WHY LEARN SEO? WELL, IT’S ALL ABOUT MAKING YOUR BUSINESS MORE VISIBLE

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about making your website more visible over your competitors when someone uses a search engine like Google. One of the most important SEO basics for beginners is to understand how to improve the quality of potential customers visiting your website. These quality customers are called “qualified traffic”.

There are many search engines around, and all function in similar ways. In this SEO tutorial for beginners, we will refer to Australia’s most popular search engine – Google. However, other search engines use similar ranking processes.

If you were to Google ‘SEO for beginners’, you will see a number of different paid advertisements at the top of your Google search. You can quickly recognise them because they have the word ‘Sponsored’ above the meta title. These results are called Google Ads.

However, SEO specifically targets unpaid traffic, sometimes called ‘organic search’, rather than:

  • Direct traffic – where someone goes straight to your website without having clicked on another link)
  • Paid traffic – where you have placed advertisements online.

Many dedicated SEO companies will tell you all about the wonderful things they can do to help your website appear on page one. However, as a business person, it’s important you understand the jargon so agencies don’t just pull the wool over your eyes.

For this reason, this guide shares some SEO terms for beginners, helping you understand what they mean, where they fit and how to apply them. Many organisations provide an ‘SEO tutorial for beginners’ PDF to download and read at a later time. We prefer that you bookmark this page and keep coming back to it as a point of reference. Please also share this page with other people who you feel would benefit from an SEO guide for beginners.

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Copy + context = good SEO results

All SEO for beginners starts with the written copy that appears on your website. The text on the page provides the following core functions:

  • Informing and educating website users
  • Selling goods and services to website users
  • Telling search engines what you are informing, educating and selling

In short, an SEO campaign is a planned effort to put the right words on a web page to improve its Google rankings over time.

Written copy is at the core of every SEO campaign. Content is literally why the world wide web came into existence. In 1989, the internet was born by allowing content to be written and shared amongst scientists working at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Switzerland.

Writing for website visitors & Google: understanding SEO for beginners

With regards to websites in general, how Google sees your website is as important as what website users see via a browser. With SEO, you need to write for…

  • Website users, and
  • Search engines, such as Google

…in that order.

When someone types in “keywords”, the search engines work by giving users the results they have asked for. Writing for the needs of the website user is the best way to get Google’s attention when it comes to ranking your content higher in SERPs.

It’s important to write useful, compelling content that is built around industry-specific keywords (see below). This is so other people will interact with it by sharing it and promoting it on social media platforms. These actions help to increase the authority and relevance of your content and improve its ranking in Google for the selected keywords.

Start with some detailed keyword research

Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing search terms (words and phrases) that people enter into a search engine to find something. Keyword research is actually a whole dark art in itself.

Since this is SEO basics for beginners, we won’t get bogged down in too much detail.

When thinking about where to start, we recommend that you list the answers to three basic questions. These are:

WHAT DO YOU DO?

From services to qualifications, skills to products – what are you promoting? This will greatly influence the style and content of the writing.

WHERE EXACTLY DO YOU DO IT?

What geographical areas does your business service? It can be anywhere from a suburb to a state to a whole country!

WHAT DO PEOPLE TYPE INTO A SEARCH ENGINE TO FIND BUSINESSES LIKE YOURS?

We can assume that you know who you are targeting – the trick is to now put yourself in their shoes. What would your customers type into Google to find you?

In the context of SEO, we are interested in writing SEO copy for the purposes of ranking within Google’s organic search results. Organic search results are basically the list of links to websites on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Organic search results are not the ads at the top and bottom of the page, but the bit in between. For this process there are many keyword research tools available. Some platforms like Google Ads & Ubersuggest are free, or you could pay for tools such as Moz or KWFinder.

Now that we have a tool, something to sell and the answers to the three basic questions (above), let’s start listing keywords. One of the best ways to do this is to identify the main product or service you want to sell. Place that at the top of the list and see what keyword variations you can come up with. As a tip, use keywords that include your location name (i.e. SEO brisbane).

As an SEO agency, if we were planning to write about our SEO services, these are the keywords we would target:

  • seo
  • seo brisbane
  • brisbane seo company
  • brisbane seo service
  • seo marketing agencies
  • buy seo services
  • seo process
  • gmb seo
  • blogging and seo
  • seo services experts
  • need seo help
  • seo performance check
  • best seo services brisbane
  • seo services for business

ONE LAST THING ABOUT KEYWORDS THAT ANYONE TEACHING SEO FOR BEGINNERS SHOULD ALWAYS MENTION: THERE ARE TWO BASIC CATEGORIES OF KEYWORDS:

  1. Fat head keywords – A ‘fat head keyword’ is a phrase that contains 1 to 3 words. These are generally the broader search terms people use to find what they need.
  2. Long tail keywords – a ‘long-tail keyword’ is a highly specific phrase consisting of 3 or more words.

By example:

  • “SEO” (1 word) is an example of a fat head keyword, whereas
  • “seo services for restaurants” (4 words) is a long tail keyword.

By shortlisting, combining and adding them to web pages, we can create written content that satisfies the needs of different users.

SEO writing for beginners

Producing the best quality content is really the best way to appear at the top of SERPs. Since we were interested in selling SEO services, we will focus on writing sales-focused marketing copy that includes phrases like ‘SEO’, ‘SEO Brisbane’ and ‘Brisbane SEO service’ etc.

