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SEO For Beginners: A Basic Search Engine Optimization Tutorial for Higher Google Rankings - YouTube
Channel: Ahrefs
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3.5 billion searches are performed
on Google every single day.
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Seriously, no matter what you do, people are
looking for your products and services on Google;
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cell phone repair shop: 1,700 monthly searches.
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iphone charger: 34,000 monthly searches.
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best smartphone: 41,000 monthly searches.
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And these search volumes are
only for US based searches.
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But hereâs the thing:
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Even though there are billions of searches
every single day, our recent study shows that
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91% of content gets no traffic from Google.
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So how do you join the other 9% of web pages
and start getting free, consistent, and passive
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traffic from Google?
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If youâre a beginner to SEO, then youâre
going to want to watch this whole tutorial
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because Iâm going to show you how to
start attracting customers from the
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worldâs
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largest
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search engine.
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Stay tuned.
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[Music]
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Whatâs up everyone, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs,
the SEO tool that helps you grow your search
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traffic, research your competitors,
and dominate your niche.
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This tutorial is called âSEO for beginnersâ
because even if you havenât got the slightest
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clue what SEO is, youâll have very clear
and easy action items that you can implement
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into your website right away.
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So weâll be covering the most important
things that you should know to ensure that
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your website is optimized for search.
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Letâs get started.
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So what is SEO?
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SEO stands for search engine optimization.
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Itâs the process of optimizing your website
and webpages to get free organic traffic from
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search engines like Google.
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Think of Google like a filing system in a library.
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The library has billions of books with hundreds
of trillions of pages.
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So letâs say that you want to find something
on, âglobal warming.â
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Then Google would search through these books
and extract pages that contain your keywords
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or closely related words.
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But as Iâm sure you know, search results
aren't returned in any random order.
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Google tries to return the most relevant results
first by using sophisticated algorithms.
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And they're so good at this, that most of
us never have to click through to page 2 of
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the search results.
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Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms
work or the exact factors it looks at to rank
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a webpage, but we do know a lot of the so-called
"Google ranking factors," so we are able to
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make some optimizations.
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So your job is going to be two-fold:
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Number 1, we need to make sure that it's easy
for search engines to understand what your
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page is about and create that content that
matches what we call, âthe searcherâs intent," right?
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And number 2, we need to show Google and
other search engines that itâs âworthyâ of ranking.
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So throughout this tutorial, letâs say that
Iâm a new and budding photographer and I
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live in Toronto, Canada.
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Iâm starting my new wedding photography
business called âSam PhOHtography.â
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Yup, Iâm pretty awesome...
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but I donât have any friends, so referrals
are out of the question.
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Alright great.
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Step 1 is to find relevant keywords that people
are searching for and see how these search
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queries fit into your business.
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The easiest way to start finding relevant
keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of
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a potential customer.
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So I would think that a bride or groom looking
for some magical wedding photos would search
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for âwedding photographer in Toronto.â
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Makes sense, right?
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So Iâll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer
tool, which is one of our SEO tools that provides
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rich data on Google searches, and Iâll enter
in that search query here.
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Iâll also change the country to Canada since
people in other countries, they probably
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arenât looking for a Toronto
based photographer as often.
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Now, Iâll run the search.
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And you can see that there are only around
60 or so monthly searches for this keyword
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phrase, which is far from exciting.
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But looking below, youâll see that the parent
topic for our query is different.
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The parent topic determines if you can rank
for your target keyword, so the one that we
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originally entered here, while targeting a
more general topic on your page instead.
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In this case, the parent topic is showing
that more people search for, âtoronto wedding
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photographer,â over âwedding photographer in toronto.â
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Now, if we scroll to the bottom of the page,
you can see the top 10 Google rankings for
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your target keyword and a bunch of keyword metrics.
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Iâll just touch on two of them for this video:
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traffic and keywords.
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Take a look at these two ranking pages.
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You can see that they generate well over a
thousand search visitors every single month
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and next to that, youâll see that each page
individually ranks for hundreds of keywords.
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If we click on the number of keyword rankings
here, you can see all of the different keywords
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and the ranking positions in Google search.
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This is a good thing to do because you already
know that Google is ranking this single page
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for all of the keywords, so why wouldnât
you be able to rank for these keywords and
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maybe even more?
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Try and remember this part, because we will
be exploring things like keyword usage multiple
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times throughout this tutorial.
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Alright, now that we have a list of keywords,
itâs time to optimize your pages.
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In the world of search engine optimization,
this is called âon-page SEO.â
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Since we know the keywords that people are
searching for in Google, it gives us clues
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on the language we should use to let both
Google and potential customers know what your
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page is about.
