5 Things Beginners Should Know Before Doing SEO for Websites

So you’ve decided to start looking into SEO services for your website? You’ve come to the right place. The fact that you’ve found this article shows that I know how to do SEO. I will break down how SEO works extremely simply so you know what to do before you do SEO for websites.

Even better, I’ll use examples from this blog and article to show you exactly how it works.

What is SEO?

To put it simply, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the amount of traffic your site gets from search engines.

All of the work that goes into ranking your content on Google is part of SEO. This includes looking for the right keywords, writing the article, promoting it and more.

Companies love SEO because it’s a form of free, organic traffic for their business. If you can get thousands of your ideal customers to your site for free, the investment in SEO will reap extensive rewards.

Let’s take a look at the term CRM (customer relationship management) for example. Many companies are looking to rank for this term to sell their software, services, etc.

I’m going to use a tool called Ubersuggest to get an estimate of how many views companies are getting for this term. Here’s a screenshot of the result below:

As you can see, Salesforce is bringing in over 30,000 visitors every month to their blog “What is CRM”. Throughout that blog, they can add links to their services and get hundreds if not thousands of new customers.

If the average small to medium sized business got thousands of visitors each month for free, it could multiply their business. This is the true power of SEO.

Let’s explore what you should know prior to doing SEO services for websites.

1. You need to understand how long it will take to see results

One of the primary reasons new companies fail with SEO is that they don’t understand SEO is a long-term investment.

I know it’s not popular to hear and you expect to see results in a few days, but it’s the truth. Even the best SEO provider in the world cannot guarantee you quick results. If they do, run away as fast as you can.

Let’s take a look at my blog for example. This is my 51st blog post and I’ll show you my Google Analytics for all of my page views, sessions, users, etc.

At a first glance, any business owner would not be happy with this result. Imagine you pay for 50 articles and you’re only getting 7 users in a week seeing the content.

Am I worried? Absolutely not. This is because I understand it takes roughly 8 to 9 months for new sites to have their blogs reach maximum page views/ranking on Google.

If I did not understand this, I would’ve probably quit already.

The question is are you willing to wait that long to start seeing results for your business? If your domain has been active, it will likely take much less time. It will still be several months before you start ranking for a topic.

The 50 articles I’ve written so far will likely bring in 15,000 page views each month by the end of the year and that’s a very conservative estimate.  Am I willing to wait that long? Absolutely, because I’m focused on the long-term benefits of my blog.

Getting an extra 15,000 visitors to your site every month is worth the wait. Be patient and trust the process.

2. SEO services can be costly, especially with providers that are really good

I cannot stress this enough, stay away from low cost SEO providers.

The chances of a very cheap SEO provider giving your business results are slim to none.

When you Google pricing for SEO services, you will likely see ads like this:

This is incredibly misleading and borderline fraudulent. When you see these kinds of offerings, you are likely working with an international business that’s operating from a developing country.

Are there great international companies that know how to do SEO well? Absolutely, but the chances of you finding them and at that price is nearly impossible.

For SEO, you have two options: learn how to do it yourself and write/outsource the content or hire an agency or individual to do it.

Either way, it will cost thousands of dollars.

It can be frustrating to pay that kind of money and not see the results you want, so it’s very important to pick a provider with a track record of success.

Those who are very good at SEO services will charge a lot more than your average SEO provider; that’s what I’ve seen from experience.

3. Keyword research is crucial

One of the most important aspects companies that are new to SEO must understand is the concept of keyword research. Keyword research is the process of searching for and analyzing keywords relevant to your niche.

With proper keyword research you can find keywords that you can rank for easily on Google. Let’s take this blog post for example:

To start off, I was looking to write a blog post about SEO. This is because SEO is very important to my niche (blogging and freelance writing). I used a tool called Ubersuggest (tutorial linked here) to find keyword ideas that I can rank for on Google.

I typed in the main keyword “SEO” on Ubersuggest and got some recommendations for content. Here’s what I found on Ubersuggest:

As you can see, the term SEO for websites has 3,600 monthly page views on Google. If you look to the right, you can see a SEO difficulty score of 27.

Ubersuggest gives SEO difficulty scores between 1-100. Anything below 35 is a relatively easier term to rank for.

That being said, if I write a great blog post on this keyword, I will have a high likelihood of ranking for this term on Google.

This is the kind of process you need to follow for creating every blog post. If you hire an SEO provider, they will do this for you.

