A Beginner's Guide to SEO

by Lucie Bridges

Illustration by Connelly Miller

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Unlocking the Basics

In today’s digital age, simply having a well-designed website is not enough to gain traction. Mastering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial digital marketing strategy to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results. If you’re new to SEO, 1893 Brand Studio is here to guide you through the SEO basics so you can unlock digital marketing strategies and optimize your website.


What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing practice aimed at improving your website’s ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Implementing SEO strategies ensures your website appears higher on the search results list. When someone searches for a topic relevant to your website, SEO measures will optimize your website’s visibility, increasing its rank on the search list and, therefore, enhancing brand awareness. Whatever your marketing goals are, SEO can help you reach them.


Getting Started With SEO


  1. Keyword Research: The foundation of SEO is adding relevant keywords. Research keywords and phrases that target your audience, and implement them throughout your website. Any text on your website should be strategically saturated with keywords. Be sure to update your website with fresh keywords continually. Remember, more relevant keywords can often be better!

  2. On-Page SEO: On-page SEO is the digital marketing practice of optimizing each page of your website. This optimization includes adding keywords to any text on your website, headlines, meta descriptions, and alt text for images. This not only optimizes your website for search results but also improves your website’s speed and user-friendliness.

  3. Content Quality: It is important that the content you are putting out is high-quality and informative to encourage visitors to stay on your site. This reduces your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. Creating original and engaging content will improve the SEO of your website overall.

  4. Local SEO: If your business is targeting local customers, utilizing local SEO is crucial. You can do this by setting up your Google My Business profile, encouraging positive customer reviews, and tailoring your keywords and phrases to your business’ location.


Steps to Get Started with SEO


If you’re new to SEO, here are some steps to help you get started:

  • Perform a website audit to identify where your site needs to improve its SEO. There are plenty of tools like Yoast or Google’s Search Console that can help you evaluate your website’s SEO performance.

  • Research keywords that are trending for your business and develop a strategy for implementing them into your site. Use a mix of broad keywords and keywords that are specific to your business.

  • Regularly monitor your SEO performance so you can improve your website’s optimization and digital marketing strategy.


Final Thoughts

SEO may seem daunting at first, but investing the time to implement it will significantly improve traffic to your website’s pages. Starting with the basics, like a site audit and on-page SEO, will help you become familiar with SEO. From there, make sure to have a digital marketing strategy in place to measure your success and continually increase SEO within your website. Work with 1893 Brand Studio to implement digital marketing strategies like SEO and more to help your business reach its marketing goals.