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For example, knowing that âtoronto wedding
photographerâ is a more popular search query
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than âwedding photographer in Torontoâ,
that will help us make smarter copywriting
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decisions.
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So for your homepage content, you might want
to say, âHi Iâm Sam, a Toronto wedding
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photographer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,â instead
of âHowdy, Iâm Sam and I do wedding photos
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for couples in Toronto.â
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But I do need to make two things very clear:
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First, you donât have to use your exact
match keyword since Google has gotten pretty
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smart at understanding what your page is about.
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And second, itâs very important to note
that you shouldnât try to trick Google by
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using keywords where they donât belong.
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Your first priority should be to optimize
for people because the last time I checked,
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robots arenât going to pay you for your services.
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Hereâs an example of what you shouldnât do:
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"Iâm a Toronto wedding photographer that
does Toronto wedding photography for your
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Toronto wedding.â
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This is known as keyword stuffing and long
story short, it does more harm than good.
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So key takeaway?
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Donât do it.
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So for on-page SEO, I want to pass on 4 very
basic, but important tips that you can use
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on every page you optimize.
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First is to optimize your title
tags and meta descriptions.
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When you look at the Googleâs search results,
youâll see this part in blue and the text
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below.
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The top part is called your title tag and
the other part is the meta description.
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The purpose of these is to entice someone
to click through to your page.
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And if people are actually clicking through
to your page, then thatâs telling Google
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that your page is likely relevant to the reason
why they had searched for the query in the
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first place, right?
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And you can see that Google actually even
bolds these keywords and similar keywords
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within the search results making them stand out.
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With that in mind, I might create a title
like, âAward-Winning Toronto Wedding Photographer,â
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and then my brand name.
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But of course, if youâre going to do something
like this, it should be true.
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Then for the meta description, you can explain
in a couple brief sentences what the page
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is about.
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But rather than putting a generic description
that everyone else is doing and calling yourself
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the best, you can put something like:
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âSam Oh was rated the Starâs Best Toronto
Wedding Photographer.
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He combines creativity with science to capture
lifeâs happiest day in a million pixels.â
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Awww...how sweet is that?
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Now this would make me as a consumer want
to find out who this awesome photographer is.
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The last part of on-page optimization is the
most important and thatâs the actual content
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on the page.
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For a typical wedding photography home page,
I might have some images, a short âabout
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usâ or âabout meâ section, possibly
the services that I provide, and some testimonials
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from happy brides and grooms.
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Without over complicating things, youâll
likely want to use your primary keyword phrase
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in the main headline, often referred to as an H1 tag.
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And looking at one of the top ranking pages,
youâll see that they did this right here.
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An example of what you probably shouldnât
be doing is something like this:
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hello there.
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The H1 or heading tag here says, âhello
thereâ which doesnât help anyone understand
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what the page is about.
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And remember, your job is to help Google best
identify your page as being relevant to the
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userâs search query.
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Iâll go back to the organic keywords report
in Ahrefs to see one of my competitorâs
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keyword rankings and see if there are any
other ideas that might help Google better
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understand what my page is about.
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You can see some other relevant keywords in
here like bridal, photos, and GTA, which stands
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for the Greater Toronto Area.
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So as youâre writing the copy for your page,
you might want to keep these in mind and sprinkle
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them in where it makes sense
and reads naturally to visitors.
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Alright, so letâs take this Sam PhOHtography
example one step further.
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Letâs say that my business was growing,
I got a lot more experience under my belt
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and I found out that I have some mad skills
in areas like landscape, portrait, travel,
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product photography.
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So I decided, heck, Iâm going to offer those services too!
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Rather than trying to rank my homepage for
keywords that arenât exactly related, I
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could easily create new services pages.
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So Iâd do the same thing by first going
to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
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Then Iâd type in something like âtoronto
product photographer," and Iâll quickly
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look at the search volume and see it has 100
or so monthly searches in Canada.
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Then Iâll take a look at the parent topic
that has around 200 searches.
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And hereâs a quick but super interesting side note.
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With wedding photographers, people seem to
be searching for âToronto wedding photographerâ
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the most.
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While people looking for product photographers
in Toronto are searching for âproduct photography
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Toronto.â
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So this step is vital to ensure youâre targeting
keywords that will provide you with the most
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exposure for your pages.
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So for our services page, we would do the
same thing as we did before with the title
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tag, meta description, and the content on the page.
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The last thing you should do is to include your
primary keyword phrase in the URL of the page.
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So for a product photography services page,
your final URL might look like this:
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If youâre a Wordpress user, you can just
click here and edit it using hyphens to separate
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spaces.
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So in this case, I would change it to product-photography-toronto.
