What is SEO and why is it so important? Have you ever asked this question to yourself? Do you also think that SEO is something too complex to understand, or is it even worth as much as it is hyped?

Search Engine Optimization is not as hard or complicated as it sounds. Rather, once you understand its need, it will be hard to turn back. No, you don’t need to get into the technicalities of SEO. Mere ABCs are enough for you to get your content and digital marketing game strong. Even if you have a limited understanding of what it is, you will still be way ahead from where you might have started.

Here, we will be discussing the basic guide to Search Engine Optimization. Everything you need to know to get started in six simple steps –

Step 1 – Learn what your customers are searching for

Every day there are billions of searches made on the internet. The traffic is only increasing day by day, more powerful and specific. To understand the traffic and the different direction it takes, it is important to know what your target customers are looking for. What keywords are being used the most and how could be included in your content to make it stronger than ever. So, how will you identify what your customers are looking for?

Well, for starters, it all common sense. On search engines, it is very common for people to type random keywords to make a quick search. Take a moment and put yourself in their shoes and make a list of possible words that you might use to search. These little words or phrases are your keywords. The use of these keywords is one of the most efficient ways to promote your business. Another way of knowing what your customers are searching for is by either referring to paid or unpaid SEO tools or take SEO services for your website.

Step 2 – Optimize your website pages for search engines with on-page techniques

After identifying your customers’ needs with the help of keywords, the next step for you is to make their online experience better. A satisfied customer is all that you need and for that, you need to make your website user-friendly, easy to consume, and with no unnecessary elements on your page. On-page optimization plays an important role here. It is not just throwing random keywords in your content but ranking them in order of most searched keywords. This will help your webpage to appear on the first page of the search engine when the keywords are being searched by the customers.

The best way to know that is by understanding the search intent of your customers. On-page optimization makes it easier to understand what the content is all about with the use of several signals. In comparison to off-page SEO, this optimization technique can provide exactly what the customer is looking for with the proper ranking of the topics and pages.

Step 3 – Make your website search engine and user friendly

As discussed in the previous step, it is always best to improve your customer experience on your webpage. But along with human customers, you must also remember that your website is not just limited to them. You need to make your website ‘bot’ search engine friendly. Your ultimate goal should be to provide a positive image of your website for both kinds of customers. Simple ways by which you can do so is by making sure that your website is fast enough for your customers.

In this fast-paced world, the longer your website loads, the bigger are the chances of your customers to leave the site. Next, make your website clutter-free by removing all unnecessary elements like pop-ups or excessive advertisements. Along with that, another way of improving your website performance is by making it mobile-friendly as well. List out the pages on your website systematically so that it’s easy for both search engines and humans to navigate through them.

Step 4 – Content marketing and link building

You have created your website and prepared appropriate content for it. You have optimized it accordingly. Is this enough? No. As important it is to follow all the previous steps, it is equally important to market your website appropriately. Link building is one effective way of doing so. Link building refers to adding necessary links to your webpages that navigates the customer to your website. These links must not be complicated and should easily convey what to expect by clicking on them.

By building such links you can market your best quality content and make it stand out from the crowd of websites available on the internet. Not to forget, link building is one of the easiest digital marketing trends that you can follow. That’s why it is important to create proper digital marketing strategies and follow them to promote your content digitally.

Step 5 – Resolve common technical SEO issues and best practices

SEO comes along with some common technical issues that should be looked for in your website and get resolved for better results. Some of these issues are the time taken to load a page, redirects, ease of use in mobiles, bot’ friendliness, and sitemaps. These are the little things that must be taken care of. A good website must not take more than three seconds to load. The reduced attention span of the customers can make them move out of the page if it takes longer to load or redirects to the wrong page. Redirects can lead to broken URLs which may affect the traffic on your website. Remember, the first impression matters a lot.

The more friendly your website is, the more traffic you will get. Many times, digital marketers forget to optimize their websites to make them mobile-friendly. This makes them lose all those customers who prefer to search on their smartphones. The same goes for adding a sitemap to your website. A sitemap is a list of all the topics or the pages on your website available as links to the customers to get their desired content quicker. These issues, once resolved, can improve your website experience.

Step 6 – Track and measure SEO results

The final and one of the most important steps is to track and measure your SEO results from time to time. But how do you track it? The answer is pretty straightforward. Along with key metrics, one must also focus on the organic traffic generated on your website. This is the best way to understand your website’s growth as you can see the actual number of visitors on your site and where they are going. Keyword ranking is another way of judging where your site ranks.

However, this might not be the best way to measure your results. One personal way of measure your SEO results is by counting the leads and sales your website made. This can give you a fair idea of what sells and what not. All these ways of SEO analysis are pretty much self-explanatory and understandable. You can also refer to an SEO consultant for a better understanding of all these technicalities.