Let's get a baseline

Imagine you're about to embark on a fitness and exercise program. You're excited to start seeing results, but before you begin, you take a few crucial steps. You step on the scale, take body measurements, and maybe even track your current eating habits. This initial assessment gives you a clear picture of where you are today, so you can set realistic goals and track your progress over time.

Similarly, in SEO, it's essential to establish a baseline of your website's current performance before you start making changes.

This means analysing your website's:

Current rankings: Where do you rank for your target keywords?
Traffic: How many visitors are coming to your site each month?
Conversion rates: What percentage of visitors are taking the desired action (e.g., filling out a form, making a purchase)?
Technical performance: How fast does your site load? Are there any crawl errors or mobile usability issues?
Content quality: Is your content relevant, engaging, and optimised for search engines?

By taking this snapshot of your website's current performance, you'll be able to:

Set realistic goals for improvement
Identify areas that need attention
Track the effectiveness of your SEO efforts over time
Make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy

Just as you wouldn't start a diet without knowing your starting weight, you shouldn't begin an SEO campaign without understanding your website's current strengths and weaknesses. By establishing a baseline, you'll be able to measure progress, celebrate successes, and adjust your strategy to achieve even better results.

Let's start

When you're trying to gauge your website's true ranking in search results, don't fall into the trap of personalised results. Your search history, location, and other factors can skew the results you see, making you think you're ranking higher than you actually are for the average user.

To get the most accurate picture, always analyse your rankings using incognito mode. This disables personalisation, providing a clearer view of where your website stands in the vast landscape of the internet.

What is relevance?

There are websites, and there are people searching for information, products, and a bunch of other weird stuff using Google.

Now, imagine Google is a super picky librarian named Libby who knows everything about every book in the world.

You walk into the library and ask, "Hey Libby, I need a book about how to train my pet dragon." Now, Libby isn't just going to throw any old book at you. She wants to give you the perfect book.

So, she starts by looking for books that have the word "dragon" and "training" in the title or content. But she doesn't stop there.

She checks if the book actually talks about pet dragons and not, say, a medieval knight's guide to slaying dragons (because that's a whole different vibe).

Libby also considers if other readers found the book helpful. If a lot of people have read it, loved it, and recommended it, Libby gives it a higher rating.

She even checks if the book's author is a renowned dragon trainer or just some random dude who once saw a lizard in his backyard. So, when Google talks about "relevance," it's doing what Libby does – making sure the content on a website is exactly what you're looking for, based on keywords, user satisfaction, and authority.

It's like getting the best dragon-training manual instead of a cookbook on how to roast a dragon.

Thanks for the bizarre analogy, dude, how about we crack on and talk about "authority"?

Fair point.

Allright then, no AI generated images in this bit, instead we have a simple statement that explains what authority is.

Put simply, Google wants your website to be the best place to find out about information regarding your products or service.

That's it.

So, if you are a florist, make sure your website has all the information about where your flowers are from, why you get them from there, what people need to do to look after them, what type of pot they need, what soil, what feed, when to water, etc. etc. etc.

In short, if your website is about flowers, make it everything about flowers. If someone comes to your site looking for some information on where to plant, how to trim, how to feed, make sure you have that information.

People should be able to get all the information they need about flowers from your website.

There you go, you have the secret to great SEO.

Is that it?

You know what? It kind of is.

That's going to be what we base the rest of the course on, but you'll have noticed there's quite a big table of contents, so there's obviously a lot of parts to the whole process and that's what we're going to be investigating, working on and developing.

On the whole, we're going to be talking about content, lots of it.

Content is king, it's been what Google has been banging on about for ever. The reason it's so important is because anyone can create content.

There are no secrets to SEO, there's no trick, and you don't need to be some sort of technical wizard, you just need to be able to get your information out to your readers in a way that will want them to keep coming back.

Applying the 80/20 rule

At this point, a lot of SEO courses start discussing some extemely technical aspects of websites, we're not going to do that.

There's a rule I've discovered over the many years I've been doing this, and it's that you can get 80% of the benefits of SEO by simply doing 20% of the work necessary.

Sounds lazy, but it's not, it's just a matter of addressing the most important aspects.

You see, many people spend way too much time focussing on the really technical bits, obsessing over the smallest part of a site or page, installing software and trying to buy their way to better rankings.

But that stuff doesn't matter as much as content, and making sure you write the correct stuff that people want to read about.

So, in the next section of the course, we'll be focussing on doing something quickly.

Yep, we've faffed around enough, let's get going and let's actually do something now that will have a positive effect on your website ranking and get you on the road to beating the competition.

Technical stuff can come later

Absolutely, yes!

Don't worry, later on in the course we'll be properly nerding it up.

We'll get into all the crazy terms and phrases that everyone discusses so, when you're done, you'll be able to talk like a geek to people and impress them with your knowledge.

You'll learn about LSI, keyword density, semantic SEO, keyword cannibalisation and all that jazz. But, you really don't need that for now.

So let's get going!