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A really quick hack you can do is to look
at the top 10 rankings and see how theyâve
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optimized those pages to rank there.
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So if we look at the Google search results
for, âToronto product photography,â you
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can see that some of the pages are keyword
stuffing in the title tags and that the meta
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descriptions are all kind of cheesy or they're truncated.
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Clicking through to this result, you can see
that itâs just a classifieds site, similar
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to Craigslist, so itâs clearly not optimized.
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Clicking through to this one, you can see
that they included their keyword phrase in
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the heading and title tags, but then thereâs
pretty much no content on the rest of the page.
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And then clicking through to this one here,
this one seems to be over optimized for their
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keyword target.
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And if I do a âfindâ for the word âphotoâ
you can see over 110 instances of it on this
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page, which again, will do more
harm than good in the long run.
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What youâre seeing here is an opportunity
to overtake these search results.
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Basically, Google has no choice but to choose
the best options from a bad pool of pages.
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Alright, so by this point, weâve optimized
our main pages for our different services,
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and we've covered the basics of on-page SEO.
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And if youâve done this for all of your
key pages, then I can assure you that you
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are miles ahead of a lot of your competitors.
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The next part and arguably most important
piece of ranking high on Google is off-page
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SEO.
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Off-page SEO often refers to link building.
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And link building is the process of getting
other websites to link to your web pages.
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Basically, links act as votes or other people
vouching for your website saying:
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âhey, these people are really good at what
they do and I trust them enough that I would
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send my visitors to their website.â
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It works in a similar way that you would refer
your friend to buy a product from whatever
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store because youâve tried it, used it, and loved it.
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In general, the more quality backlinks you
can get from relevant pages, the higher youâll
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rank in Google.
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Now Iâm putting the emphasis here on the
word âquality,â because there are a lot
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of different types of links you can get from
like forums, directories, and editorial links
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to name a few.
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But if you think about it, a place like a
forum where virtually anyone can place a link
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will likely hold less value than a link from
someone else's blog.
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But to be clear, other types of links will
still hold some kind of value, but probably
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not as much as links like editorials would.
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So if youâre focusing on quality, then youâll
probably want to prioritize editorial links.
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And the main way to get links from other peopleâs
blogs is through something that SEOs often
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refer to as âoutreach.â
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And outreach is exactly the way it sounds.
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Youâre contacting people and asking them for a link.
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But you canât just email someone and be like, âyo!
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I need a link.
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Hook it up.â
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It doesn't work that way.
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There are a three things that you need in
order to make your outreach campaigns more
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successful.
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1. You need people who are actually
interested in the stuff that you do.
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2. You need a good reason to contact them.
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3. You need a pitch that somehow benefits them.
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Letâs go through a few examples, shall we?
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First we need to identify people who are interested
in what you are doing.
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The most commonsensical one in the context
of link building are websites that have already
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linked to your competitors.
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You can find these pages by going to Ahrefs'
Site Explorer and entering in a domain or URL.
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So Iâll enter in mangostudios.com, who also
does wedding photography in Toronto.
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Iâll also narrow our search down to pages
that are linking just to their home page.
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From here, I can click on the backlinks option
in the left column.
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And here, Iâll use this filter to narrow
down the backlinks to only links within content,
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since I mentioned that I want to get some
editorial links.
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On the left side, you can see the websites
that linked to the target URL or domain and
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on the right side, you can see which page
they linked to and the context of the backlink.
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Next, letâs click through to this one on
"Jaw-Dropping Gorgeous Wedding Flower Ideas."
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You can see that there are a bunch of pictures
of flowers.
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And hey!
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I actually have a great one thatâs way better
than all of these.
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So letâs check that off on our checklist
for successful outreach.
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We now have a prospect.
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So I can contact the author, Nicole, and let
her know about one of my pictures that was
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published in some kind of wedding magazine,
because itâs that awesome.
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So this now fulfills checkbox #2.
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We have a good reason to contact her because
we have something relevant to her piece.
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And of course, Iâd be giving her rights
to publish my photo, which also checks off
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#3.
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As a side note, it doesnât mean that sheâll
publish my photo or give me a link.
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As a general rule of thumb, the better the
âexcuseâ you can come up with to contact
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the author, the better your chance will be
to get the link.
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Another good reason to contact someone is
to offer a guest post.
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Blog owners are always on the hunt for new
content and since your site is new, youâll
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be getting in front of someone elseâs audience
in exchange for some of your time and content
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where you could easily use some watermarked
photos that youâve taken.
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With guest posts, your reason to contact them
is pretty reasonable and youâll be providing
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value, which is free content (that should
be good), that benefits them and/or their
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website.
