SEO for Beginners: Unlock the Power of Organic Traffic

Are you struggling to get people to your website? Not sure how to get Google to give your website a little love?

I’m Torie Mathis, and I am here to show you that you don’t need crazy tech skills, stacks of cash, or a dedicated staff to get traffic to your website. What you need is just to be smart.

And the smart way to get traffic to your website is to understand how search engine optimization, also known as SEO, works and how you can implement it on your website.

The Changing Landscape of Online Traffic

Like five to ten years ago, you could get a ton of traffic from just posting on social media. If you wrote a blog post with an interesting title and an eye-catching picture, you could bet that people would click on it if they saw it on Facebook.

Websites like Buzzfeed took full advantage of this by creating endless listicles, like “22 Reasons Why Friends is the Best Show Ever.” People would see these types of articles, click on them, and then share them with everyone they knew.

But since then, things have changed dramatically. Social media sites like Facebook realized that they were pretty much giving away free publicity, and they decided that if websites wanted to get more attention, they were going to have to pay for it.

So Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites started making it more difficult for you to grab people’s attention for free. What began as like 10,000 people seeing your post was now only a tiny fraction of that. If you wanted to get more exposure, you were going to have to pay for it. The end result is it’s now tough to get tons of traffic to your website directly from social media.

You either need a massive following or be willing to shell out a lot of cash to get seen. And that is why SEO matters more than ever.

What is SEO?

But what is SEO? SEO is the process of optimizing your website for search engines like Google.

And if you understand it and do it correctly, you can get a significant amount of consistent traffic for free from search engines. Seems pretty simple, right? Well, it is, sort of. The general concept of SEO is simple, but it’s a little more complicated in practice, which makes sense. Of course, there are literally billions of web pages out there, and Google has to be able to go through all of them and then give the most relevant ones to searchers.

One of the primary goals of your SEO is to make your website stand out from all of the others out there. You want to make your website as attractive as possible to Google, and the more appealing, the more it’ll be shown to searchers and the more traffic you will get. So how do you make your website stand out in the eyes of Google?

How Search Engines Work

First, it’s essential to understand how search engines like Google work. Search engines are incredibly complex, and Google is notoriously secretive about exactly how it works.

But over the years they have revealed some key information. At its core, Google exists to return relevant information to searchers. That’s why we all use it, right? We trust that for the most part, it’ll return information relative to our searches. If it didn’t do this, no one would use it.

If you search “tacos” and Google returns a page with farm tractors, that information would be useless to you, and you probably would never use Google again. In order to make searchers happy, Google is always trying for the best ways to give you the most relevant information for each and every search. But how does it determine which pages are the most relevant?

Well, it uses these things called ranking factors. The Google algorithm uses over 200 different factors when evaluating web pages. These factors help Google figure out which pages to return for search results. You enter your search terms and Google evaluates billions of pages all by their ranking factors to find and deliver the best results that match your search.

In simple terms, the pages with the higher scores are listed higher in the results than pages with lower scores. The better a page ranks according to all of the different ranking factors, the higher it’ll appear in search results.

Key SEO Factors to Focus On

As you would expect, not all ranking factors are equal, but some are more important than others. So which ones actually matter the most? Well, Google really hasn’t made it completely clear which ones are the most important, but there are some agreements around a few, and these are: search intent, backlinks, page speed, user experience, content freshness, accuracy and depth, site authority, security, mobile friendliness, structured data, and optimization for voice search.

In this series, we are going to cover greater detail about each of these factors. If you want to nerd out, you can check out Brian Dean’s post on Google’s 200 ranking factors; it’s fascinating. But you don’t have to worry about all 200 factors. If you want to succeed with SEO, focus on the ones that we’re going to cover.

We are going to explore each of these SEO factors and what it means for your website. By the end of this series, you are going to have a greater sense of how SEO works, along with some specific action steps to increase the search traffic your website receives.

But SEO is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to a smart marketing strategy. Let me ask you a question, do you know how your marketing stacks up?

Find out by taking the SMART Marketing quiz. Get customized results on how to get smarter with your marketing – you’ll learn exactly what YOUR business should focus on, get customized recommendations on how to get the best bang for your marketing buck, and unleash your business’s true potential. It’s like having a personal marketing coach by your side!

And remember, you don’t need crazy tech skills, buckets of cash, or a dedicated staff to market your business, you don’t even need a lot of time.

What you need is to be smart, and SEO is smart for your business.

If you're ready to grow your business with smart marketing you can:

1. Sign up for weekly FREE Business Bytes with CEO, Torie Mathis

2. Get a SMART Funnel and begin to automate your marketing

3. Learn Digital Marketing with a Smart Marketing Course

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: TORIE MATHIS

Torie Mathis helps entrepreneurs grow their business with Smart Marketing.  She is a best-selling author, Army veteran, international speaker + trainer, and the CEO + Creative Director at Lake Shark Media. She also teaches entrepreneurs how to get smart with digital marketing at toriemathis.com