SEO for beginners: How to overcome your competition without sending gorillas to smash their market

Have you ever wanted your company to be ahead of the competition? Silly question, I know. If you’re even remotely ambitious and want your company to progress, of course you have! Since violence is not the solution, and it is also illegal, we will focus on some calmer and more legal methods for overcoming the competition – SEO.

SEO is like a baseball bat from a full tree: it hits relentlessly where it needs to and breaks the competition.

1. SEO keywords – What are keywords and why are they important?

When someone searches the internet and types certain keywords into a search engine, it returns results starting with the most relevant one. If those keywords match your keywords, your site will be returned.

This is a very simplified but approximately how internet search works.

To ensure that your website is the first in search results, you will need to research which keywords are the most searched for and most relevant specifically for each page of your website and make sure you use them in your content, meta descriptions, titles, and URLs.

2. Site speed – Site loading speed is more important than you think

Also, people are impatient – according to statistics, if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, about 70% of people will move on to the next site in the search.

This topic is quite complicated, there is a whole area that deals with it. What you can do to speed up your site is to reduce the size of the images you add to your website, use a caching plugin, preload images, and possibly change hosting, everything else requires deeper knowledge and a lot of experience.

Attention: If your website is made in WordPress and a site builder like Elementor, Divi, etc. was used for its creation, it will be difficult to achieve any significant result because these builders significantly slow down the site.

3. Optimizing your website for mobile devices

For a long time, the vast majority of people have used their phones to search the internet and it should be normal for a website to be adapted to all devices.

The trick is that everything may seem fine with the site on the surface, but Google and other search engines detect an error because, for example, the title is out of frame, the text is smaller than allowed, social media icons are less than 45 pixels, etc.

If search engines, more precisely their algorithms, determine that your website is not optimized for mobile devices, they will rank it lower in search results, which means that the competition will stay ahead of you.

Again, this is a field of its own and we are only briefly going over everything here, and to find out if everything is OK with your website, sign up for Google Search Console, and there you can track the status of your site. Read the instructions for use or watch the video at the following link: How to create a profile in Google Search Console and how to report a website to Google for indexing pages?

4. Quality content – If possible without using artificial intelligence

Quality has become a relative concept today because for customers who watch Jni ver or newly composed domestic films, quality content means swearing, violence, idiocy…

I would rather say that you need to find out what your customers are interested in and then write about it – of course, related to what you offer.

For example, you as my potential client are only interested in earnings, so I am writing to you in this context related to websites and marketing. I can go into technical details, rules, why and how something should be done… but in vain when no one will read something like that!

4.1. Write personally in your own style, because people will read it

Another topic that is very popular lately is AI or artificial intelligence.

You type in what you want to “write” (so-called prompts) and he or she, (whichever sounds more convenient) writes an entire blog post on the given topic. Sounds fantastic!

In practice, it’s a bit different, because the text that AI returns is not actually written to be read. As they say – it has no soul. I was among the first to use it to “write” posts, but I quickly gave up, because it wasn’t that – that. As much as I personally write poorly, that’s me and I don’t want to lose myself because of false productivity.

I’m not saying, it’s great for generating ideas, researching, creating materials, but only so much. Maybe one day…

4.2. Write regularly

As my former dorm roommate once said, “I bathe regularly, but not often!”

Once or twice a year also means regularly, but not often, so I would still modify the title to “write regularly and often.” It won’t be easy at first, but it would be good to write at least one quality blog post a week or every two weeks.

Remember to use keywords in your content, but don’t overdo it – search engines don’t like “keyword stuffing” (that’s when you’re designing websites and you write the website 17 times in one sentence – here, for example, I’ve already written website 3 times).

5. Building quality backlinks

Backlinks are links that lead to your site but from other sites that have some connection to your business. Quality backlinks are very important for SEO because they show search engines that your site is relevant and valuable, and therefore ranks better.

5.1. How to Build Backlinks?

It’s easy to say build backlinks. But how? How do these 17-year-old influencer lifecaches say “you need to have passive income,” and they themselves don’t even know what it means and how to achieve it? Although, living with your parents in your 30s comes across as passive income, so…

Let’s get back to backlinks. You can write a blog for other relevant sites, you can exchange links* with people with similar interests and businesses, pay newspapers to interview you, etc. It’s important to build authority in your industry.

*Above I said exchange links with people with similar interests. This can be more harmful than beneficial if done poorly. If you agree with a friend that you will link his site and he will link yours, you can be sure that Google will ban you. Many of them started doing this, so this method was blacklisted.

What you can do is hire someone else to help you:

For example, you sell boards (You) and have a carpenter friend (Person C). You need to find another person who deals with interior design or furniture sales (Person B). It is important that you all have your own website and possibly a blog.

You link Person B, who deals with interior design or furniture sales, in every blog post you publish on the topic of woodworking. Person B links the carpenter or Person C in their posts while Person C links your site as a source of quality wood material.

Everyone wins, everyone has quality backlinks, and Google loves you. This is called a win-win situation!

6. Measuring and Tracking Results

After you do all of this, you “only” have to measure visits and clicks on the site and use the results to further improve your site.

Use free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track traffic, keyword ranking, conversions, and other important metrics. Based on the analysis of the results, adjust your SEO strategy and continuously improve your positioning in search engines.

With these six steps, your company can easily outpace the competition through an effective SEO strategy, without the need for violent and unethical methods. Just be patient and consistent in your approach, and you will soon see positive results.

When your company is successfully ranked in search engines, the competition may wish they had gorillas on their side – but your success will be the result of a smart, legal, and peaceful SEO approach.

Boldizar S. Santo (Co-Founder)