An introduction to the basics of SEO for beginners

SEO or search engine optimisation is a term you may be familiar with if you have a website. However, not everyone knows what it is or how it can benefit your business. Fear not, we’re here to provide an introduction to the basics of SEO for beginners.

What is SEO?

A woman pointing to a tablet on a table with SEO related words displayed in a bubble diagram

SEO (or search engine optimisation) is a digital marketing strategy that involves increasing your website’s discoverability in search engine rankings. As online searches continue to grow, improving your rankings is a crucial marketing strategy that cannot be ignored.

There are around 8.5 billion searches on Google every day, with a person making an average of 3 or 4 searches per day, according to Textmetrics. The main reasons people use search engines is to find answers to a problem they are experiencing or to look up a business.

But with fierce competition in search engine rankings, it can be difficult to get your business noticed. This is why it’s vital to have a good SEO strategy.

While there are other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, Google accounts for around 90% of all online searches (as of August 2024). While you shouldn’t ignore other search engines, our guide will focus on Google due to its large market share.

Search rankings play a crucial role in determining the success of your SEO efforts as higher search rankings receive the majority of clicks. The top-ranking position of organic search results will generally receive 39.8% of clicks from all search users.

As the rankings lower, so too does the click rate. The second organic position receives 18.7%, followed by 10.2% for the third, and 7.4% for the fourth. Unless you are achieving a top-ten ranking, chances are no one will be able to find your website. Data from FirstPageSage.

Organic search results refer to unpaid results that are relevant to the user’s search query. These display after sponsored or paid ads which are distinguished by the presence of the “Sponsored” tag at the top of paid ads, as shown below:

Paid “sponsored” result:

An example of sponsored paid results on Google

Organic unpaid listings:

An example of organic unpaid results on Google

What are the benefits of SEO?

We’ve already mentioned that SEO is crucial for increasing your discoverability and increasing visitors to your site. However, there are many more benefits to SEO that we haven’t mentioned yet, including:

  • Boosts your business credibility
  • Low cost with high ROI potential
  • Promotes your company 24/7
  • Grows your brand awareness
  • Greater conversions
  • Targets the entire marketing funnel
  • Improves the user experience
  • Provides a long-term marketing strategy

How do search engines work?

One crucial element of understanding the basics of SEO is knowing how search engines work to find and rank your website. For your website to rank within the search results, your website needs to be discoverable. This means search engines can find and crawl your website.

Ensuring your website is discoverable will allow the search engines to do their job. This involves 3 steps or stages:

  1. Crawling – search engine crawlers scour the Internet to find websites for indexing or reindexing. These crawlers read the code and written content of each web page they find.
  2. Indexing – once a crawler has discovered and crawled a page, all the content and pages discovered need to be stored and organised.
  3. Ranking – only after a webpage has been indexed does it stand a chance of ranking. Based on the search engine’s algorithm and how well your content addresses a search query will determine its ranking.

Links play a crucial role during the crawling stage as this is how search engine crawlers navigate from site to site discovering new content. From using links to navigate the web, crawlers can add a wealth of content to the index, including images, videos, PDFs, and more.

How to create high-quality content?

A person holding a cup of coffee and a computer with content marketing icons displayed on the screen

Once you’ve understood the process of how search engines crawl, index, and rank content, it’s time to begin exploring how you can create content that will rank highly. Understanding the needs of your customers will put you in a strong position to achieve this.

Search engine rankings display content in order of relevance to the search query. Google has a complex algorithm that determines rankings based on many factors.

While we don’t know the exact algorithm, some of these factors include:

  • High-quality content that is informative and relevant
  • Backlinks from other high-quality websites
  • Technical aspects of a website, including user experience, speed, mobile-friendliness
  • Keyword optimisation and using relevant keywords in content
  • Schema mark-up and using structured data to help search engines better understand a page

It’s important to note that links and high-quality content are the two most important ranking factors in Google’s algorithms. As a result, understanding how to create high-quality content that appeals to the needs of searches is another crucial element of SEO.

Keyword research

Close-up of a magnifying glass over keyword

The first step in creating high-quality content is keyword research. Keywords refer to the idea or topic that each web page is about and will consist of the words or phrases people enter in search engines.

Every page on your site, whether that’s a product page, blog post, or the homepage, needs to be optimised for a keyword. These keywords also need to align with those that users are searching for. To discover this, you need to carry out keyword research.

Keyword research enables you to discover the right keywords to optimise your web pages for, to help them appear in relevant search queries. Doing so will help drive traffic to your site and increase the number of potential customers.

A few factors should influence your choice of keywords including:

  • Keyword relevance (how relevant the keyword is to your business and content)
  • Search volume (how many searches this keyword gets per month)
  • Keyword difficulty (the percentage difficulty of ranking highly)
  • Intent (the user’s search intent, such as informational or commercial)

Buyer personas

4 wooden blocks with black persona silhouettes on each, one silhouette is green with a target around it

Alongside conducting keyword research, you also need to have a solid understanding of your potential customers. This will help you create high-quality content for a keyword that is meaningful, relevant, and useful.

Conducting buyer personas is the best way to determine what content will appeal to your target customers. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on research and data. As such, you are given a deeper understanding of your customer’s needs and pain points.