By going after keywords that your audience is searching for, you can rank easier and ensure all of your blog posts will get views.

Just writing blog posts without keyword research will not produce any results. Keyword research ensures you write content that people are searching for instead of assuming what people are searching for. For example, if you’re in the train services industry, some lucrative keywords you can target include “split ticket” or “split ticketing“. These are transactional keywords that are directly linked to a service you’re providing. If you rank well for these keywords, you can bring organic sales to your business.

4. Focus on only high ROI SEO activities

SEO is one of the most technical niches and it’s very easy to go down the rabbit hole of technical jargon.

There are only a handful of things that are truly important to SEO. This includes activities like publishing blog posts, keyword research and guest posting/link building. If you’re not doing any of these activities, you’re basically wasting your time.

The most important out of all of those is publishing high quality content. If you publish high quality content over a long period of time, this will be the single highest ROI activity you can do.

Let’s take my blog as an example. I started this blog on December, 28th 2020. Since I began this blog, it has been very easy to get distracted with changing themes, fonts, looking up domain names, etc.

The truth is none of that matters if I’m not getting traffic to my blog. I decided to focus solely on my highest ROI activity: publishing high quality blogs.

Since I made that transition, I’ve published over 50 blogs in less than 4 months. At this rate, I will have hundreds of high quality blog posts by the end of the year.

The main takeaway from this is that if you’re not publishing content or preparing to publishing content each day, you’re doing something wrong.

Focus and do the key activities that will drive the majority of your success.

5. SEO compounds and rewards the patient

SEO is a long-term game and the winners win big. What companies often seem to overlook is that the time it takes to rank with SEO is actually a good thing.

If you can outrank someone in a day, you can be outranked in a day also.

Companies who do SEO well enjoy getting thousands of free organic traffic for years, not months. If a new company comes in with a blog post, you can literally just update yours and make it better.

This makes it very easy for you to compete and win because you have domain authority with Google. As long as you keep updating your content occasionally, you can keep your ranking positions if there’s not too much competition.

The problem for most companies is delaying gratification. If you can wait 6-12 months for your content to rank, you can position yourself as a leader for your keywords.

On my blog, I’ve written over 100,000 words so far. What do I have to show for it? Nothing, at least for now.

The great thing is I understand the power of compounding in SEO and I’m willing to put in the daily work to maximize my rewards.

Let me show you the long-term approach and vision I have for this blog, so you can understand the power of SEO compounding.

Compounding for this blog

At my current content production schedule (about 1.5 blogs per day), I will have over 400 blog posts published by the end of this year alone. This is an extremely aggressive schedule because I’m trying to turn a profit this year for this blog.

Assuming these posts age and I don’t publish another blog post, I can make a very conservative estimate of getting 300 views per blog post each month. Obviously some will get thousands and some will get nothing, but on average 300 views per post is a conservative estimate.

So if you take 400 blog posts X 300 views per post, you will get 120,000 page views each month on my blog.

That’s insane, especially in a year.

Imagine if a business starting getting 120,000 visitors every single month to their website, they’d grow exponentially.

Obviously, I will publish more blog posts after this year, but this shows you just how much SEO can do for one blog in a year.

The great thing is you don’t need 120,000 visitors for your business to succeed. If you can get an extra 10,000 visitors organically to your site, that’s a huge win.

You can convert 1% of that 10,000 visitors to paying customers. That’s literally 100 new customers each month (or 1,200 new customers each year) organically to your business, if you can convert them.

Depending on the types of services you offer, that can be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in your business.

Final thoughts

These are just a few of the ideas you should know prior to doing SEO for websites. SEO is one of the most fruitful marketing endeavors you can start for your business. The ability to get organic customers to your site every month will allow you to spend less money on marketing and increase your profitability dramatically.

With the right timeline, strategy and effort, any business can position itself as a market leader in a certain category. This will help drive organic traffic to blogs and the overall site and drive business objectives.

A year from now, your business can be ranking for many keywords specific to your niche and location. This will ultimately help you beat competitors and attract new customers without paying a dime.

If you’d like to follow my progress on my traffic and income for this blog, check out my latest income report here. I detail exactly how much traffic I get, how many blogs I produced and other relevant information.

If you’re starting a new website for SEO, this will help give you a realistic idea of what kind of results you should be getting from publishing SEO articles. For more information on how to approach SEO as a beginner, check out this helpful article from the Search Engine Journal. It dives more into the details and inner workings of SEO and how you can start implementing the best SEO practices for your business today.