BEGINNER SEO 1 (full free course!): Important Concepts & Basics
two things number one i am super proud of this beginner seo course but it was actually making me really sad i'm proud of it because i spent years on it because i actually had four courses that i redid i changed the videos i made it more concise and better i think this is one of the better courses i've ever created this is what i would give myself if i were in my first couple of years doing seo i truly believe a lot of the stuff is evergreen and it's super valuable i'm super proud of it but literally yesterday i'm sitting right here looking at my paid products dashboard and i see beginner seo and i'm like oh man no one's going through this it was a paid product but i wasn't selling it or launching it it was only for my online impact members which i only opened up once a year so no one was taking advantage of this so i don't like being sad and i figured you know what i'm just gonna release the entire thing right now on youtube for free in its entirety so that's what i did all right so it is long it's about three hours which is actually way shorter than it used to be like i said a second ago i'm gonna split it up over three videos don't skip around this very first module in this video contains a lot of super beginner stuff but also laced with evergreen seo strategies that will serve as great reminders even if you're a couple of years into your seo journey so without further ado i hope you enjoy this absolutely free no strings attached no upsells or pitches beginner seo course i'll see you on module one watch it all the way through go through at your own leisure happy seo is that a thing happy seo let's get started beginner seo so right off the bat i want to set some expectations i got my notes here in front of me that i want to show you we're going to talk about what we're going to learn what we're going to dive through can you see that and i want to like spoil it for you right off the bat my goal of this course is not to make you an seo master you're not going to know everything there is to know about building links you're not going to know everything there is to know about how to produce the perfect content how to use the fanciest tools like sem rush or ahrefs or screaming frog or anything like that that is not the goal of this course the goal of this course is to get you up and running in the game of seo or talk about what i mean by the game of seo the long-term game what to do on your blog what to do to promote all those strategies and tactics and theory and you know google rank brains and all the fancy stuff my goal of this beginner course is to get you up and running as quickly as humanly possible that's it that is seriously it to get from zero not knowing anything about seo i'm gonna assume you're pretty new in this course to getting up and running so that six months from now a year from now two years from now three years from now you will be a master of seo i mean that in the real sense of word like i can compete with anybody in my niche i can compete with the big brands in my niche on my topic six months 12 months 18 months from now it takes time to play the seo game if you don't know that already you're going to find that out very very quickly when you start to do this stuff but my goal is to take you from zero not starting not doing anything to i have all the pieces in place it's gonna take time to arrange them into the right puzzle but i got on my pieces and i'm up and running and now the only thing that's left for me to do after i complete this beginner seo course the only thing that's left for me to do is produce the content and execute the strategy did you get that i don't know that was a lot of big words uh that i threw in there not really that wasn't big words was that uh the only thing left to do after this beginner seo course is to execute the strategy and produce the content time and advanced techniques and strategies that we'll talk about in my events seo course or somebody else's advanced seo course that stuff comes later it's not important to you right now what is important is for you to understand what seo is and what you need to do on your blog today yesterday tomorrow this week and this month in order to benefit from the long-term stuff right the long-term butt kicking that you're going to do in google and that's the goal of this course i think i reviewed that like five times now the goal is not to make you a master seo the goal is to get you up and running as quick as humanly possible so you can go ahead and start to build the juice in google search results so you can start to generate some organic backlinks so you can proactively start promoting your content the right way that will benefit you for the long term up and running soon as soon as possible that's now six times that i've said that on this uh this little lesson here so that said let's dive in module one is always going to be like the facts the frequently asked questions like okay i'm completely new to this blogging thing completely due to seo what is this what do i need to expect what do i need to do how long is it going to take me what are the you know strategies we're going to be going for all that stuff we're going to answer first so that said let's dive in okay so why choose seo as a traffic source why is seo so great why do we hear so much about it uh there's two main reasons one let's actually start with number two it's easily the most useful traffic source this is the big one right that most people kind of realize already it's incredibly powerful to drive not only traffic to your blog but here's the thing relevant