange for some of your time and content where you could easily use some watermarked photos that you’ve taken. With guest posts, your reason to contact themis pretty reasonable and you’ll be providing value, which is free content (that shouldbe good), that benefits them and/or their website. The next outreach prospect you can find arebusinesses in a lateral non-competing niche. So as a wedding photographer, you might wantto contact other local flower shops, reception halls and wedding planners. If you look at the “jaw dropping flowers”article, you can see that there are two people mentioned in the article. There’s Mango Studios, which is the sitethat we’re analyzing, as well as an event and design planning company. You can contact these peopleto form meaningful relationships. Just think about it for a second. Your businesses go hand-in-hand and you canpass on referrals to each other, you can link back to each other as a ‘preferred vendor’or link to others’ content in guest posts where it's relevant. And this isn’t limited to just local businesses. This applies to everyone. So, find some solid partners who are on thatsame journey as you in a lateral niche and help each other out. Now with link building, there are numeroustactics and strategies, so if you want to expand your knowledge in this sphere, thenI highly recommend watching our series on link building where you’ll get a full scopeof how to do this effectively. 

Alright! We are on to the last SEO tip that I see alot of beginner’s avoiding. Now, if you have something to sell, settingup your homepage and product/services pages is probably the first thing that you’ll do ordid and for good reason. These are the pages that will directly generateleads and revenue for your business. But here’s the final tip: start blogging. Now, I’m not telling you to write abouthow you changed your storefront sign from red to green. By blogging, I’m referring to providingpractical content that can and will help your prospective customers solve problems. In Dr. Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious:"Why Things Catch On," he shares his research on why content gains popularity and even goes viral. Content that provides “practical value”was one of the key factors to success. People don’t just share funnycat videos or emotional stories. They share things that help others. And the same goes for gaining links. People are more likely to link to your contentif it’s helpful, actionable, and solves a problem. Look at what we do for the Ahrefs blog. We have numerous SEO tools, but we tackledifferent big topics like keyword research and link building. And even if you don’t use our tools, you can gaina ton of value through these monstrous posts. But you’ll see that we include shortcutsor hacks where our tool can make doing SEO a whole lot easier. To further prove my point, if you look atthe “top pages” report inside Site Explorer, you’ll see that the pages that generatethe most search traffic for us, mostly come from our blog articles. 

Blogging lets you reach large audiences. For example, we saw thatToronto wedding photographer had around 900 monthly searches in India. Let’s look up something like “wedding venues Toronto” in Keywords Explorer. You can see that it has around 1,400 monthlysearches in Canada. If you’ve been in the wedding photographybusiness long enough, then you’ve probably done shoots at numerous venues. So you could create a post withhelpful and practical value. For example, I might create an article ofsome of the best venues that I had taken photos at and display pieces frommy portfolio within the blog post. I would also detail pros and cons of eachplace, pricing information, location details, items on their catering menu, or anythingelse that would be genuinely helpful to a person visiting this page. And if you think about it, people usuallybook the venue before the photographer. So there’s a solid chance that after peoplesee some of your stunning watermarked photos, they might look through your portfolio, andcontact you for a quote that can generate more customers for you. 

If you think about it, they may have neverdiscovered you through a different means because they didn’t type in a keyword phrase like“Toronto wedding photographer," or their friends didn't refer you to them. When you’re thinking of these ideas, put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. What would they be looking for and what would help them solve the query? Now, when you’re picking topics, try and stick with ones that provide value to your business. So as a photographer, I would want to almostalways showcase my work because I would be judged by my portfolio. As a software company, we showcase how our tools can help in people’s SEO process because people will buy our tools if they see how it benefits them. As a coffee roastery, you might show them how to make the perfect cup of coffee or an article on how to roast beans. I cannot emphasize enough, how much a blogcan help you boost your SEO efforts. It’s a great way to get ahead of your competitorswho have been in the game for longer than you, but they've been targeting only these‘obvious’ keywords. From here, you can just rinse and repeat thekeyword research process, the on-page optimization tips, and continually build links to yourcontent and articles and start climbing the Google search rankings.