Welcome to The New Google SEO Guide!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of continuously optimizing a website for higher rankings in the organic search results, with a focus on popular search engines like Google.

In fact, SEO can and should involve other disciplines within digital marketing, including:

In short, the sites that perform best in Google aren’t just good at SEO. They’re good at digital marketing in general.

When it comes to SEO for Google, keyword research should be your first step. That’s because you want to optimize your content around keywords that people type into Google.

And when you optimize your webpages around those exact search queries, you can rank your blog posts and landing pages for those terms.

Now that you have a list of keywords that your target customer searches for in Google, it’s time to write content. Fortunately, thanks to the keyword research you just did, this step should be pretty simple. All you need to do is write a piece of super high-quality content for each keyword on your list.

Now it’s time to optimize each piece page on your site around a single keyword. If you’re first starting out, this keyword should be a long tail keyword. Long tail terms don’t get a ton of search volume. But they’re less competitive. So you have a better chance of ranking #1.

Whether you go with a long tail keyword or not, optimizing your page for Google SEO is exactly the same. And this mini SEO checklist will help ensure that your page is optimized for SEO.

You probably already know that you want to use your keyword a handful of times on your page. However, it’s important to use your keyword at least once in the beginning of your content (ideally in the first 50-100 words).

From a Google SEO point of view, your title tag is the most important place to include your keyword.

Although not as important as your title tag, you do want to use your keyword once in your page’s URL.

This emphasizes to Google that your page is focused on that keyword and topic.

Optimizing images isn’t super important. But it can help.

Internal links can help Google find, crawl and index more pages on your site (and help them rank higher in the search results). Bonus points if you use keyword-rich anchor text in your internal links.

Use variations of your target keyword on your page. For example, if your main keyword is “kettlebell workout”, use variations like “kettlebell exercises” and “easy kettlebell movements”.

Although using keywords in your meta description isn’t a ranking factor anymore, organic CTR is. And when Google searchers see a compelling meta description in the organic search results, they’re more likely to click on your site.

In other words, your site should be mobile-optimized for Google searchers and search engine crawlers (also known as “spiders”).

Structured data (Schema) can help your site feature “Rich Snippets” in the search results.

Link building is the hardest (and most important) part of any SEO strategy. The simple fact is: if your site doesn’t have backlinks pointing to it, you’re probably not going to rank very well. It’s also important to promote your content via outreach and on social media.

You can technically practice SEO without a single tool. But it makes Google SEO significantly harder.

It’s time to wrap up this Google SEO starter guide with a few advanced strategies and tactics that SEO pros use.

If you want to learn even more about Google SEO, I recommend checking out The SEO Marketing Hub.

It’s a free library of SEO resources that covers pretty much everything you need to know about search engine optimization, including technical SEO, building backlinks, key Google ranking factors, advanced SEO tips, XML sitemaps, advice for avoiding duplicate content and more.