traffic to your blog blog not blog your blog even passive traffic that's relevant yes please right passive traffic traffic while you sleep now you of course have to put an effort up front to produce the content and do marketing strategies for seo we'll talk about that later but in general once the traffic ball starts rolling it is passing today i have got let me show you right here um just 163 it's like 10 a.m in the morning by the way 10 40 a.m in the morning i've gotten 163 different users that's not page views that's different users unique users uh this morning already just from organic no i'm sorry that was uh all of them this could be largely organic i promise you that uh there we go uh okay 122 users just this morning already just from seo excuse me i have not promoted my blog any this morning i've not done anything this is all traffic based on stuff i've already done and sometimes months ago right even years ago it's passive traffic eventually once you got to get the organic ball rolling and like i said just a second ago it's relevant why is it relevant because people are searching for something on google specific and then landing on the solution it's highly relevant to them their problems the solutions they're seeking the knowledge that they're seeking landing on your website and it's just a natural uh i was gonna say they're inclined to be impressed by your blog if it's good content if it actually satisfies their user intent of course which we'll talk about in a second but it's relevant right it's not just some random person landing on a random article that they may care about or may not care about no the nature of google searching for something they care about and then landing on your site means that they already have an uh ex include i don't know the word i'm searching for you'll have to give me some slack here it means that they care about the topic that's all i really wanted to say that's number two easily easily easily the most useful traffic source one more thing on this actually uh before i move on google in general was meant to drive blog traffic that's why google exists that's how google makes their money that's google's entire business model is allowing their users to come and search here for whatever i'm searching for this crazy little thing filmic pro log direct 709 lut you know what that means probably not unless you're a video editor but in general google wants me to find the answers to my question they want me to click through right here they want to show the best search result they want me to send these blogs traffic they want to send traffic to your blog that's it that's google's entire business model their entire business thrives on the fact that they send traffic to your block and everybody else's blocks right that's number two number one the process of seo is also incredibly valuable to your readers what do i mean by that what i mean is in order to rank an seo in order to get in these like top spots right here your content not only has to be good quote unquote in ear codes who knows what that actually means but it has to solve people's problems it has to give them what they're looking for in google right else google want won't rank you they'll push you down to page two page three page 175 who knows in order for your content to rank in google it has to be good and it has to be helpful and useful to people does this sound like another little benefit even outside of google even outside of traffic seo completely you want your content to be good you want your content to help people so the strategy for ranking in seo is also aligned with helping people it has to be else you'll never rank in google google wants to help their users your content has to help their users so you solve all these problems by producing good helpful useful content does that make any sense the process of seo also helps your readers by you producing the best possible content that's why i love seo personally is because it aligns with my mission to help people to save the world to make money by providing useful content it doesn't matter what your goals are what your mission is what your purpose is of your blog helping people providing value in exchange for money if you're doing this for side hustle it doesn't matter that aligns with the seo strategy i hope that makes sense uh let's move on to talking a little bit more about what is seo how does this process work in general what's the marketing strategy that we keep mentioning what does that actually look like i am going to assume that you are a complete beginner when it comes to all this and i want to kind of throw some terms at you actually i have like a list of some definitions that i want to go through really quick but in general i want to introduce you to what seo is what it is what it is not so blogger you you blogger user you're going to get to know each other quite well throughout this video let's start by going over a few basic terms here one by one seo obviously search for search engine optimization it's more than just google it could mean bing it could be youtube wikipedia any search engine that takes in user queries user questions like whatever i type in here and then spits back out an answer page uh trying to point them to a blog post or resources or whatever that's a search engine seo serp you'll see this engine results page what serp means is this when i type in how to uh install a toilet that's fantastic this what you're looking at right here is the search engine the serp this is the serp there you go and i've uh okay the next two are gonna take me half a second on page seo and off page seo uh i'm again i'm assuming