THE COMPLETE LIST TO SEO BASICS
Here is everything thing you need to know about SEO Marketing so that search engines find your website on the internet and inch it towards to first page of your ideal keyword searches by your potential customers. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is a very powerful way to market your website these days and is something that can be done by yourself if you know what to do, have patience and take the time to do it right. We know that there are hundreds of sites out there trying to tell you and sell you on this service.. but even we can hardly make heads or tails out of them as to what you actually have to do in a clear and concise way. So here is our list of what you have to do in the most simple and organized way possible.
Base Setup for Good SEO
SEO Purpose: This is the very first thing you need to do (or have us do ;-) It's registering or "indexing" your website. This is where you add your website to Google for the very first time. You can keep coming back here to have google "index" new pages you add or edit.
SEO Purpose: Setting up Google Analytics let's you start seeing the results of your SEO efforts. It takes time for results to start showing up in all the graphs, but there are so many different reports available to you once it does. Like with almost of these tools, the information may seem confusing and overwhelming at first.
SEO Purpose: Google-My-Business is that information block in search results that shows up ion the right hand site and should have a map to you location, photos from your place, reviews, contact buttons, and a lot more things that most people don't know about. But setting up a Google-My-Business page is a huge SEO boost.
Yoast has made it super easy to setup the basics. The main basics that Yoast makes easier to do is getting your sites description to look right in search results and getting a sitemap xml page registered, that you can link to Google's Search Console.
But to use Yoast right, there are tools on all your WordPress pages where it reads your pages and lets you know how well your page may be read by Google's algorithm.
SEO Purpose: Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that greatly eases your ability to SEO content on your website. How your content is written is a big part of good SEO marketing. Normally you would have to know quite a lot about website code, but Yoast make all the steps you need "easier"... well the easiest of all the options out there.
Content SEO
Note: Within the past year, google kind of buried access to the keyword planner tool, hoping you pay for Ads first before you can get to the dashboard/admin. But there is a link to get to the dashboard if you look carefully for the small text that ask if you are an "expert".
In any case, most people use Keyword Planning wrong. No matter what, you just need to write good content about what it is you do. You can use Keyword Searches/Planning to maybe help you decide what words to use more of if google says they show up more, but chances are that if you are knowledgeable in your industry you will be using words that are already ideal keywords. In many cases, industry knowledgeable people come up with Keywords that aren't the most popular but since it is in the industry, may yield better results than google's suggestions for attracting those customers.
This is a "coding" thing but if you use WordPress it is a bit easier to do this. There can only be ONE H1 Tag on a page, then there can be multiple of the other tags but they should go in order from H2 stating more importance, down to H6 stating less importance but still it let's google know that this is priority content. Don't overdo your tags either as google does read all you content anyhow, the tags are there to just draw attention to priority content.
You don't have to use all the tags either. Most website pages use H1, H2, H3 tags. Then the paragraphs right below the H-Tag Titles need to correspond with keywords and phrases that relate to those Titles. And all of it needs to read "normal" like a human wrote it... Google's AI and Algorithms can tell the difference and may penalize your visibility and rankings if it thinks you are trying to cheat your way into results that you shouldn't be in.
Paid SEO Strategies
In any case, Google Ads are also pretty good and can be setup in a way to work with any size budget. You set your daily limits and monthly max limits. There are lots of tools along the way that help you really target keywords and demographics which in turn can help you write or rewrite better content on your website to better target your potential customers.
This all takes time to do so understand that that this is a chess game but in a few months you should be making moves that yield some nice results. With Google Ads you need to be spending at least $300 per month at the very minimum to see something happen.
Ads help SEO in that they get you a lot more exposure out there and when people who see your ads, their visits to your website increase your traffic, which is a factor in google improving your rankings. The only consideration here is the cost of the ads versus how much traffic is driven to your site and is converted into those people buying your products or services.