What is SEO?
SEO or Search engine optimization is the process a website owner will use to increase his or her search ranking on the world wide web. This will ultimately improve the user’s visibility in the search engine and will lead to an increase in traffic to the website. For example, imagine a business sells men’s hoodies, chances are if they are not a well-established brand like Adidas or Nike people probably won’t be searching for their brand name. Instead what the business wants is to optimize for keywords surrounding their business like men’s hoodies or men’s clothing and optimize their website so they can rank as high up the search engine for people to find their website. The website owner wants to get their website on page 1 as nobody or barely anyone goes past page 1. Also, every business’s aim is to get to position 1 as this will ensure that they are above their competition. On top of that people are lazy and don’t always like to scroll to the bottom of the page.
Why is it important?
Firstly SEO traffic is a type of organic traffic, which means, unlike a paid ad it is absolutely free. So for a business owner, it would be still for them not to have SEO on their website as it is a free way to bring visitors to your site. Also, users tend to have a bit more trust in organic traffic on a search engine rather than ads. The biggest reason why SEO is important in my opinion is that millions of people go online and search for a product or service that they are in need of, for example, imagine someone locked out of their house and has no way of getting into their home, the first thing they are going to do is to search on Google for a something like ‘’locksmith near me’’. For a business not to have SEO on their website, they could be losing hundreds if not thousands of potential customers a day. Also if a business owner has had a website built and is ranking on page 5 for their relevant keywords or even worse than that not even ranking on page 1 for their brand name then they’ve wasted money on getting that website built.
How to learn SEO?
Youtube
Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google. With 800 million videos on Youtube, there are many videos that can provide you with the fundamental knowledge of Search Engine Optimization. In fact, all the people that I knowledge who are ‘’SEO experts’’ all got their fundamental knowledge by watching videos on Youtube. There are a variety of different channels on Youtube like Semrush, Moz, Ahref, exposure ninja, and many more which all offer free videos to get you started in SEO.
Online courses
The third way in which we can learn SEO is through an online course. In the current digital age, online courses have gained enormous popularity, especially during the covid 19 pandemic period when everyone was stuck indoors and wouldn’t able to travel to seek knowledge. In the year 2022, you can find an online course in any sector you desire to learn about. The many free digital marketing courses out there will touch upon SEO. If you want to go a bit further then you may want to enroll in a paid course this will most likely go a little bit more into detail and will give you more knowledge/skills. There are many digital marketing institutes that provide online courses which you can study at your own pace from the comfort of your own home, you just need to find the right one.
Agencies
The last and most effective way in my opinion to learn SEO is to get first-hand experience by doing some work experience for an agency. No matter how many videos you watch or books you read nothing beats learning a skill by doing a real-life task. All you have to do is get in contact with an SEO/digital marketing agency like Leapfrog Internet Marketing and express your desire to do some work experience with them for a day or two. Most agencies would be delighted to have someone work with them for a couple of days. And you never know that 2 days of free work may lead to a full-time role within the agency.