you're a relatively new blogger or otherwise new to seo and so on kind of what google looks at we're going to talk about that a little bit more specifically in the next video but in general there are two broad aspects of seo and i'm actually going to open up my blog here and show you something um i'm going to show you two things actually on-page seo and off-page seo this is like the broadest two categories that google looks at when determining hey what shows up when somebody searches how to install a toilet they look at on-page factors i guess you could say and officers and there's a lot more that you can go under that stuff but in general that's like the two broad categories right i'm gonna go to a blog post any blog post we'll do i'm just gonna scroll down here and click blogging tools perfect here's my own post on page seo i control directly literally when google looks at this website or this blog post it's looking at everything on this page so what does that mean it means the actual words first of all there's a title uh here's some other text i don't really know what that is here's a title of my menu there's an image like back in here somewhere there's these weird things there's a bunch of text and images and all that great stuff all that's on page seo as well as how quickly did this load if i like reload it like how quickly did it go was it like super super quick ever did i get like a huge wait time as the images like loaded really slowly you know what i mean site optimization is the other thing you'll see i wrote that down here factors google is set on your site everything you can control directly words on the page and site optimization the big picture overview this is what you have control of a hundred percent in fact no one else has control over this except you everything you do in your content is on page seo uh how you format your titles and how you format your actual web what i'm looking at right here and how fast the website loads and we'll get into all that separately but in general on page seo okay moving on off page seo what is this literally everything else outside of your actual website so i'm on do even blog.com siteground at the moment i have like all these website files and there's the text and images and all that great stuff on page seo off-page seo is how many backlinks do i have roughly speaking that's the most important part there's maybe a little bit more to seo but in general it's looking at how many backlinks do you got like who else thinks this post is relevant i know pete thinks it's relevant i wrote it like pete definitely thinks it's awesome because i think it's literally the best post on the entire internet that's all my on-page seos else think google trusts or google has to trust both of us both me because i created the content i gotta like look at what pete did what pete thinks and i gotta look at what everybody else thinks that's off page seo i'm looking at back links right here it looks like there are three referring domains with 10 total backlinks pointing directly to this post right that's what everybody else thinks that's what google looks at as off page seo so if you're still with me that is like the big broad overview into just a few more definitions i'll make this video a tiny bit longer i want to go over a few other things that you're going to hear both in this course and everywhere else you learn about seo just these three there's a lot of definitions that you'll want to know eventually but right now i think i can tell anchor text what the user sees your readers your audience anybody who looks at a web page when they see a link right okay let's go through here this is a link name cheap right here let's find another one snappa right here um all the free stock pixels you can see i have these underlying this is the way they look on my site uh what is the anchor text for this one right here it is all the free stock those four words that is the anchor text right the actual url called thefreestock.com uh of this one short pixel is the anchor text the actual url i'm looking like down here by the way it's actually do evenblog.comshortpixel as my affiliate link for shortpixel but this is the anchor text got it you're gonna hear this a lot it's basically your popularity determined by google by a number of factors what is your site's authority what is your page's authority literally like do you even blog.com has a certain authority in google's eyes and do you even blog tools also has a separate authority a page authority so right off the bat let me tell you this if you use seo tools like cmrush ares kw finder mods any of that stuff you will see the kings it's arbitrary it's very general it's not exactly what google thinks my site i'm not the 2.1 millionth ranked site on the entire internet in google's eyes i'm not this is just a estimate that's why they say in ahrefs google's rank but in general how authoritative is my site on my topic that's what authority general means you'll talk about uh google juice i'll use that term quite a bit like what's your google juice how authoritative on any given topic if i wrote about horse manure this is that's a really bad example i don't know why that came to my head right now if i wrote a blog post on do you even blog about horse manure i probably would not have that much authority on for that blog post it would not have a great authority in google's eyes why because i don't write about horses i don't write about manure i don't write about farming i don't write about any of that stuff i write about digital marketing and blogging right i have zero authority when it comes to horses the way it is what about