SEO für Anfänger: 5 fundamentale Grundlagen
You will learn the five fundamental
SEO basics for beginners. No, we don't talk about details
like title tags or meta descriptions. From these 5 basics,
all the details then arise for you. Have fun! My name is Alexander Rus
and SEO is my bread and butter. On this channel we chat
about SEO and content marketing. If you want to learn how you can sustainably acquire
customers through your website, then subscribe to this channel right now. Now before we start with the 5 fundamental
SEO basics for beginners. The ultimate foundation for SEO
and all other marketing channels is a professional, clean website.
If you don't already have a clean, professional website at this point , then
creating one is your biggest growth driver. Only then should you consider
investing in SEO or other measures. If you haven't already, be sure to watch two
more episodes after this one, namely "Learn SEO: From Beginner to Real Pro in Record Time".
In it I mention tons of resources at different levels.
Depending on where you are right now.
And another very, very recommendable video is "Creating an SEO strategy:
simple instructions [for beginners]" There I also explain for small companies how
to compare yourself with the competition using a few key figures and
develop a meaningful SEO strategy based on that . But let's get started with the SEO fundamentals. Point 1 (preferably and
most often ignored) is goal setting. Put simply: What
do I want to achieve with SEO? But that's not a request concert, with the
restriction: For what is my offer relevant? And just to give an example
of what relevancy means: Let's say we're looking at the search results
for a specific search query and if everyone that appears in the search results here has
a huge selection of products on their If you have category pages and you
only have two products per category page, then you are not relevant here.
That means you won't be able to rank here and there's no point in trying
to rank here and hoping for a miracle.
So. The goal setting, why is it so important? Because: It decides all your
further decisions in the later course of search engine optimization
and other marketing measures. That means: What do you want to achieve through SEO? I now have a few example
goals (without specific numbers, because that's a
generic example for you): What can a goal be? For example: I want more
visibility/more traffic. Simply so that my company is more visible
online in a certain subject area. That means you would
choose topics and keywords that have a lot of search volume and the
whole thing is independent of conversions, so that you sell something or
generate any inquiries. Another goal could be:
You want to make more sales or profit. Then of course you would optimize for keywords that are close to the sale or close to the
request and that would be your focus.
Another goal:
You want to generate more visitors as a local business.
A local company can also be a chain, it doesn't matter now. That means you optimize for
local keywords on your website, maintain your Google My Business profile
and collect business mentions. Then, maybe as a leader in an area, you have that one important
ego keyword that you want to rank for. That means your goal is
to rank better for a specific keyword. Then you would, in a sense,
generate content around that keyword. We call this “content hub” in the SEO section
and you just optimize that hub. The other bells and whistles
doesn't matter. You only do that. Or you are concerned with brand building. What is important then: Of course you want to
cover the entire customer journey in order to become the point of contact for your topic. And as you can see here, depending on the objective , an SEO campaign and an
SEO strategy look completely different. In short:
What does the goal tell you? To a certain extent, it implies which
key figures then make sense to measure in order to measure success and which
strategies make sense or don't make sense at all.
Then we come to number 2: From keywords to topics/goals To put it simply: What is my target group looking for
and where is the demand? What is very important, in the field of SEO
is often an extreme keyword focus, that you think of these words all the time.
These words are super important because these are the words that your target audience is using
and I can use them to measure how great the demand is.
But what it's really about is: What does the user want to
achieve by entering this keyword? And that is very important as a mindset.
That's why I say "From keywords to topics/goals" So. If you now do keyword research, what
we very often see in practice, what we see with our customers etc. is that people often don't quite
understand what a Keyword research is. Keyword research is not just a
list of keywords, it also includes the website structure,
i.e. which URLs are actually on this website and in which hierarchy they are.
Then: Keyword research also actually includes the content strategy.
That means it's also about which words does my target group use, where
is the demand, for which search terms is my offer relevant, what content needs to be
written and then of course: prioritization.
That means, depending on what my objective
is, other topics need to be written first and of course based on
how the website is structured , other content needs to
be written first as well. That said, what does keyword research tell me? It tells me:
Which search terms are interesting for me? Where is there real demand? How should my website be structured? &
What should my content strategy be? Now, keyword research isn't
something you learn in 5 minutes. That's why I've written an incredibly
comprehensive guide here. Really handy with screenshots where
I use different tools.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter
if you're using SEMRush, Ahrefs, Sistrix , Keyword Finder, or whatever.
It's about you understanding the concepts, and now we come to an incredibly
important concept in this context, which is: Number 3:
Understand search intent Put simply, we do
n't see it as just any keywords and we need to create some kind of page there, rather
we want to deliver relevant content that matches the demand of the target group.
