SEO is one of the bare essentials of every digital marketing strategy. It is responsible for making your website more visible on search engines like Google by making your website and content as high-quality as possible. However, with all of the elements that go into SEO, it can be difficult for those who aren’t familiar with digital marketing to grasp it in its entirety.
At Tiny Lever, we get asked to teach SEO all the time. A common question is, “Please explain SEO like I’m 5 years old.” This can either be a test to see if we actually know what we’re doing or an honest request by someone who genuinely wants to gain a deeper understanding of how SEO works.
Employing our industry insights, we’ve explained SEO like I’m 5 in-depth. So, for those who are having trouble fully understanding it, we’ve put together this blog to walk you through the basics of SEO. We’ll tell you what it is and why it’s essential, and go into all the details you need to perfect to get the most benefit out of it.
Let’s get started!
What is SEO Like I’m 5?
When we are asked, "Please explain SEO like I’m 5,” we usually start by saying that it stands for Search Engine Optimization. It involves tweaks and fixes to make your website appear as high up on search engine results pages, or SERPs, as possible. To make a brick-and-mortar analogy, SEO is like sprucing up your storefront so people will talk about it.
SEO works by helping search engines like Google understand what your website is about and why it’s worth visiting. Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to rate your site on relevance, security, and performance, and they decide what your place is on the SERPs based on those ratings. Organizing your site and ensuring it’s pleasant to use all show search engines that your site is valuable to people looking for what you offer.
Why is SEO Important?
Being one of the first few search results on Google and other search engines means that people see your site first and are much more likely to click on it first. You may have heard it said before that getting customers’ attention is half the battle in business. For your sales techniques to have an effect, the customer must see you first.
Most studies agree that less than 1% of users on Google even go to the second page of the search results. This is why any business should try to rank as high as possible. Implementing SEO strategies increases the chances of appearing on that crucial first page.
7 SEO Tips for Beginners
SEO (search engine optimization) can be overwhelming for beginners, but it becomes much more manageable with the right tips and strategies. Here are the top 7 simple SEO tips for beginners:
1. Use Keywords Strategically
The first step to learning SEO for beginners is familiarizing yourself with how to find and use the right keywords correctly. Paying attention to these keyword elements will make you much more likely to rank higher:
- Conduct Thorough Keyword Research: In-depth research lets you identify the most relevant words for your industry. This often requires you to get to know your audience on a deeper level, identifying pain points and trends that are relevant to them.
- Incorporate Keywords Naturally: Search engine algorithms are getting better and better at detecting whether keywords are placed appropriately in content. Apart from ensuring you hit the optimal keyword count, you should prioritize fitting them into the text and adjusting your content as needed.
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing occurs when you use a keyword too many times in short succession or when you use the same keyword too much on the same page. Avoid doing this, as it can significantly reduce your search engine ranking.
Strategic keyword use is often considered the bread and butter of SEO. Although search engines have sophisticated algorithms to evaluate how informative each web page is, important words and phrases are still the primary factors that tell it how relevant they are.
2. Create High-Quality Content
Search engines have had highly sophisticated algorithms that gauge how informative and valuable content is since the late 2010s, made even more refined with the advent of AI. Ensuring your site’s content gives the most informative value allows you to rate high with those algorithms. Here are a few tips to ensure quality content if we were to explain SEO like I’m 5:
- Focus On Being Informative: Content value is essentially a descriptor of how valuable your content is, which depends on how informative it is. So, focus on providing fresh insights that are educational, stimulating, and actionable if need be.
- Make Good Use Of Visuals: Visual enhancements like images, videos, and infographics enhance the user experience by being visually stimulating as well as making it easier to digest the information. Breaking up walls of text with visuals helps hold readers’ attention, keeping them on your site for longer, which also contributes to your SEO rating.
- Regularly Update Your Content: Search engines favor fresh content, so regularly update your pages to ensure that they remain relevant and accurate. Revisit even your oldest articles to add new information, correct outdated data, and touch up quality to keep your audience engaged while improving SEO.
Quality content is one of the top SEO essentials as it keeps your audience coming back and encourages them to share links to your website, spreading awareness. If you think you need help creating good content, consider looking up SEO content writers for hire. Consistent quality content establishes your site as an authority in your industry, which also builds credibility and trust with new visitors.
3. Leverage Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for businesses, but it can also be incredibly good for your SEO strategy. Regularly sharing content from your site on social media platforms increases visibility and drives traffic to your website. Make sure to do these things when taking advantage of social media to improve your SEO:
- Share Your Content: Spreading your content as far and wide as possible will increase its visibility and reach a broader audience. Make sure to maximize exposure by using all the social media platforms you can, as well as email newsletters and even content syndication networks if available.
- Encourage Content Sharing: Aside from sharing your own content, you should also make sharing your articles as easy as possible with a prominent share button. At your discretion, you can also include a call to action for your readers to spread the word, but this works best if your content is newsy or in some way groundbreaking.
- Engage With Your Audience: Talking to your audience builds brand awareness and a rapport with people that will strengthen your brand identity. Your interactions will also reinforce your brand authority and create a loyal community of supporters who vouch for your products or services.
