SEO For Beginners: A Basic Search Engine Optimization Tutorial for Higher Google Rankings

Summary

This tutorial offers a comprehensive guide to SEO for beginners, emphasizing the importance of optimizing websites for organic traffic. It covers keyword research, on-page SEO techniques like title tags and meta descriptions, and the significance of quality content. The video also delves into off-page SEO, highlighting the value of link building and effective outreach strategies. Finally, it underscores the benefits of blogging for SEO, illustrating how practical, valuable content can boost search rankings and attract potential customers.

Takeaways

• 🔍 Google processes 3.5 billion searches daily, indicating massive potential for businesses to be discovered online.
• 📱 Despite high search volumes, 91% of content gets no traffic from Google, highlighting the importance of SEO to stand out.
• 👀 SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is essential for attracting organic traffic and should be a priority for any online business.
• 📚 Understanding searcher's intent and creating content that matches it is crucial for optimizing web pages for search engines.
• 🔑 Keyword research is the first step in SEO, helping to identify what potential customers are searching for in relation to your business.
• 🌐 On-page SEO involves optimizing elements like title tags, meta descriptions, and content to make pages more attractive and relevant to search engines.
• 📝 Avoid keyword stuffing, which can harm your SEO efforts; instead, focus on natural language that appeals to both users and search engines.
• 🔗 Off-page SEO, primarily link building, is vital for improving search rankings, as quality backlinks act as 'votes' of trust from other websites.
• 🤝 Outreach for link building should be strategic, targeting relevant sites and providing value to increase the likelihood of gaining links.
• 💡 Blogging is an effective SEO strategy that can attract a larger audience and provide practical value, potentially leading to more business opportunities.
• 🔄 Continual keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building are essential for maintaining and improving search engine rankings over time.

Q & A

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's the process of optimizing your website and web pages to get free organic traffic from search engines like Google.

Why is it important to find relevant keywords for SEO?

Finding relevant keywords helps you understand what potential customers are searching for, allowing you to optimize your content to meet their search intent and improve your chances of ranking higher on search engines.

What is the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO?

On-page SEO involves optimizing the content and structure of your website to make it easier for search engines to understand and rank it. Off-page SEO refers to activities outside your website, primarily link building, to improve your site's authority and ranking.

What are title tags and meta descriptions?

Title tags are the clickable headlines that appear in search engine results, while meta descriptions are brief summaries that appear below the title tags. Both are crucial for enticing users to click through to your page.

What is keyword stuffing and why should it be avoided?

Keyword stuffing is the practice of overloading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. It should be avoided because it can harm user experience and lead to penalties from search engines.

What is the role of backlinks in SEO?

Backlinks act as votes of confidence from other websites, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. Quality backlinks can significantly improve your site's ranking.

How can you find websites that might be interested in linking to your content?

You can use tools like Ahrefs' Site Explorer to find websites that have linked to your competitors. You can also look for related businesses in a non-competing niche and reach out to form partnerships.

Why is blogging important for SEO?

Blogging allows you to create practical, valuable content that can attract links, engage your audience, and improve your site's authority. It also helps you target a wider range of keywords, driving more traffic to your site.

What should you consider when optimizing your URL for SEO?

Include your primary keyword phrase in the URL, use hyphens to separate words, and keep the URL short and descriptive. This helps search engines understand the content of your page and improves click-through rates.

What are some effective strategies for link building?

Effective strategies include guest posting on other blogs, forming partnerships with related businesses, and creating high-quality, shareable content. Outreach with a clear value proposition is key to obtaining quality backlinks.

How can you use Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer to find relevant keywords?

Enter a search query into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, adjust the country filter to your target audience, and analyze the search volume and parent topic to find the most relevant and popular keywords for your content.

What is the purpose of analyzing competitor keyword rankings?

Analyzing competitor keyword rankings helps you identify opportunities to target similar keywords, understand what works for them, and find gaps that you can fill with your own optimized content.

How should you structure your content for on-page SEO?

Use your primary keyword phrase in the main headline (H1 tag), write clear and engaging copy that naturally includes relevant keywords, and avoid keyword stuffing. Focus on providing value to your visitors.

What is the benefit of providing practical value in your content?

Content that provides practical value is more likely to be shared and linked to, as it helps people solve problems. This increases your reach and can improve your search engine rankings.

Why is it important to optimize for the searcher's intent?

Optimizing for the searcher's intent ensures that your content meets the needs and expectations of users, improving their experience and increasing the likelihood that they will find your page useful and relevant.

Outlines

00:00

🔍 SEO for Beginners: Attracting Traffic with Google

This paragraph introduces the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for driving organic traffic from search engines like Google. It highlights the massive volume of daily searches and the challenge of standing out, with 91% of content not receiving traffic. The speaker, Sam Oh from Ahrefs, offers a beginner-friendly tutorial on SEO, emphasizing the need for understanding searcher intent and optimizing web pages accordingly. The goal is to join the top 9% of web pages that successfully attract free, consistent, and passive traffic from Google.

05:04

📈 Understanding SEO and Keyword Research

The second paragraph delves into the definition of SEO and its significance in optimizing websites for organic search traffic. It uses the analogy of a library's filing system to explain how Google retrieves and ranks search results based on relevance and keywords. The paragraph also discusses the importance of understanding 'Google ranking factors' for making optimizations. It introduces a case study of a photographer in Toronto, emphasizing the process of finding relevant keywords and analyzing search queries to fit the business model, using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool.