Never forget, and that's such a catch phrase that everyone always
says but nobody really understands: Never forget, you optimize for
people and their goals. Not for one or more search engines.
That's easy to say, but still everyone falls into this
trap of losing sight of it. It is always important to understand that we have
now done our keyword research and we know approximately which pages
we need – it is important to understand what users
want to see on this page for this search term.
There are different approaches
how you can find out. This can be surveys, this
can be your own research, this can be a survey of your sales
people, you can look at the competition, … But at the same time it is important to understand
what Google understands by a search term. To do this, you need
to look at the search results for that keyword. There's a video where I really
explain exactly how to do it. What
I think is often a mind blow for companies when it comes to search intention: It's not about the view from the inside
(i.e. from the company to the outside – how do we see the world), but: How
does the world see our area? That means:
What is important to the user? What does the user want to achieve? And how, if I can't deliver that now
, how can I deliver that? That means whenever you create a
page and write a text and so on, keep asking yourself honestly: Are you really the best
answer to the user's question? Because at the end of the day: every
keyword implies a question.
So. What does search intent tell us? Exactly, all these details that everyone always
asks, even though they are not at the point yet.
Namely: What should the Google snippet look like
(i.e. title tag and meta description)? How should the site be structured? What content do we need? Text.
How long should the text be? Photos.
Do we need graphics? Do we need any mini tools and so on. Sefa, a senior copywriter for us, has written the ultimate guide to
search intent. Where she really explains exactly how to
analyze the whole thing step by step. I would strongly recommend to everyone. Point number 4:
Referrals are power or influence As I said, in the SEO field, of course,
we call referrals backlinks. To put it simply: backlinks, i.e.
references from other domains to your website, are to be seen as recommendations. It
could also tend to be seen as a stable currency, i.e. more stable than the euro and dollar, for example. Provided, of course, that the
referring domains are reputable. That said, if these are some shoddy,
bogus spam sites, then those referrals aren't that valuable vs.
These are
any authorities in your field, then those referrals are insanely valuable. Very important, because very often in the
SEO area there is a discussion that this is no longer important.
Let's say there is now only the content or relevance factor. That would of
course throw the search results into chaos, because in principle anyone can write a relevant
article on a critical topic (including a medical topic).
But how do we know that we have
the necessary qualifications and authority? Google can only measure this via backlinks.
This means that
you cover your search intentions
or the goals of the user with relevant content (these were the first points). They are the basis for ranking
on Google. That means if you haven't even covered your keywords then you ca
n't rank anyway because what should Google play out? But many have semi-relevant content
and since every single keyword is a competition , it just so happens that in many cases
backlinks separate the wheat from the chaff. If you don't know about backlinks yet,
then there's this guide, where our Head of Digital PR, Basti, explains in detail how to approach the whole thing from the ground up and
then there's a video of me, where I show if you really start with a new website
, how to build your first backlinks. And then we come to our last
SEO fundamental, namely number 5: Healthy marketing mix
This is extremely important to me. To put it simply:
SEO must not be your complete marketing. That may sound ridiculous to you now
, but a lot of people think: "SEO" And that was the marketing concept – that
's not a strategy, that's called madness.
Because the visibility of your website on Google
and other search engines is not only influenced by classic SEO measures
(i.e. what kind of content you write and what you write in your title tag and
whether you build backlinks), but also by: How is your brand generally strong
in the minds of your target group? How's the reputation of your brand? What are your products,
services and your product and service selection? Is it big or small? Then of course the perceived customer and
user experience on your website and so on.
And of course your other marketing measures. That said, SEO is influenced by everything.
SEO doesn't exist in a vacuum. This means that if all of these points that have now been mentioned
are sparse or non-existent for you, then your SEO results will also be
sparse or non-existent. Accordingly, very important:
SEO is not a marketing ploy. SEO is there to serve a channel. Namely organic search and that's
not the easiest channel. The simplest channel is: I run a
campaign in Google Ads and off we go. But of course SEO has an
incredibly good return on investment (ROI) in the long term. That means it's a long-term thing.
Should I only do SEO? No, because then I
don't get any money in the beginning. That means I always want to run SEO and
Google Ads in parallel, because Google Ads gives me data about which keywords
convert well and I can then use that again in my SEO campaign and
with Google Ads I can spontaneously control how much I get in and
I can then scale the SEO in the long term and so on.
So. To conclude:
Very, very important, if you haven't done it yet: Watch the video
about "Learn SEO", where I just provide resources for different levels and
the video about "Create an SEO strategy". And that plus this video should be the
foundation to get started with SEO. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video and see you
next time. Bye!.