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The next outreach prospect you can find are
businesses in a lateral non-competing niche.
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So as a wedding photographer, you might want
to contact other local flower shops, reception
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halls and wedding planners.
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If you look at the âjaw dropping flowersâ
article, you can see that there are two people
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mentioned in the article.
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Thereâs Mango Studios, which is the site
that weâre analyzing, as well as an event
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and design planning company.
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You can contact these people
to form meaningful relationships.
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Just think about it for a second.
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Your businesses go hand-in-hand and you can
pass on referrals to each other, you can link
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back to each other as a âpreferred vendorâ
or link to othersâ content in guest
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posts where it's relevant.
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And this isnât limited to just local businesses.
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This applies to everyone.
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So, find some solid partners who are on that
same journey as you in a lateral niche and
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help each other out.
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Now with link building, there are numerous
tactics and strategies, so if you want to
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expand your knowledge in this sphere, then
I highly recommend watching our series on
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link building where youâll get a full scope
of how to do this effectively.
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Alright!
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We are on to the last SEO tip that I see a
lot of beginnerâs avoiding.
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Now, if you have something to sell, setting
up your homepage and product/services pages
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is probably the first thing that youâll do or
did and for good reason.
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These are the pages that will directly generate
leads and revenue for your business.
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But hereâs the final tip: start blogging.
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Now, Iâm not telling you to write about
how you changed your storefront sign from
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red to green.
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By blogging, Iâm referring to providing
practical content that can and will help your
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prospective customers solve problems.
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In Dr. Jonah Bergerâs book, Contagious:
"Why Things Catch On," he shares his research
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on why content gains popularity and even goes viral.
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Content that provides âpractical valueâ
was one of the key factors to success.
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People donât just share funny
cat videos or emotional stories.
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They share things that help others.
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And the same goes for gaining links.
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People are more likely to link to your content
if itâs helpful, actionable, and solves
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a problem.
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Look at what we do for the Ahrefs blog.
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We have numerous SEO tools, but we tackle
different big topics like keyword research
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and link building.
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And even if you donât use our tools, you can gain
a ton of value through these monstrous posts.
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But youâll see that we include shortcuts
or hacks where our tool can make doing SEO
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a whole lot easier.
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To further prove my point, if you look at
the âtop pagesâ report inside Site Explorer,
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youâll see that the pages that generate
the most search traffic for us, mostly come
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from our blog articles.
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Blogging lets you reach large audiences.
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For example, we saw that
Toronto wedding photographer
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had around 900 monthly searches in Canada.
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Letâs look up something like âwedding
venues Torontoâ in Keywords Explorer.
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You can see that it has around 1,400 monthly
searches in Canada.
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If youâve been in the wedding photography
business long enough, then youâve probably
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done shoots at numerous venues.
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So you could create a post with
helpful and practical value.
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For example, I might create an article of
some of the best venues that I had taken photos
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at and display pieces from
my portfolio within the blog post.
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I would also detail pros and cons of each
place, pricing information, location details,
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items on their catering menu, or anything
else that would be genuinely helpful to a
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person visiting this page.
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And if you think about it, people usually
book the venue before the photographer.
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So thereâs a solid chance that after people
see some of your stunning watermarked photos,
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they might look through your portfolio, and
contact you for a quote that can generate
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more customers for you.
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And if you think about it, they may have never
discovered you through a different means because
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they didnât type in a keyword phrase like
âToronto wedding photographer," or their
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friends didn't refer you to them.
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When youâre thinking of these ideas, put
yourself in the searcherâs shoes.
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What would they be looking for and what would
help them solve the query?
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Now, when youâre picking topics, try and
stick with ones that provide value to your business.
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So as a photographer, I would want to almost
always showcase my work because I would be
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judged by my portfolio.
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As a software company, we showcase how our
tools can help in peopleâs SEO process because
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people will buy our tools if they see how
it benefits them.
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As a coffee roastery, you might show them
how to make the perfect cup of coffee or an
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article on how to roast beans.
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I cannot emphasize enough, how much a blog
can help you boost your SEO efforts.
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Itâs a great way to get ahead of your competitors
who have been in the game for longer than
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you, but they've been targeting only these
âobviousâ keywords.
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From here, you can just rinse and repeat the
keyword research process, the on-page optimization
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tips, and continually build links to your
content and articles and start climbing the
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Google search rankings.
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We have a ton of really helpful videos where
we expand on these topics, so Iâll leave
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links to those in the description.
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Make sure to subscribe for more actionable
SEO and marketing tutorials and if you have
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any questions, feel free to leave a comment
and I would be happy to jump in and help out.
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Sam PhOHtography, signing out.
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