Effective social media use broadens reach and improves search engine performance from the traffic that gets directed to your website. When users share your content of their own volition, they also help build your brand authority and strengthen your community.
4. Highlight User Experience
Performance and responsiveness go hand in hand with quality UX design. Your website should be easy to navigate, visually appealing, and generally pleasant to use. Observe these practices to ensure top-tier UX:
- User-Friendly Design: Easy-to-understand interfaces and smooth navigation are the foundations of UX. Make sure you simplify menus, use intuitive icons, and ensure a seamless flow from one page to another.
- Stimulating Feedback: You can enhance your UX design even further by adding stimulating feedback to your interface with sounds, animations, and other effects. However, adding such things with a light touch is important, as too much feedback can make your site seem unprofessional.
- Consistent Aesthetic: A consistent visual theme makes your site look more cohesive and professional, making it easier for users and, therefore, search engines to trust your site. Ensuring consistency between color schemes, fonts, and design elements also contributes to user-friendliness, as users would be less likely to get confused while navigating your site.
Engaging, visually appealing websites encourage visitors to stay longer, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable. It also increases the likelihood of repeat visits and positive word-of-mouth.
5. Improve Your Website's Technical SEO
Technical SEO, in simple language, has to do with the parts of your site that are behind the scenes. It involves optimizing site speed, structure, and functionality to ensure search engines can effectively crawl and index your site. Improving things like these makes your site look more reliable and trustworthy to search engines:
- Site Structure: A highly organized website structure is favored by search engines. Make sure you use clear, hierarchical URLs, create a logical navigation menu, and use internal linking to connect related content.
- Crawlability: Crawlability is how easily a search engine can browse through and index your entire site. Improving this involves using XML sitemaps and the robots.txt file to guide search engines to your important pages and prevent them from indexing irrelevant or duplicate content.
- Technical Errors: Broken website elements can significantly harm your SEO score. Conduct regular site audits to discover broken links, duplicate content, and other technical problems that search engines take issue with. Use tools like Google Search Console to identify and fix these issues promptly.
Technical SEO can often be the most challenging element for companies without a dedicated SEO team to take on, but it is arguably the most important element of your SEO strategy. Something as seemingly minor as your website’s title can be very impactful to your SEO. Optimizing the technical aspects of your website tells the search engine that your site is well-functioning and secure, making it safe to recommend to users.
6. Optimize for Mobile Devices
Ease of use and high performance on mobile devices should be one of your top priorities. The vast majority of users access the internet on their phones, so Google and other search engines place a large amount of importance on how fast and responsive your site is on mobile browsers.
- Responsiveness: Ensure minimum latency on mobile for every element of your site. Issues like hard-to-press buttons and unresponsive touch gestures can negatively affect responsiveness.
- Loading Speed: Mobile devices load pages differently in some ways, such as images needing to be optimized for different screen sizes and scripts that are best minimized or deferred. Solving these problems will help your page load as fast as possible on mobile.
- Mobile-Specific Technical SEO: There are several technical SEO elements that are specific to mobile, such as AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), mobile-friendly meta tags, and viewport settings. Make sure you optimize these elements to rank highly on mobile searches.
Given the disproportionate amount of users accessing websites on their phones, making sure yours is optimized for mobile is an essential part of SEO. Responsiveness and fast loading also contribute to UX, fostering more goodwill with your audience.
7. Monitor and Track Your SEO Efforts
To verify whether your SEO efforts are fruitful, you have to implement continued monitoring and tracking. Use these tracking techniques to identify ways you can continuously improve upon your SEO strategy:
- Use Analytics Tools: Analytics tools like Google Analytics help you accurately track your website’s performance and SEO metrics. This tells you how well your SEO efforts have been going so far.
- Log Performance Metrics: Take account of key metrics like organic search traffic (users searching for your site of their own discretion), bounce rate (users clicking off your site soon after visiting), and conversion rate (site visitors becoming customers).
- Make Data-Driven Adjustments: Use the data you gather to identify which areas need the most improvement so you can make the most out of the resources that you have to drive SEO and growth.
Continuous monitoring and tracking tell you what you’re doing right and what else you can do to improve. It also allows you to stay on top of changes in the algorithm, like the ones we revealed in this new Google algorithm leak, and your competitors’ efforts to rank higher than you. By adjusting according to this information, you can ensure sustained SEO success.
Key Takeaway
SEO can be overwhelming, but with these SEO-like-I'm-5 tips, you can optimize your website to boost your search engine ranking overnight. Understanding these basics will give you a solid idea of how to take on the issues in your site that are holding your search engine ranking back.
Some elements of SEO, such as technical SEO, mobile optimization, and UX, are best left to professionals. But you can still do essential page maintenance to ensure your site stays at the best rank possible.
Looking for someone to help you with your SEO efforts? Don’t hesitate to contact us at david@tinylevermarketing.com so we can start planning your SEO strategy. Tiny Lever handles all aspects of the SEO process, ensuring you get the highest attainable ranking. Our strategies are fully customized and tailored to client specifications, so we can act as SEO support or take care of technical SEO while you work on content and UX.
