SEO Introduction Guide for Business Owners

by

This post is a small guide to introduce SEO to business owners, so they can make an better decision on how to (or if to) invest on the SEO of their online business. It is not meant to teach you about SEO, but to understand the basics of how it works. By reading this post, you, as a business owner should be able to decide if you want to hire an agency, a freelance or DIY (Do it Yourself) and also how to invest and where to invest (or maybe not to invest on SEO at all) to get the best returns.

SEO is a big topic, and we are trying to make this post/guide short and easy to understand, and that is hard, so please contact us on twitter for any clarifications or questions. We will try to keep the post alive and improve it as we go.

What is SEO

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. So investing in SEO means that you will do things to make your website appear on the top results on the different search engines, so people will find you there.

That’s it. Easy!  Well, the problem is that no one knows exactly how that works, so no one knows exactly how to achieve that, but we have some ideas from google and mostly from so many people doing tests and sharing their insights. They call it…

SEO Ranking Factors

The Ranking Factors are the areas where you can act to improve your position (ranking) on the search results. And again (it is important to repeat this), no one knows exactly how this works and no one knows exactly what the factors are, but we know some of them, and we know some of the bigger areas that affect your SEO.

I personally like to separate the ranking Factors in two big groups. The Internal Ranking Factors and the External Ranking Factors.

The internal Ranking Factors are the ones that are part of your website and therefore you have full control over them. Some of them are technical, some of them are not technical at all. In WordPress, plugins allow you to modify technical parts without knowing any code. I divide them in groups again.

All of these groups are interconnected, and the list is made only to give you an idea of how mostly everything within your website will affect your SEO:

  • Content: This is the most important one, if you asked me. Content is king for SEO.
  • User experience and user interface (UX and UI, the design of your site): How well users navigate through your site, how much time they spend on it, do they find what they are looking for? All those factors will affect your SEO.
  • Accessibility: More and more google is looking into this. Also considering that google is a bot that needs to read your site, it makes perfect sense to work on this.
  • Performance: Google told us about it. Performance is really important. But this include so many topics, the technology, the server, the code, the optimizations, etc.
  • Security: Not only important for the day to day SEO (https://), but also a hacked site can destroy your SEO work instantly. Do not forget about it. Prevention is key.
  • Errors, downtime, etc. You could include this on all the above, but we know that the search engines do not like the errors and they will take that into consideration.
  • Code: This could be part of any of the previous options but we think is important to leave it is own space. Code could affect Performance, Security, Errors, Accessibility, and UX and UI, more or less depending of how much custom code do you have on your WordPress site (theme or plugins).

The external ones, are related to your website, but not part of them. So you can work on improve them, but not directly:

  • Social Media: What happens on social media reflects on your site and it does affect your SEO.
  • External Links: In the past was the big thing. Now it is not that clear, but if you consider that a link on a social media account is an external link, well, I think it is still important. But do not go an buy links around, just build great content and then the links will follow.
  • Search results: yeah, a circle thing. The more you appear on the results and how people interact with those results, will affect and be considered by the search engine.
  • Reputation: the domains have a reputation, a history, this is considered important by many SEO experts. It is not clear the effect, but it is something to have in mind.
  • Traffic: Another one that is tricky (nobody knows exactly how this works). But it seems that traffic has some influence on the SEO. Again, do not go and buy traffic for SEO, that is not the way to do it.

Note: Every SEO expert, website and professional will have their own list of Ranking Factors and they will classify on their own way. I am sure a lot of people will disagree with this quick list. This is a small list made for this post using not technical terms. The list and names are not really important. The idea is to understand that there are multiple areas that can be improved to get better search results.

SEO campaigns, marketing and planning.

As with any other project, SEO requires planning, investment (time or money and normally both) and in this case it requires also patience.

SEO is a very long term thing. Do not expect results in 1 month, it “could” happen, but it is most likely it won´t happen. And if someone tell you that you will get results in one month for sure, guaranteed, that is a red flag and you should just go to someone else. Normally you will start to see results in 3-6 months, but this depended a lot on the topic, the competition, the investment and the quality of your campaign, so it could be even years.

You should invest in SEO thinking on years of return, if you need quick results, there are other marketing areas (SEM, Social Media Ads, etc.) that will give you faster results.

