SEO Beginner: I have a website, what’s next?
What to do after you’ve launched your website? The simple answer is SEO.
This SEO Beginner article help you to gain visibility online.
You have your own space on the web, and you are ready to sell products and services online. Not all professionals need a website to trade online; you may have completed your current business activity and created a brochure website. On the contrary, you may have started a whole new online business and looking forward to seeing it thriving.
We’re here to help you out through the following steps of your digital journey for an SEO Beginner.
What is the difference between a brochure and an e-commerce website?
A brochure website will display valuable information to your customers, such as your products or services description, location, team members, and company values and mission. The brochure internet site has the same purpose as a paper leaflet. Most communication agencies, like Ohma Digital, falls into the category of a brochure.
An e-commerce site is a digital space where the customer can complete a purchase online. The online experience can prepare a visit on-site or be completely independent. To some extent, your users can purchase your goods from their cosy home without the need for you to manage a physical store. Most clothing brands such as Nike and Puma will bundle both physical stores and digital presence. Some brands choose to operate with a digital store only or to start with exclusively a digital company. For instance, some software and apps, such as Asana Rebel who deliver yoga-inspired workouts videos and Pony O hair accessories, fall into products available to purchase from your phone or your computer directly to your door.
SEO Beginner – What should I know?
What to do after you’ve launched your internet site?
You need visibility online.
The simple answer is SEO. Getting knowledgeable in what needs to be done when you are a beginner in search engine optimization is crucial whether you carry the work yourself or delegate it to an agency like Ohma.
As an SEO beginner, we will walk you through the essential information you need to get started.
Visibility is key to business
Once you have created your brochure or e-commerce site, the very next thing you wish for your brand is to get visibility and traffic. Online traffic means potential customers. Indeed, having an online presence is just the beginning of an exciting adventure where visibility is key to success.
Your website must be visible for people to find you. You may already know that the first three organic results on Google Search get 75% of the traffic. Being visible for what matters the most to you is essential in getting your company top of mind for your prospects.
SEO for beginners
The very next step for you is getting SEO knowledge. There is no difference in the need for optimization if you have a brochure or e-commerce website. Individual product pages on e-commerce pages are more challenging to optimize primarily because of the lack of content. A content creation strategy powered by a blog and social media helps. But for now, we will discuss organic visibility and content optimization.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the total effort and processes that help to gain visibility online via search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. If you want to read more about SEO exactly and why you need a strategy, read this article.
SEO or Paid Search?
In short, SEO helps your company to be visible sustainably and organically, using long-lasting and qualitative content creation such as a blog, deep industry knowledge and partnership with other brands within your niche. It is slow marketing at the core.
On the contrary, SEA, also called advertising, will boost your ranking artificially as long as you paid for it. It’s fantastic to get a quick boost and is rewarding for businesses with seasonal sales cycles. However, it requires significant investment to work, and once you stop paying, your visibility drops to zero again.
You can promote your blog or site using paid search if you are in a hurry or/and use organic optimization for long-lasting ranking results.
Is your content optimized ?
Paid search is pointless if your content isn’t optimized for your users. All your hard-earned traffic will go to waste without proper actions on-site.
Has your website has been designed with an architecture that makes sense? Is your content optimized for the keywords relevant to you?
Many SEO beginners forgot these crucial two steps.
What is SEO friendly architecture?
Like a house, it does make sense to build your website so that it is easier for your guests to navigate. We feel comfortable when we find what we expect on the pages we look for.
An SEO friendly architecture is understandable for Google bots to crawl. There are some basics rules to follow to facilitate the indexing of your web pages.
We clear the whole fuss around bots, crawling and indexing on our article about Google SEO: Understand Google’s Mission and increase your Online Visibility.
Google will reward web pages that are user-friendly or UX friendly. In a nutshell, when webpages are easy to navigate, the users can follow logical steps, and colours codes are respected, easy to understand.
What are relevant keywords for my niche?
What are relevant keywords for my business, and where to find them?
Moz SEO Keywords Explorer is a fantastic tool, and Answer the public are an excellent free tool for SEO beginners.
Keywords are the most relevant two to three words that appear the most or/and at some key position within a specific webpage. When your design a great user experience in mind, you isolate each page as a whole different experience which covers a particular topic, display a product, or present a service.
Therefore, each page will rank for different keywords. Understanding the dynamic, popularity and competition your face on the internet for keywords is essential to optimize search engines.
How to optimize my content?
Keywords
Not all keywords have the same value. Some are more popular than others. Usually, we distinguish short-tail keywords, which are industry-related terms, general words and cover your most important pages and main topics. On the contrary, long-tail keywords cover a specific topic in much more detail that will direct traffic to a particular page. Both are important.
Let’s assume you are selling personalized phone cases online where people can upload the photo of their pets, family or any design of their choice.
For this company, short-tail keywords will be phone case, apple phone case, Samsung case, best phone case, or a location such as a phone case + city.
Long-tail keywords for phone cases could be personalized birthday phone cases for dad or best-personalized phone cases for people with kids.
Pages optimized for long-tail keywords helps your website to rank higher on less competitive and industry-specific keywords where you have space to build authority.
Internal linking
Having your pages connecting between each other’s are great if it is beneficial for your users. Genuine connections from separate blog or service pages help your users to stay longer and enhance their experience.
Internal linking helps Google bots to classify your website as qualitative for visitors. Your website generates a more significant impact on promoting your website when your web pages connect in a meaningful way.
Make Google Analytics your best friend
If you need to remember, only one thing about SEO is consistency.
Getting Google Analytics connected with your website is an asset if it displays you the correct data. Monitoring your progress and adjust along the way is essential to reach your goals.
When you put in regular work, there is no room for improvement if you can’t monitor your results. Content management has a lot to do with measuring and adjusting.
Once you’ve put in place a content production and management system that works, it’s interesting to watch how your visitors interact with it. You can isolate what’s working well and give more space to this type of content.
For a great introduction to Analytics, the Google Academy offers free courses here.
Should I combine SEO with paid marketing?
Generating traffic is often a combination of direct paid marketing and organic optimization.
Additionally, you can leverage influencer and social media marketing to build awareness of your brand.
It all depends on what time you have to reach your goals, how long you are in business, your size, and your financial capacity. For instance, if your business is a startup, having a significant budget to build brand awareness on various platforms is essential to get market traction early on.
However, it’s still possible to establish your business authority by leveraging only organic tactics. SEO take time, and results last the test of time.