you if you have a personal finance blog and now you're trying to rank for how to grow tomatoes in a homemade garden do you have authority on that i don't know maybe you do maybe you've written a few posts about farming and gardening and stuff like that so far maybe google sees that as authority but that's what i mean by authority it's basically your popularity like among all the sites on the internet how authoritative is yours on your given topic i think that's important i probably should put that down here last thing index uh i will ask like is your website what do i mean by that is does google know it exist when i type in site do you even blog dot com we'll talk about uh this right here later site and then colon what i'm checking for search console which we'll dive into to check this stuff oh look i see results if it had zero results that would mean my site is not indexed in google google does not know my site exists um that's what it would mean but google does obviously because like google knows my site exists boom it is indexed whenever i publish a new post it's not immediately indexed like instantaneously right google has to send out their crazy bots to like search my site and discover new podcast episodes i do and new images that i upload it has to be found before it shows up in search results that's called indexing got it good this is what i want to conclude with in this video what is seo it's trying to get to show up in serp search engines results page right that's literally what this is we're trying to get your site to show up and then have people click on it to bring you blog traffic that's what seo is a very broad picture of seo but i want to conclude of like what we're going to be doing next the first thing we're going to be doing is understanding user intent it's going to be the most important video you watch in this entire course it's going to be the most important thing in seo period without it you have zero ranking zero traffic right user intent we're gonna go with that in the next video or two then we're going to get your site optimized the very basic stuff right i don't want you to spend more than an hour on this but we're gonna go through i'm gonna show you what you need to do today this week this month whatever in order to get the basics of site optimization so google can help you rank higher we'll talk about that separately but that's what we're gonna do next after that we're gonna have a very basic content plan based on keyword research for google we're gonna do this together an hour on it you're fired right at this point in your blogging career i don't know what month you're in month 0 month 6 month 12 whatever if you spend more than an hour on keyword research i think you're doing it wrong at this point later on we can get fancy you can use tools like if you really want to you can do advanced competitor research to try and like find the perfect keywords but you don't need that right now anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you an seo course like me right you don't need it right now what you have in this course is we're gonna get you a basic content plan now you're gonna produce the content we'll talk about how to structure and present your content so that you have the best chance of ranking we talk about that in great detail actually because that's very important stuff to learn as soon as humanly possible with you all of your blogging career you need to learn that now so we're going to spend the most time on that and then we're going to plan for the future we will talk about backlinks and doing some guest posting and outreach and infographics and maybe some of that stuff that uh you can use to generate off page backlinks from other blogs and stuff like that but in general you shouldn't be obsessing over that right now you should be putting most of your time and energy 98 into this right here banging out constant on a consistent basis that is pleasing to you and therefore pleasing to google so that's what we're going to spend the most time on going forward but before we do that we have to understand user intent and get our site set up so we're doing that in the next several videos let's go all right all right let's answer this frequently asked question this fact facts here how long is it going to take me to rank to start building traffic in google in seo how long it's going to take seriously okay i have several blogs pulled up here some analytics some stats and right off the bat before we go into this any further i want to say it takes a while that's it now this is silly because it could take you a year it could take you three years it could take you four months i don't know but it takes longer than a week it takes longer than a month it takes longer than several months in order to really get the ball rolling look at this right here this is do you even blog this is my site i did not do any seo for the first six months i just published i did lots of podcast interviews i got lots of good backlinks but i wasn't actually blogging i was podcasting this entire time right here i started seo around here with very difficult keywords how to start a blog is an extremely difficult keyword it wasn't until a year was this june 2017 here is june 2018 about a year later right here this is about a year 20 50 between 30 40 50 users a day maybe that's about uh a hundred page views a day right it wasn't until um six months there's six months this is like last october november now it's really just starting to pick up i've started to produce a little bit more content recently i had one post in particular that was very uh christmas driven and that got