What Should I Do If I Want To Start With SEO In 2021
By: Brian Petersen
Tags: Seo Tips For Beginners, SEO, Startup Lessons, Marketing, Online Marketing

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

If you are brand new to SEO and want to hit the ground running, here are five things you should pay attention to in 2021.

Even you are brand new to Search Engine Optimization. It doesn’t need to be complicated to get started.

Google Core Web Vitals:

Google has a heavy focus on the excellent user experience, also known as Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and loads blazing fast.

Google has already announced that in May 2021, load speed is a ranking factor — so fix it before may!

So a shared Webhosting $3.95 per month account is probably not the best place to host your website.

Here are the five most important things to focus on in 2021:

Act as a business if you want to be considered as a business

Google puts a great effort into fighting web spam — especially sites that don’t seem to have other purposes than ranking in Google and make an income from affiliate income or ads.

If you are running a business, try to act like a business — list your phone number, business address, terms and services, and other legal stuff.

Who are you and your business? Use an “About us” to tell about your company, your staff, products, or services.

Keyword research — What keywords are your users using?

It all starts with a user typing a keyword into Google. You need to know what kind of keywords your users are typing in.

You also need to know what kind of search volume (how many times a keyword is typed into Google monthly).

You can use different tools, and if you are on a shoestring budget, you can start by using these ten free keyword tools.

Content is still king.

My best advice is: Write for the users, optimize for Google.

You need to engage with your users, answer their questions, inform and entertain them.

You need to be better than your competitor — if your competitors on page one in Google is using an average of 1500 words, it is pretty safe to predict that you don´t have much of a chance to outrank them with a 350-word article.

You need to make your content more engaging for the users, focus on the user intent behind a search query: What is it the user wants to achieve by typing in a specific keyword in Googe?

Perhaps the user intent is buying a product, a search for a review, additional information, or questions.

It doesn’t need to be hard to create content optimized for SEO. Please read this blog post I made.

Onpage optimization

No matter how good content you create, it would help if you had a strong foundation so Google can read, index, and rank your content.

Structured data, SEO friendly URLs, and keyword optimization — many things can be optimized, which would help Google favor your website.

Fabian has created quite an impressive blog post about how you can structure your onpage SEO. You can read the onpage SEO blog post here.

Link Building — Still a reliable ranking signal in 2021

Most people that are just getting started with SEO seem to struggle with link building.

Even experienced SEO´s can have a hard time locating and obtain the right type of backlinks.

Beginners often make a giant mistake and think that link building is a pure numbers game — the more, the merrier.

Building a ton of low-quality backlinks can end up harming your website, so don´t buy links on Fiverr or similar places.

Google is smart enough to determine if a link has relevance and authority.

Your goal should be to aim for high authority links from websites within the same niche as yours.

It might be a bit overwhelming trying to locate links, but the good thing is that there are tools to help you with the entire process.

You can target sites based on specific keywords and locate relevant niche directories or websites to publish a guest blog post.

There are several more features, and you can read my Link Assistant review here.

Final thoughts — If you are still with me! :-)

Now you got a quick overview, and of course, there are many moving parts in SEO.

The good thing is that it is never too late to get started. Starting a brand new website is often easier compared to the job of optimizing a big established website.

My partner in crime, Fabian, has also written a quick guide to Search Engine Marketing you might find interesting.

You can also download our free Ebook on our website, SEO GEEK LAB.

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