SEO Fundamentals: Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] Hey everyone, my name is Sam Oh and welcome to the SEO Fundamentals course by Ahrefs. In this course, I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of SEO with a heavy focus on execution. And while it's a beginner's SEO course, I don't want you to be fooled by the word

[00:15] beginner. Even for an eight-figure business like ours, we don't do anything crazy technical or complicated. Right from the start, we stuck with the fundamentals of SEO that led to compounded growth. And today, our site gets over a million monthly visits from Google Search alone, making

[00:31] SEO one of our most effective strategies to get traffic to our site. So the course is broken down into four modules, plus this video, which is more of an introduction to the course, as well as an

[00:43] SEO 101. In this video, we'll go over the basics of SEO and cover things like what it is, why it's important, and how it works. You'll then move on to module one, which is on keyword research.

[00:55] Throughout these lessons, I'll show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your business. It'll also set the foundation for the next module, which is on-page SEO. In this module, we'll talk about optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords.

[01:09] The next module will be on link building. This is one of Google's most prominent ranking signals, which has proven to contribute to higher rankings in search. Finally, we'll finish off the course with the basics of technical SEO,

[01:21] which will mostly be about best practices and website maintenance. And we'll be releasing a module each week to give you time to actually apply what you've learned to your website. So if you're not subscribed, then make sure to do that and hit the bell icon so you don't miss out on the rest of the course.

[01:37] All right, let's kick things off with the SEO basics. We'll talk about what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and how Google works. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's the process of optimizing content

[01:50] to be discovered through a search engine's organic search results. Now let's talk a bit about how they work. If you completely new to SEO then it easiest to think of search engines as libraries But instead of storing books they store copies of websites and web pages So when you search for a query the search engine will then look through all pages in

[02:10] its index and try to return the most relevant results. And SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result. Now, you might be thinking, why should I focus on SEO when there are so many other marketing

[02:24] mediums? Well, there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization. And in my opinion, these three things make SEO the best traffic source. Number one, unlike paying for ads, search traffic is free.

[02:39] Number two, organic traffic is typically consistent once you're ranking high. Whereas other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing. And it makes sense because social media networks are designed to service fresh content.

[02:56] Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box. Whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information. And the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month.

[03:09] And number three, you have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn't have access to otherwise. In fact, as of October 2019, there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world.

[03:22] And almost 4 billion of those people are Google users. This is why search engine optimization is an $80 billion industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today.

[03:35] Everyone wants their business to get discovered, and SEO is the perfect way to do that. Now let's briefly talk about how Google works, and there are two parts to this. The first is calling and indexation, and these two things are what actually allows Google to discover webpages

[03:50] and create their search index. So to actually attain information, Google uses crawlers, also known as spiders, which gather publicly available information from all over the web.

[04:02] The spiders will start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds Then they follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages And this process goes on and on allowing them to collect a ton of information They then take

[04:18] all of this data back to Google servers to be added to their search index. And that's what people like you and I are searching through when we key in a query in Google. Now, if you were to search for something and Google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page,

[04:32] then you end up with really bad results. This brings us to the second part, which is Google's ranking algorithms. Google has hundreds of ranking signals and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. So to be frank, no one

[04:48] knows exactly how their algorithm works, but they've given us clues and some guidelines to better understand the factors that are most important. In addition, third-party companies like ours have done studies to test and better

[05:01] understand these factors. Now, I won't bore you with over 200 rankings and notes, many which are just speculation at best, but I do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you'll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint.

[05:15] First are backlinks. Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another, and Google has said on their How Search Works page that if other prominent websites link to a page, that's proof to be a good sign that information is well

[05:30] trusted. The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes. When a page receives a backlink, it's essentially another website vouching for the content on the page. And the more votes you get from credible sources, the higher the

[05:45] trust. And we also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page's organic traffic. Second is search intent, which represents the reason behind the searcher's query.

[06:00] And if you think of Google's goal for search, their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query. So with that said you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top pages for the query you want to rank for For example if you search for slow cooker recipes you see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list

[06:21] of slow cooker recipes. So if you try and rank a product page where you're selling the slow cooker, you won't be matching search intent and therefore you won't rank. Now if we change the query to just slow cooker, you'll see that the dominant types of pages are e-commerce category pages. So if you

[06:38] try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes, then you probably won't rank because you're not matching search intent. This is a critical concept to understand, and I'll share a simple three-point checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query in the next

[06:53] module. And third is content depth. Search engines are made up of computer programs, so they can't actually read and understand text like you and I would. Nevertheless, Google has poured billions

[07:05] of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree. But it's your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject. For example,

[07:17] if you look at the top-ranking pages for the query, How to Drive a Car, you'll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt, familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals, adjusting your seat and mirrors, and other things that a first-time driver may not know.

[07:33] Basically, you want to be able to answer the searcher's query the best that you possibly can. And naturally, it should lead to content that has depth. Now, it's important to note that depth doesn't always translate to length.

[07:46] For example, a topic like how to turn off iPhone 12 doesn't need to and shouldn't be long. In fact, the top-ranking page is only 185 words. But the content itself solves the user's query from start to finish.

[08:00] Alright, so the basics are in the book and it's time to move on to the Keyword Research module, which will be published throughout this week. So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future lessons. And if you're watching more than a week later from this video's publishing date, then just

[08:14] check the description where we'll leave links to all of your other lessons in the course. I'll see you in the next module.