We want the text to both rank high in Google and generate leads. We refer to the latter outcome as ‘converting’. In the context of our SEO agency, a conversion would mean that a potential client contacted us to enquire about our services. Therefore, a conversion is simply the action we want a user to take when they visit our website.

Now that we’ve done the keyword research let’s start to write the content. We need to create a sales page focused on selling SEO services to organisations in Brisbane. As you may be a copywriting novice, here are three SEO tips for beginners that we recommend that we use and highly recommend that, you follow:

1. WRITE GREAT HEADINGS

When you are writing the headline, think about the main message that you want to communicate? Focus on that one thing. Explain what it is that you do. Or tell readers how they will benefit from what you have to offer.

Using a keyword in the title will not only help add context to an article, but it will also help the article to rank better in Google’s SERP. This approach is also relevant to your site’s meta titles and meta descriptions.

If you want a better chance at getting your entire headline read, keep your headline to six words and under. Six-word headlines are hard to write, making them rare. If you can’t cut your title down to six words, you can still be aware of how your headline might be read, and you can adjust the phrase to meet your needs.

2. SHORT PARAGRAPHS ONLY

Writing sales copy that actually converts requires a different approach to other forms of writing. Your sales copy needs to be as easy to read as possible, as your readers will likely have a short attention span.

Short sentences are much easier to read than drawn-out passages. That’s why, when writing sales-focused SEO copy, you don’t need to worry about starting a sentence with words like “But” or “And”. These words, known as ’coordinating conjunctions’, can be an effective way to grab your audience’s attention.

3. BE A PROBLEM SOLVER

SEO writing, especially sales copy, needs to be about solving problems. If someone has searched for “I need seo help” then they probably are looking for an organisation such as ours. As an SEO agency we know people will look at multiple websites before they shortlist and connect with the agency that they want to use.

Local SEO

Local search is the use of specialised internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a list of local business listings. At BAMBRICK, we optimise your Google Business Profile (GBP), as it’s one of the best ways to list your business locally (on search engines).

Google is more likely to share your content if it can support and verify the existence of your business. As an SEO agency, we regularly set up and optimise our clients’ GBP profiles, uploading information about their businesses, such as:

  • Business categories
  • Office address
  • Locations serviced
  • Business opening hours
  • A brief description of the business

Beyond sharing your business information, you can also use your GBP to write and publish the following:

  • Short posts,
  • Special offers,
  • Events
  • Products for sale

All of the information on your Google Business Profile is a great way to promote your business and its services.

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Ranking factors

The way search engines understand and rank websites is very complicated. To make sense of Google’s processes, we often say that there are about 200 ‘ranking factors’ that influence a website’s SERP position. While this article so far has been made up entirely of text copy, it is worth noting that Google will sometimes return SERPs that also include images and videos, if it considers these elements to be of value to what a user searched for.

When you publish something – copy, image, or video – search engines grade it against all of the other content produced. Everything you post online should have a clear context, i.e. “buy SEO services” or “SEO services for business”, so when you publish a web page about “SEO services for business”, Google knows to compare and rank it against other web pages that address the same topic.

As we mentioned above, Google has about 200+ (known about) ranking factors. Google itself has never published its ranking factors, so it’s all down to experience, expertise and execution. Over the last 20+ years BAMBRICK’s SEO experts have observed and documented how the information we produce performs. Creating an effective SEO Strategy and monitoring it is the best way to ensure success.

Ranking factors can be split into two groups: on page and off page. To get websites ranking higher in Google SERPs, you need to focus on these two ranking factor groups in equal measure.

ON-PAGE SEO FOR BEGINNERS

On-page SEO is the practice and process involved in optimising the user experience on individual web pages in order to rank them higher and earn more qualified, relevant search engine traffic. On-page refers to both the content (what users see) and HTML source code of a page (what Google sees) that can also be optimised – such as the meta title tags and the meta description.

Learn more about how we practise on-page SEO.

OFF-PAGE SEO

Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within SERPs. The most common form of off-page SEO is often referred to as ‘link building’ or ‘backlinking’. Backlinking is where a link on another website pointing back to your website provides ranking factor signals to Google about the overall authoritativeness of your website.

Read more about how we sell our off-page SEO services.

Glossary: BAMBRICK’s SEO checklist for beginners

Using our glossary below, familiarise yourself with some of the most frequently used terms in the SEO industry.

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): The process of optimising a website’s content, structure, and other elements to improve its visibility on Google and attract organic traffic.
  • Keywords: Words and phrases that users type into search engines to find what they are looking for (like ‘SEO brisbane’). Keywords are also the words and phrases that you use to optimise your web pages for search engines.
  • SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The page displayed by search engines like Google in response to a user’s query, featuring a list of relevant websites, ads, and sometimes special features like snippets.
  • Backlink: A hyperlink from one website to another. Search engines use backlinks as a measure of a site’s authority and relevance.
  • Anchor Text: The clickable text within a hyperlink that provides context about the linked page’s content – find out more about BAMBRICK’s SEO services.
  • Meta Tags: HTML tags that provide information about a webpage to search engines, including the meta title (blue underlined text) and meta description (grey text beneath) that appear in search results.
  • Crawling: The process where search engine bots systematically browse the web to discover and index new and updated content.
  • Google Search Console: A free service from Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s performance and visibility in Google’s search results.
  • Technical SEO: The aspect of SEO that deals with the technical aspects of a website, such as site speed, site structure, crawlability, indexability, mobile-friendliness, security, and more.