SEO

How To Do Basic SEO With Zero Experience

Whether you’re a business owner, a tech geek or an entrepreneur looking to start your online journey, SEO is a term you’ll hear everywhere.

With the technicalities and buzzword terms that are associated with our industry, it’s no surprise that the world of SEO is not something everyone has been a part of.

Simply put, while there are understandably certain areas that might lie outside your area of expertise (and understanding perhaps), there’s no reason why you can’t start practising SEO with zero prior experience.

Thanks to the numerous videos and guides on this practice in digital marketing, learning more about SEO and implementing it can be a lot easier than you think.

Equipped with just a few SEO tips and tricks, you can take your business’ online journey to the next level and have an obvious impact on your digital presence.

At Novus Digital, we’ve put our heads together to build a list of succinct and actionable information on basic SEO practices that can be tried out by any and all businesses, irrespective of how much experience you have.

With us, you don’t have to get swept away with technical jargon and other seemingly complex techniques that every other digital marketing blog throws at you, we’ve kept it simple.

With these tips, you’ll be able to start strong on your SEO journey.

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1. Focusing on the Right Keywords and Optimising Your Site – For Beginners

One of the main components of basic SEO for beginners is keywords. They essentially serve as the first step of your journey but can make a massive difference for your organisation’s visibility and ranking.

They’re like the base ingredient that you start with in your recipe/project.

The key to achieving Google traffic success is leveraging your prospective customer’s intent when they make a search. In other words, you use keywords, phrases and terms that people use to find out more about a certain product, service or query and include that in your content to signal to Google that you’re relevant to that search. Therefore increasing your visibility.

The first thing you need to do is select a phrase or term you want to appear on Google for.

Let’s say you’re a pet grooming business with your main shop in Northampton; you need to focus on keywords that reflect this.

A few phrases or terms that you could use for your keywords could be “pet groomers Northampton, “pet grooming services in Northampton or “best pet grooming services”.

Through keyword organising and planning tools available online, you can get suggestions and actually work out how many people are searching for your keywords. These tools can greatly simplify your tasks, reducing the need to spend too much effort on finding the right phrases that you want to rank for.

Keep in mind that it’s ideal to have a mix of both location-specific and generic keywords, while also peppering in both longer and shorter search phrases.

You can then optimise your website by using these keywords. Here are a few places they can be used –

Page titles
Headers for blogs and landing pages
Names and alt tags for images
URLs
Meta Descriptions
Link anchor text

We’re in danger of getting jargon-y here, so we’ll cover each of these in future content – if you simply can’t wait, drop us a call!

Keyword tools can also show you the estimated traffic for a particular search term that can help you find unique niche keywords that you can take advantage of with less competition.

Depending on the content you have online, including your landing pages, narrowing down on the main focus keywords and secondary keywords is an important SEO practice that can do wonders for your business’s online presence.

Click here to request a custom website audit for your page!

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Novus have been very professional and extremely helpful in setting up and looking after our SEO and website. Alex is very knowledgeable and since working with him we have gained a lot more interest in our business.

Paul Shewry

In a few months Novus took our website from nowhere to 2-4 new enquiries a day. Alex and the team’s service and communication have been excellent, can't wait to see where we go next.

Karl Walter

We've worked with a number of SEO agencies and there's an energy with Novus I haven't experienced elsewhere. It's so refreshing to talk about what matters to us, rather than arbitrary metrics.

Arron Potts

2. Creating a Smart Content Strategy for Beginners

At Novus, we’ve always firmly believed in the saying “Content is king”.

It’s one of the core aspects that requires a great deal of effort and dedication to reap maximum results. Without content, search engines simply don’t have enough data to understand your pages correctly to rank accordingly; it should serve as the heart of your SEO strategy.

That said, creating content may be easy but ensuring quality will require you to put together a smart content strategy. To dominate Google’s algorithms, your content needs to provide value to the audience.

As Google’s algorithms continue to evolve, putting together a content strategy requires you to stay up to date with the changes to stay on Google’s good side.

Carry out some competitor research to understand what kind of content other business’ in your field are producing. Check out the playing field (or we can help you with that) to see what works and what doesn’t.

This will give you better insights about what you can use for improving your own content strategy and marketing.

Besides this, there are a few content fundamentals you need to keep in mind –

Length of Content

Focus on both long-form and short-form content and use your keywords strategically for good SEO optimisation.

While it’s an obvious fact that long-form content ranks well, you need to find a sweet spot with your word count to maintain quality and engagement.

Readability and tone

Readers need to understand the content on your website to fully comprehend what you’re offering. Technical jargon can be a snooze fest so you need to ensure that the words you’re writing are being absorbed by the reader.

