Five Questions Every SEO Beginner Has – Answered

SEO is a critical element to every marketing strategy. But for beginners, it can seem like a foreign language. 

As somebody who lacked deep SEO experience and wanted to learn more this year, I had  many questions. Where do I start? What are the best practices? How does it even work?

I started my journey by taking the HubSpot Academy’s SEO Training Course. To make it easier for other newbies, this blog answers the five questions every SEO beginner has: 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which refers to the techniques that help your website rank higher in search engine results, like on Google. Proper SEO techniques help make your website and content more visible to people looking for information, services, or something else related to your organization.

For example, Corporate Ink is a B2B public relations and marketing firm that works primarily with technology companies. We run PR programs across several key B2B specialities, including AI, supply chain, procurement, robotics, enterprise risk, sustainability tech and more. Therefore, we seek to be found for keywords like supply chain PR, B2B content marketing, procurement tech and B2B tech public relations.

How does content get ranked?

Search engines leverage bots and algorithms that rank your content based on what is being searched. Specifically, there are three stages to content being ranked. Stage one is called the discovery stage, when search engine bots discover your content by crawling the internet. Stage two is called the relevancy stage, which is when search engine bots decide how relevant your content is by indexing it based on keywords. Finally, stage three is the authority stage. Here, search engines rank your content in search results based on your site’s SEO authority, which directly impacts ranking strength. 

A good way to think about it is like a librarian. A librarian finds newly published books, then categorizes them, and then decides which books to feature in the front of the store and which books to put in the back. 

How do I determine what my organization’s SEO authority currently is?

The most important thing to look at initially is the volume and quality of backlinks. Start by creating a backlink profile, which is a list of the sites currently linking to your site. This shows you the number of inbound links, unique links, and quality of links. To do this, you can use sites like Moz, Majestic, ahrefs, or semrush. 

I’ve heard about backlinking before – but what is it and how does it work?

A backlink is a link that comes from another website to yours. It could be placed in a section of text, on an image, or as a button — as long as the source is a different website, all these connections count as backlinks. 

Backlinks count as one of the top eight most important ranking factors for a Google search. Google cares about how interesting other people think your content is. It serves as a signal to the search engine bots that your site is a high-quality resource that people want to reference. 

How can I optimize my blogs to improve my SEO?

• Create a backlink baseline target. Start with determining which topics you want to be ranked for. Then, calculate a baseline target for how many links you’ll need to rank for a specific topic using a link-checking tool like Moz and calculate the average. You’ll need more than the other results on page one to rank high.
• Look for commonalities. See what common themes, words, structures, length, and other factors are consistent in your desired topic’s top ten results. You can utilize this information and apply it when drafting your own blog.  
• Build topical relevance. Determine which topics (not keywords) you want to be recognized for. Search engines are smart enough to recognize the connections across different search queries and group them into larger topics. So, publish a lot of blogs that answer questions about those topics and link these blog posts to one another, so search engines know they are related.
• Historical optimization. Optimize your old blog posts so they’re fresh, up to date, and can rank higher in search results based on your commonality research. Start with older blogs that already rank on the first few pages and are still relevant. Google rewards freshness, comprehensiveness, and accuracy. Try updating the statistics, add new sections or list items, update the publish date so it looks new, and add an editor’s note that the blog has been updated to reflect more current information. This should be a piece of your bigger strategy, as it’s a great way to build off existing authority. 

Implementing the latest and greatest SEO practices isn’t something that will happen overnight, but the long-term return is worth it. Be patient and diligent with your approach. Invest in the upfront research and don’t be afraid to test multiple strategies. Most importantly, have fun with it!

Have any questions? Drop us a line!