This allows you to create targeted content that addresses these needs and pain points. This will help attract customers and keep them interested. By providing solutions to customers’ pain points, you are more likely to build more meaningful relationships.

The main 3 elements of SEO

A diagram depicting the 3 main elements of SEO; on-site, off-site, and technical optimisation

When it comes to creating an effective SEO strategy, you need to also focus on the key elements of SEO. While creating high-quality that appeal to your customers is a top-ranking factor, it’s not the only factor. There are 3 main elements of SEO:

On-site optimisation

The first element of SEO is on-site optimisation. This refers to any SEO tasks you carry out on your website in a bid to improve your ranking potential. On-site (or on-page) SEO includes many tasks that seek to optimise pages for both users and search engines.

We’ve already covered some factors that come under on-site optimisation, such as keyword research and site content. However, many more elements can be optimised as part of on-site optimisation, including:

  • Metadata optimisation, e.g. title tags, meta descriptions
  • Content hierarchy, e.g. headings and subheadings
  • Internal linking
  • Page speed optimisation
  • URLs and visual content

Off-site optimisation

Off-site optimisation is another element of SEO that focuses on any optimisation tasks away from your website. These factors focus primarily on boosting your website authority in a bid to strengthen your credibility and ranking potential.

Link building, which involves obtaining links from third-party sites, is the most widely known off-site optimisation technique. However, others should also be considered:

  • Social media
  • Local SEO
  • Guest blogs
  • Public relations
  • Influencer marketing

Technical optimisation

The third element of SEO is technical optimisation, which, unlike the other two elements, only focuses on search engines. Despite this, technical optimisation is equally important as it improves the crawlability of your site and minimises technical issues.

Technical optimisation also takes place on your site but focuses on ‘under the bonnet’ elements of the website. Optimising certain elements helps improve the discoverability, crawlability, and indexing of your site. Optimising elements of technical optimisation include:

  • Schema markup
  • Mobile responsive/mobile-friendly
  • Canonicalisation
  • Web & URL structure
  • XML Sitemap & Robots.txt
  • Broken links
  • HTTPS

Link building

A notebook lying open on a table displaying link building and a link chain

Creating high-quality content is one of the top Google ranking factors. The other is links. Having a strong backlink profile is vital for boosting your SEO performance. When it comes to creating an effective link-building strategy, there are 3 types of links you need to understand:

  • Internal links – a link that points to another page on your website.
  • Inbound links – a link from an external site that directs to your site.
  • Outbound links – a link from your site that directs to an external site.

An effective linking strategy needs to incorporate all 3 types of links. However, link building primarily focuses on gaining inbound links to strengthen your backlink profile. The more links you gain from high-quality and authoritative sites will help strengthen your website authority.

The higher your authority, the greater your ranking potential. Each quality backlink acts as a quality signal to search engines that your content is valuable, credible, and worth ranking highly. The more quality backlinks you obtain, the better.

There are several methods you can use to gain high-quality backlinks, including:

It’s also important to note that links can be do follow or no follow. Do follow links pass on link juice and authority the linking site. No follow links, on the other hand, do not. When a link is marked as no follow, it tells search engines you are removing your endorsement of that site meaning you don’t receive any link juice or authority.

Whatever the link, it’s always crucial to ensure that it uses clear, relevant and descriptive anchor text that clearly outlines what the link is about. This makes it clear to both users and search engines the link contents. Avoid reusing the same anchor for multiple links though as this can appear as manipulative to Google.

Black hat SEO

A man in a black hoody covering his face sitting at a computer

Many times, people try to manipulate or influence search engine rankings through unscrupulous and shady methods. Black hat SEO, as it’s referred to, involves deliberately going against search engine guidelines for improved ranking.

Often, these tactics are discovered by search engines and lead to a penalty action. Penalty actions usually involve limiting a site’s ranking to a very low position or temporarily removing sites altogether. Continually breaking the rules can see your website permanently removed.

Someone entering the world of SEO needs to be mindful of black hat SEO to avoid accidentally making a mistake. Otherwise, your SEO efforts will go to waste as your rankings take a massive dive due to a penalty.

Black hat tactics can vary but often include:

  • Keyword stuffing (this is a common tactic that involves reusing a keyword extensively throughout a piece of content).
  • Cloaking (either by misleading search engines with different content than a user sees or hiding elements on a page).
  • Private link networks (a website that exists for the sole purpose of providing backlinks to other sites).
  • Sneaky redirects (sending a user to a different URL than the one they originally clicked).
  • Low-quality or spam content that provides no relevance or usefulness to searchers’ query (this typically involves content scraping from other sites).
  • Paid links (Google has a strict policy against buying and selling links as these often act to manipulate PageRank).
  • Abusing structured data by including misleading or inaccurate information.

There are many more black-hat tactics, but these are the main ones. Make sure when maintaining an SEO strategy, you steer clear of these unethical practices so that your rankings don’t suffer.

SEO is a long-term strategy that takes time to effectively implement. While it can take time to see the results of your efforts, the long-term benefits of an effective SEO can be highly beneficial for businesses of any size. Whether you are a new business or an already established one, you can greatly boost your online presence and success by choosing to implement an SEO strategy. We hope our introduction to the basics sets you on the right track for growing your business online.