a lot of searches that's why this like thing is right here but you can see in general like it's been going up and it's been taking a long time this is a year and a half after i started now i'm not saying i stink at seo i target extremely hard keywords and i'm also a podcaster i'm not blogging every week uh let me show you a few other people's sites that might be this for one this one's gonna be extreme i'll just tell you right now the traffic value is a million in a refs uh let's start with kellen the savvy couple he has been doing really great this is really great he started way back well let's just say a long time ago a long time ago he's had this domain he started blogging actively about january 2017 which would be a little over two years ago at the time of this recording a little over two years now he's doing great the past couple of months he's really started to take off last summer about six months ago he started this gradual incline in the past two or three months he's starting to skyrocket even more but it's been over two years since he started which was like right here started two years to get to this point he's doing really really really well now really well look at this like really well lots of referring stuff so dollar sprout jeff and ben this is an extreme example first of all this is not their first blog they've been blogging for a while past this they had a ton of followers to just kick start their blog right off the bat for guest post opportunities and traffic especially on pinterest these guys did not start from scratch and you are not going to see these results period you just small i'm not going to see these results you're not going to see these results this is the exception to the rule but they've done like amazing things in about a year they started uh november super late 2017 and now it's early 2019 so about 14 15 months they have been able to grow like this it's just incredible results this is the exception rather than the rule but even here you'll see that's uh referring to mates where's traffic organic traffic roughly this still look how long it took like it still took almost an entire year to really get to before the hockey stick now they're just tremendous exponential growth they're just crushing it but it took a while for these keywords to even take off now did they start producing content right here no they started producing content way back here it literally just took this long to get going and you'll see there's some bumps in here i don't know what this was but in general the huge crushing exponential growth didn't happen until a while later and this is an extreme example and that still was the case right olivia i hope she doesn't mind me sharing this birdsofafire.com uh blogger use student um she did not do any seo for the longest time she has been she's had this blog for quite a while uh started doing seo she a blogger youth student like i said success story started back in early summer 2018 about seven eight months ago now and at this point she was lucky enough to already have several referring domains i believe by this point no actually she didn't i kind of started uh well yeah yeah a little bit earlier about five six months earlier i guess in general i don't know what that is but that's not normal in general like the backlinks and referring domains you can see she had a few right off the bat there we go that's what i really wanted to show just because she's a personal finance blogger she left some comments she got some mentions and referrals but she didn't start doing organic uh like seo strategies until six months later and she's been doing quite well since then of course but still that took a long time it took a long time so what i'm trying to say the point of this video is to don't give up now and six months from now and a year from now depending on your keywords as well by the way dollar sprout these are much much much much easier keywords to get than a lot of the other ones they're not super easy i'm not saying i'm not trying to discount what these guys have done over at dollar spout they've done amazing things don't get me wrong but it is keywords uh that are a little bit easier than the digital marketing keywords the seo keywords if you're trying to start an seo blog good luck if you're trying to do blogging keywords like me over here uh i'm just gonna tell you it's stuff out there by the way jeff and vin found this out too they have a blogging blog and it was a lot harder they got a lot better results on this personal finance keywords same thing that olivia's been targeting mostly over here it depends on the niche right now exercise uh paleo diet keto diet that sort of stuff is kind of a wide open field in terms of seo it's relatively easy to start ranking quickly for various stuff uh so it depends on your niche that's the answer to my question how long does it take to rank in google a while longer that's the right answer how long does it take longer longer than you ever thought possible to rank that said it depends on your niche and the keywords you're targeting right okay you got it it takes a while don't give up be patient it depends on your niche what you're blogging about if you're doing digital marketing and blogging and seo those are really tough keywords you get people like neil patel out there uh and people like me competing against you for that matter um personal finance a little bit easier but personal finance obviously proves still pretty tough um food also pretty stuff like recipe blogs it can be tough not all of them but there's a lot to choose from there personal finance uh we already covered that sorry um