Transcript
For many people, SEO can be incredibly confusing. There’s a lot of terms like SERP, crawl, index, canonical tags, backlink, schema, and if you don’t understand the basics, it can become incredibly overwhelming.
That’s why I decided to put together this course to help junior SEOs, marketing managers, business owners, and anyone else understand what SEO actually is and what truly moves the needle.
But before we get into that, I want us to get onto the same page about what SEO is and how Google and the other search engines actually work.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines like Google.
In simpler terms, it’s about making your website easier to find when people search for topics related to your business. SEO can help you to attract more traffic, generate more inquiries, and increase sales, all without having to rely on paid ads.
Imagine that you’re a florist and somebody has searched for flower delivery in Manchester. You would want your website to appear near the top of the results in Google when somebody performs that search, since that’s the listing that’s most likely to get clicked.
And that’s what proper SEO can do for you.
Your website is often the first impression that you make with potential customers. And if you don’t appear on the first page of Google, it can signal to those customers that you are a much smaller player than you actually are.
Or worse, it can make them not even know that you exist in the first place, since most people will not go past the first page of Google. When you get on the first page of Google for your desired search terms, it can make all the difference to your business.
On top of that, you don’t have to pay per click. It increases the trust you have with these new customers since people trust the organic results that Google and Bing give back more than paid ads and it can drive long-term results because once a website has been well optimised, it can drive traffic for many many years to come.
Now, before we get into any technicalities, it’s important to understand what the term SERP means. SERP stands for search engine results pages. Now, these are the pages that come up when you type a query into a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Think of SERPs as a bridge that connects the user to the information that they’re searching for. For you to understand SEO, it’s important that you understand the structure of these SERPs and the different types of results that they’ll display.
For example, when somebody searches for something like plumbers near me, the SERP will likely include a combination of paid ads, a local map, organic listings, a people also ask section, and probably some more paid ads.
These elements are designed to provide users with quick and relevant answers. And this is where the battle for visibility begins.
Let’s talk a bit about how search engines like Google actually function. Now, it all comes down to three core stages.
The first is crawling. The second is indexing. And the third is ranking. Crawling is the discovery phase. This is where Google will send out its little spiderbot to scour the internet. The bot will go from page to page following links to find new and updated content.
Once a page has been found, it moves on to the indexing stage. This is where Google tries to make sense of what the page is about. It looks at things like the content, the meta tags, the overall structure of the page, and then files all this information away into a massive library known as the index.
The final and most important stage is ranking. Now, when somebody types a query into Google, it will dig through its index and find the most relevant pages. It will then order these pages based on hundreds of different factors like the relevancy of the content, the quality of the site, and more.
Our job as an SEO is to make sure that Google can easily find and understand our content and then convince Google that our page deserves a top spot in the rankings.
I designed this course to be the most straightforward and simple way to truly understand SEO. Every single lesson has been meticulously planned to make sure that you’re learning the right lesson in the right order with explanations that are as straightforward and easy to follow as possible.
You’ll learn how to spot issues, what needs to be done about them, and explain them clearly to others, even if you’re not the one that’s going to be implementing them. You’ll gain insights that took me years of real world experience to figure out.
I’ve worked on everything from small businesses to massive campaigns and know what really works and what’s just a waste of time. This isn’t some vague SEO theory. I’m going to be sharing things that you can implement right now and see real, measurable results in your business.
I promise that this course will be a worthwhile investment of your time and by the end of the course, you will have a solid understanding of SEO in the shortest possible time.