You need to open up your content to a wider audience to increase visibility. Additionally, keeping a consistent tone can help the reader understand your perspective and improve overall readability.

Formatting

Formatting plays an important role in SEO. Headlines and subheadings are essential as they make your page navigation around the content better for website visitors and your target audience at large.

In SEO, we’ve given those headings, subheadings and subsub headings (etc) names, such as H1s, H2s etc. From a strong H1 as your main title to usingH2s, H3s and using bullet points to compressed images across the article, make sure your content is properly formatted so that the reader’s attention is captured throughout.

Visuals and Alt Tags

Visuals can serve as a nice break from words and can help retain a reader’s attention. It can be used to further break up the content and provides chances for SEO optimisation through alt tags (that’s the short descriptions assigned to every image you upload).

Since alt tags are text representations of your image that provide an image description for accessibility purposes, it provides a great opportunity for keyword optimisation.

We always say – speak to 100 SEO agencies and get 100 different strategies – but by sticking to the basics you’re sure to start your SEO journey off right. By having a smart content strategy in place, you can update it as and when you like.

Book your call with us right away to give your content strategy a facelift!

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3. Learn The Basics Of Quality Link Building

This is where we take things up a notch – bear with us on this.

One of the greatest advantages of SEO is that whilst it may be ever-changing, knowing the basic tips and tricks give you a formula that will almost always bring results.

Although most agencies are now cottoning onto the power of links, we’ve been practising link building for almost 10 years, so we know our stuff.

Simply, it means having another website link back to yours which drives referral traffic and increases your site’s authority. Quality backlinks have and will always be an important factor for a search engine to determine which sites rank for different keywords.

For long-term viability of your business, winning organic backlinks is essential as getting links from spammy sites may not be the best thing for your business. Using manipulative Black-hat SEO practices will usually damage your rankings and your site, potentially irreversibly.

We always recommend staying away from “too good to be true” practices by finding smarter strategies and loopholes that get you easy wins. Yes, we also strive to take care of your reputation while handling your SEO strategy.

Creating evergreen organic backlinks is a long process that requires a considerable amount of time and effort. To get results that you need, you have to put in effort. Links from authoritative sites like Forbes or The Wall Street Journal aren’t something that are typically achieved overnight unless you have tons of funds at your disposal. Then, it’s a cakewalk.

However, if you’re on a budget, the journey to getting there requires consistent effort in increasing your site’s authority by acquiring quality backlinks from smaller sites as you build your way up from there.

Here are some of the best backlink strategies that people with zero SEO experience can implement easily (at least by SEO standards)-

Content Creation – Developing high-quality content will make people want to refer back to your website as it provides good value to their audience. You’ll notice in this piece, we’ve linked to some other sources, due to their high quality. With this, promoting it the right way will enhance visibility and people will then easily be able to find you.
Collaborations – Contributing a guest article, receiving a product mention from an influencer or working with related industries for mutual benefit can help build quality backlinks to your site.
Links from local businesses – Links from relevant sites and local businesses can make a big difference in your ranking. It can provide more value than random backlinks from low ranking sites.
Online Directories – Register your business on national and local online directories; it’s a sure-shot way of getting quality backlinks and typically forms the standard initial set up of a Novus campaign.
Social Media Platforms And Sites – Leverage social media to promote your services or products and get quality backlinks. This will also greatly help in creating a strong online presence through easy engagement with your target audience.

Another link building strategy to implement, especially for SEO beginners is to build free links with internal link building – that is building links around your website to help users and Google navigate more easily. It’s one of the easiest and most underrated ways of improving rankings on search engines; the first few baby steps in your SEO journey.

Optimising internal links is less tedious and can often bring decent ranking boosts (for free!).

Focus enough on both external or off-site and internal or on-site link building strategies to have an impressive roster of organic traffic flow to your website.

Novus Digital – The Right Agency For All Your SEO Needs

Most online businesses need SEO in some form and every day you’re not moving forwards, you’re getting left behind by your competitors.

Even if it’s basic SEO for beginners, following simple tips and tricks can give you a headstart on building your business’ online presence. Armed with these simple and effective strategies, you’re not guaranteed results (particularly in high competition industries), but it’s a start and a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately however, in most industries, doing it yourself isn’t going to bring you game changing results. For this, you need an agency that understands your business and is working actively with you to achieve your goals. You need Novus Digital. Find out more about working with us here.

Whether you’ve been stung in the past or are just looking for an SEO agency that “get it”, you won’t find a service like ours anywhere else.

Give us a nudge and we’ll set up a quick call to put together the best SEO strategy for your business.