exercise and dieting and food health nutrition a little bit easier right now that might change going forward parenting is probably around that category and then even smaller niches that are you know below that stuff it might even be easier so it depends on the niche your topic how easy those keywords are and other than that longer right it takes a lot of time to start building up backlinks to start generating shares and stuff that's going to rank you in google it takes a while right i could have just made the video 10 seconds long it takes a long time you just got to get used to it you got to play the long game sweet let's go moving forward all right this is the most important lesson in this entire course i'm not joking over the next couple of months or the next couple of weeks however long it takes you to learn the ins and outs of how to produce the right kind of content on-page seo to learn about doing some guest posts for backlinks or strategies or whatever strategies tactics all that great stuff will be useless if you don't heed these words are you ready for this user intent you see that think about this what does google care about google doesn't care about you google doesn't care about me this seems a little negative by the way but it's not a promise google doesn't care about any of our blogs they don't care about any of that stuff what does google care about google is a business it's a publicly traded company google cares about wait is it a publicly traded company i actually don't know the answer to that and made me question myself now google cares about profits and bottom line and making its ceo happy and shareholders happy and all that great stuff how do they do that user intent google cares about making googlers happy right when somebody goes on google and they type in best chicken pot pie recipe they want that person to get what they're looking for that seems pretty obvious but is it think about it just a little bit more when people go let's say you're on a travel blog by the way uh how to travel hack what does google want to show the best optimized page no the page with the most backlinks that has something to do with it but no google only wants to show what will satisfy that searcher the googler's user intent they want to find the best chicken pot pie recipe the best travel hacking uh overview instructional how-to page if you will that's why they're searching when people start how to start a blog what are they looking for exactly a long how-to article a video a podcast audio an image infographic a short form quick win sort of thing a product per se a hosting package i don't know do you know the goal of this entire course is to help you understand how to satisfy user intent that's it seriously that's it what does google care about google cares about its users they want their users to be happy else google doesn't make any money and they go out of business and we never hear about them again bing takes over the world right google cares about satisfying user intent with their search results so that's your goal that's the big point of this video satisfy search intent to satisfy it first of all you got to know what googlers are looking for they could be looking for a product they could be looking for best vacuum cleaner 2019 reviews or vacuum cleaner reviews what do you think they're looking for they're looking for a review but they're also have the intent to buy so they need what will help them bridge that gap how to start a blog they're not looking for a product per se you'll see a lot of advertisers advertising to those people because blogging is lucrative if you haven't figured out already that's what i do for a living uh what about best chicken pot pie recipe are they looking for a product no they are looking for a recipe specifically a how to do this chicken pot pie which they're going to make tonight for their family and their kids they don't want to take a long time etc right satisfying this is what will get you in google search results it will get you rankings it will get you backlinks it will get you profits from affiliate links and leads into your product this it starts with this user intent by far the most important lecture i want to say lesson and lecture session section uh the most important thing you'll hear me say in beginner seo period satisfy user intent in order to do that you have to figure out what are people looking for and then you have to produce that content sometimes it's a video sometimes it's a blog post sometimes it's a product with intent to buy something sometimes it's a review sometimes it's knowledge that's what people looking for how to start a blog are generally seeking by the way the knowledge the steps they need to take in order to install the website get their own domain name set it up where they can start writing and start blogging and start producing content and whatever else their goals are list building or making money side hustles whatever right knowledge user intent understand what googlers are looking for give it to them that's it that's super simple and incredibly difficult i get you by the way that's why i make the rest of this course and advanced seo and stuff like that is because satisfying that user intent is incredibly difficult and telling google about it is even more difficult right through the promotion through indexing stuff that we'll get to in just a second but in general i'm making this video a little bit long for a reason here and that's because this is incredibly important you must understand the user intent behind the keywords and search queries that you were trying to rank for so you can satisfy it that's it