I will try to compress in the next few lines what a typical SEO campaign could look like. Imagine this is someone telling you about this with a coffee in 10 minutes. This does not pretend to be technical and does not pretend to be accurate (if you are reading this and do SEO campaigns for a living, sorry for the simplification):

  • Think about what do you want to achieve with your SEO campaign. You need to have a goal (or more than one). No way to plan without a direction.
  • Think about what people search for that connects with your goals.
  • Think about the content you want to write and how to write it so it answer those people questions and searches.
  • Audit your current site and status, so you know where your weak points are.
  • Work on all the Ranking Factors above (or pick the best ones) so the search engines find that content and rank it.
  • Measure (with real numbers) how the campaign is working.
  • Review all the data, improve and repeat.

As you can see, working on SEO is not only doing the work, but to think and plan and keep working on it, knowing also that you will need to wait long time to get results.

Agencies vs Freelancers vs DIY

So, do I hire an Agency, do I hire a Freelance or can I do it myself? It depends, but I will try to give you some general and non specific guidelines.

And again, agencies and freelancers reading this, I am sure some of you won’t fit on either of those profiles, this is a simplification. Most of the time, picking an agency or a freelance for SEO is more a personal preference than a technical one.

  • Why do you need an Agency? An agency will require a bigger budget, so that is normally the main reason. Also you will pick an agency when you want to work on all the areas above at the same time. Agencies normally have teams with developers, designers, social media managers, they can partner with hostings (like us) and can deliver more in less time. You want an agency that can do a good marketing plan to pick the right keywords to pursuit, work with the content, understand the technical SEO, be able to create a social media strategy, and then offer the monitoring of the campaigns to be able to react and adapt the work in the long term, so you can get a better return of your investment. Some agencies will mix the SEO with the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) to give you faster results, but then we are not talking about SEO but about digital marketing in general.
  • When to pick a Freelance? A freelance can know all about SEO, but their time is sometimes more limited, unless they work with other freelances or have a team. The budget is sometimes smaller (not always!). In my experience, I have found that most freelances focus more on the technical SEO and provide audits but they do not work too much on the social media side or the server side. The good thing with freelancers is that is sometimes easier to find one that connect with you and that understand your business more closely.
  • DIY – Do it yourself. Of course this is the cheaper of the budget, but the more expensive in time. If you are willing to put the hours and learn, there is a lot of free information about SEO out there. Most of the things freelances and agencies will do, you could do it yourself, but of course it takes time to learn and execute. I think, if the budget is limited, it is good to understand the basics of SEO, or even try to do some of it yourself before to hire someone.
    This way it is easier to explain which parts to focus and also to understand that with a limited budget and dedication, it will take longer to get the same results.

Small tips for your SEO Campaign DIY

(or to tell your agency/freelancer to follow, but they should know all this):

  • Remember this is a long term strategy. Patience and consistency is key.
  • If you are not sure where to start, start with good content.
  • If you can only do one thing, content is the most important one.
  • If you  are going to write, write about something you like, so you will enjoy the process.
  • Plan ahead, not only the content, but everything related to it. If you do not have the time, use a freelancer or an agency to plan the SEO strategy for you.
  • You do not need to do SEO. Not all business need it.
  • Get involved. SEO includes content and that will show your business tone and voice. Make sure it is aligned with your business goals.
  • Write for people, not for machines.
  • Do not forget about the technology (for security and performance mostly), which includes the server but also the code on your site.
  • Do an audit and work on fixing the biggest issues. Fix any big errors or problems on your code.
  • If you are doing this yourself, pick only one social media channel and focus on that one. It is hard to be present on all social media channels without a team.

How do we help with SEO at WPHercules:

With our WPHercules managed WordPress, we help you with the following areas:

  • Performance: we use top quality servers and we setup them for best performance.
  • Security: if you are hacked, the SEO investment of months can be affected. Also Google is looking into security more often lately.
  • Maintenance: updates prevent errors, downtime, and hacks. Which are key to a right SEO strategy.
  • SEO Consulting: we can help you discussing these topics and also helping you to find the right person or agency for your business.
  • SEO Audits: We can help you identify issues on your website so you can work on them or outsource them.

Some links to learn and read about SEO:

Learning the basics of SEO:

  • https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/
  • https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/
  • https://www.semrush.com/blog/small-business-seo/
  • https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/
  • https://ahrefs.com/blog/small-business-seo/
  • https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo

Links from google:

  • https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide
  • https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/webmaster-guidelines
  • https://developers.google.com/search/news

About hiring the right person for SEO:

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/pfdnij/hiring_a_seo_person_where_to_start/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/78qla7/anyone_here_have_experience_working_with_an_seo/