A beginner’s guide to the world of SEO and why you should care
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is difficult, especially from the outsider’s perspective. It can seem overwhelming when you have a website or finished product and then suddenly after all that hard work is done you are given a new SEO checklist of multiple issues you then have to address. It can seem costly and unnecessary, especially if you think that you have got a good marketing strategy.
This is wrong, and whilst SEO may seem like a buzzword in the design industry, it is one of the most important and sought-after skills required after the launch of any website. It can bring new organic users to your website without having to pay for advertisements, or spend another 8 weeks on a marketing campaign trying to increase your user volume.
In this post I will try to explain the different factions of SEO, why they are important for your website, and how you can start the steps to learn how to implement SEO.
What is SEO?
In layman's terms, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which tries to encapsulate the importance of the quality of content you are putting on your website and the interaction your website has with the Google algorithm BERT. Now, plenty of you out there may not like Google Chrome, you could be a Bing fanatic, but even search engines that aren’t Google utilizes the BERT language model developed by Google.
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which, if you’re anything like me, makes absolutely no sense. But it’s a fancy way of saying the machines have got pretty clever and can understand search terms with the nuances of context. So it can look at what a user is searching for and show them relevant content within the correct context.
SEO is typically split into three sections of On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and my personal favourite, Technical SEO. These three factions are taken into account when the mega-machine of Google is scanning your website and assigning an SEO score to the website.
Why should I even care?
The most important part of this is: why should you care? Does it make a difference when I have loyal followers on Instagram that will check out my content? The short of it is yes, you should care and yes it does make a difference.
Not only do you achieve a wider reach of potential users, who may see your content and subscribe to the ideas you choose to push out there, but the return on investment is huge, your credibility is increased and most importantly everyone else is on board with an already existing competitive advantage. SEO is a diamond in the rough in the fact that it is not only measurable but the results are tangible, which I would argue, is a rarity in this industry.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a reference to the website and server optimizations that help to increase ranking on Google search pages. So for instance, where are your alt tags on your images? Why are your H1’s and H2’s all mixed up and overused? That image is massive, why didn’t you resize it?
The reason Technical SEO is my favorite area to work on is that it’s very binary, this website crawler says this is an issue? Let’s get it fixed. There are some wonderful tools out there for the low price of free - including Lighthouse which is built into the chrome browser and SEO ability which gives you a more comprehensive overview of roughly how well your website is optimized.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO refers to the written content and source code of each web page of your website and trying to optimize said content to target specific keywords to rank higher on Google when people type in specific search terms. But it can also encapsulate the metadata you have for each page.
The issue I find with On-Page SEO is figuring out what keywords to target or why I’m trying to target those keywords - there are some great tools out there such as ubersuggest and a much more comprehensive guide to on-page SEO from moz.com.
Off-Page SEO
Finally, Off-Page SEO refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website, so that’s Social Media Marketing, Link building (which refers to other websites and social media referring to your website). There’s a couple of ways that you can increase this through organizing a campaign, getting shout-outs or guest authors on your website.
There is a great guide to Off-Page SEO written by Neil Patel (The Ubersuggest guy) that you can find here which may help develop your understanding.
Closing thoughts
SEO isn’t easy, but its a powerful way to develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding not only with your website but also as a brand as a whole, to really achieve with SEO you need to understand your competition as well as your target audience but also what exactly it is that you do as a brand. It’s also a wonderful way to go through your previous work and perhaps display to you the toxic designer traits you may have, such as lazy copywriting or non-optimized images. Overall SEO will give you the advantage you need in this industry and at least having a basic understanding of is a very valuable skill.
