Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tried-and-true, cost-effective tactic for attracting and sustaining relevant traffic to websites. But in a landscape that demands instant results, it’s sometimes pushed to the bottom of to-do lists in favor of more urgent tasks. Why?
One apparent reason is that instant results from paid advertising, social media campaigns, or flash sales can be more appealing than the gradual gains from SEO. Another factor is resource allocation. SEO can require significant time and resources, including keyword research, content creation, technical optimizations, and continuous monitoring.
However, sidelining SEO is a mistake. Much like investing, a long-term SEO strategy can provide big benefits over the long haul. How?
Just as investments grow over time, well-executed SEO efforts lead to increased organic traffic, brand credibility, and cost-effective marketing, ultimately contributing to sustained online success.
Feel like you’re lagging behind? Well, don’t. The nice thing about SEO is that you can start at any time. Here, we’ll provide a simple action plan you can use to get started.
Getting Started with SEO: An Action Plan for Beginners
- Step 1 – Set Your Preliminary Goals
- Step 2 – Identify Where SEO Can Help
- Step 3 – Refine Your Goals
- Step 4 – Organize and Prioritize SEO Activities
- Step 5 – Use analytics to track progress
Step 1 – Set Your Preliminary Goals
If you’ve read anything we’ve written before, you know where we stand on goal-setting. It’s the single most important thing you can do before diving into a marketing strategy. Why? Because you can’t make a strategy if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish!
Is your goal to capture the highest share of voice among select competitors about a particular topic? Is it to increase qualified traffic on a select set of pages? Is it to develop an enterprise-wide SEO strategy? Is it all three?
Good. Get them down on paper. We’ll need them in a bit.
Step 2 – Identify Where SEO Can Help
Many resources out there will tell you to start by building a keyword strategy. While that might be sound advice for some, the reality is that keywords only represent a piece of the SEO puzzle.
At a high level, most SEOs will agree that there are three big buckets to consider:
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO is the foundational layer of any SEO program. It involves optimizing the technical aspects of your site to ensure that search engines can crawl, index, and understand its content effectively. Components include crawlability and indexability, site speed and performance, mobile-friendliness and more.
- On-Page SEO: On-page SEO means optimizing “on-page” elements of web pages to help them rank higher for specific queries in search engines. In other words, this is the piece of SEO where keywords, header tags, image descriptions, etc. come into play.
- Off-Page SEO: Conversely, off-page SEO refers to activities (acquiring backlinks, influencer outreach, social bookmarking, etc.) that occur off of your website to influence search rankings for specific queries.
So, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, you can use different tactics within each of these buckets to build the right SEO plan.
Step 3 – Refine Your Goals
OK, let’s get those goals that you wrote down again. Now that we know what SEO activities can help us, let’s take those goals a step further by turning them into SMART goals. What are SMART goals?
SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
In other words, if your preliminary goal was to increase qualified traffic on a select set of pages, take it a step further to ensure you’ll be able to track it down the line (more on that later).
Example of a SMART goal: Increase the number of qualified visitors to pages X, Y, and Z by 20% each within the next six months by optimizing those pages for targeted keywords, improving page load speed, and implementing a content marketing strategy.
Step 4 – Organize and Prioritize SEO Activities
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to SEO. However, depending on what your plan calls for, here are some basic recommendations for prioritizing activities:
- Start with the technical base: Once you’ve identified the pages and assets where you’ll focus, we suggest you perform a technical audit to understand where you may have deficiencies. Screaming Frog is an especially helpful tool here. You can use it to run comprehensive audits and uncover issues such as broken links, duplicate content, bad server response codes, etc. Best of all, there’s a free version!
- Look for on-page opportunities: After fixing technical issues uncovered by an audit, you’ll have a strong foundation in place for making effective on-page enhancements. It’s here that we suggest you start researching and building out keyword lists to inform your on-page work. What should you look to do to your identified pages after you’ve built your keyword list? Reputable SEO platform SEMRush provides a comprehensive checklist that breaks it down. Also free!
- Launch an off-page program: Search engines such as Google use a variety of off-page factors to determine the relevance and trustworthiness of a given page or site. In short, Google wants to provide the best possible experience it can to its users, and so it relies on external signals that imply a page or website will do so. For example, a link to your website from another reputable website (aka, “a backlink”) suggests an added level of credibility (i.e., a third-party endorsement). Likewise, social mentions and interactions exuding positive sentiment can have a similar effect. Where do you start? Again, SEMRush has a free off-page checklist you can use to get started.
Step 5 – Use analytics to track progress
Got those SMART goals handy? Let’s get them out again.
Because you took the time to make them SMART, you baked in parameters to qualify whether or not you’re succeeding on them. And those parameters should inform what key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to monitor. In the case of the example we used above:
Increase the number of qualified visitors to pages X, Y, and Z by 20% each within the next six months by optimizing those pages for targeted keywords, improving page load speed, and implementing a content marketing strategy.
Some KPIs of interest might be:
- Organic Page Traffic: Measure the overall increase in traffic from search engines to your website. This will help you gauge whether your SEO efforts are driving more visitors.
- Qualified Page Traffic: Track the number of visitors who fit your definition of “qualified” (e.g., based on demographics, behavior, or specific actions taken). This could include visitors who spend a certain amount of time on your site, visit specific pages, or complete desired actions.
- Keyword Rankings: Monitor the rankings of targeted keywords that you optimize your landing pages for. Improved rankings should correlate with increased qualified traffic.
And that’s just a sampling. You can create more as needed to fit your unique situation best.
Summary
There you have it—a comprehensive beginner’s guide to getting started with SEO. This guide provides a solid foundation and actionable steps to help you begin your SEO journey effectively. However, keep in mind that this is just the starting point.
SEO is a dynamic and evolving field, and what you see here represents the initial steps toward building a robust SEO strategy. As you progress, you’ll need to delve deeper into advanced techniques, stay updated with industry changes (such as the impact of artificial intelligence), and continuously refine your approach based on performance data.
Need help diving deeper? Or getting started? Contact us to let us know how we can help. Dennison Creative has the resources to help you grow your digital footprint.