10:05

🎯 On-Page SEO: Optimizing Content for Search Engines

This paragraph focuses on 'on-page SEO', detailing the steps to optimize web pages for search engines. It advises using the identified keywords in the page's title, meta description, and main content to align with user intent. The speaker warns against keyword stuffing and emphasizes the importance of writing for people first, then search engines. Tips are provided for crafting effective title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags, as well as the importance of natural keyword usage within the content. The paragraph also touches on the strategy of creating service-specific pages to target different keywords.

15:06

🤝 Off-Page SEO: The Power of Link Building

The fourth paragraph discusses 'off-page SEO', particularly the strategy of link building to improve search rankings. It describes links as 'votes' of trust from other websites, which can significantly impact a page's ranking on Google. The speaker explains the value of quality backlinks, especially editorial links, and introduces the concept of outreach to obtain these links. The paragraph provides examples of how to identify potential link partners, craft a compelling reason for contact, and create a pitch that offers mutual benefit.

Keywords

💡Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website and its pages to rank higher in search engine results, thereby increasing organic traffic. It is central to the video's theme as it discusses strategies to make a website more discoverable on platforms like Google. The script mentions SEO as the process that helps grow search traffic, research competitors, and dominate a niche.

💡Organic traffic

Organic traffic denotes the visitors that come to a website through unpaid search results. In the context of the video, the goal of SEO is to increase this type of traffic by optimizing website content to rank higher on search engines like Google, as illustrated by the discussion on optimizing for search queries and creating valuable content.

💡Google ranking factors

Google ranking factors are the various signals or metrics that Google's search algorithm uses to determine the order of search results. The script alludes to these factors when it discusses the uncertainty of the exact workings of Google's algorithms, but acknowledges that many factors are known and can be leveraged for SEO.

💡Searcher’s intent

Searcher’s intent refers to understanding what a user is looking for when they enter a search query. The video emphasizes the importance of aligning website content with this intent to create relevant and engaging material that matches what potential customers are searching for, as seen in the example of optimizing for 'Toronto wedding photographer'.

💡On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves optimizing the elements on a website that affect its ranking in search engine results. The script provides several tips for on-page SEO, such as optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, and ensuring that the content is relevant and keyword-optimized, exemplified by the advice to use the primary keyword phrase in the main headline (H1 tag).

💡Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the terms that people enter into search engines when looking for content like yours. The video script describes using Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool to find relevant keywords such as 'wedding photographer in Toronto' and understanding the search volume and competition for these terms.

💡Backlinks

Backlinks, also known as inbound or incoming links, are hyperlinks from one website to another. The script explains that backlinks act as 'votes' for a website, indicating trust and relevance, which is crucial for off-page SEO and improving a site's ranking on Google.

💡Link building

Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites. The video discusses the importance of obtaining quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative sources, emphasizing the value of editorial links over other types of links for improving search engine rankings.

💡Outreach

Outreach in the context of SEO is the act of contacting other website owners or bloggers to request a link to your site. The script provides examples of how to conduct successful outreach campaigns, such as offering a guest post or sharing unique and relevant content that benefits the recipient.

💡Blogging

Blogging is a content marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing written posts on a particular topic. The video suggests that blogging can provide practical value to prospective customers, help solve problems, and is a powerful way to boost SEO efforts by targeting less competitive keywords and attracting backlinks.

💡Guest post

A guest post is when an individual writes and publishes content on another person’s blog. The script mentions guest posting as a strategy for providing value to blog owners by supplying them with new content while also gaining exposure to their audience and potentially earning backlinks.

Highlights

Google processes 3.5 billion searches daily, indicating a massive potential audience for businesses.

Despite high search volumes, 91% of content receives no traffic from Google, emphasizing the importance of SEO.

SEO for beginners tutorial aims to attract customers from the world's largest search engine.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, focusing on organic traffic from search engines like Google.

Google uses sophisticated algorithms to rank the most relevant search results, which SEO aims to optimize for.

Understanding 'Google ranking factors' is crucial for making website optimizations.

SEO involves making content understandable for search engines and matching 'searcher’s intent'.

Keyword research is fundamental for SEO, helping to identify what potential customers are searching for.

Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer is a valuable tool for finding and analyzing search queries.

On-page SEO is essential for optimizing webpages to rank higher in search results.

Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions can significantly improve click-through rates from search results.

Creating content with primary keywords in the H1 tag helps search engines identify the page's relevance.

Avoid keyword stuffing, which can harm a page's SEO by misplacing keywords.

Off-page SEO, primarily link building, involves getting other websites to link to your pages, acting as 'votes' of quality.

Quality backlinks from relevant pages are more valuable for ranking than quantity.

Outreach for link building should be strategic, offering value to the contacted party.

Blogging is a powerful SEO tool for providing practical value and attracting a larger audience.

Content that offers practical value is more likely to be shared and linked, boosting SEO efforts.

Utilizing Ahrefs tools can enhance SEO processes and provide shortcuts for keyword research and link building.

Transcripts

3.5 billion searches are performed on Google every single day.

Seriously, no matter what you do, people are looking for your products and services on Google;

cell phone repair shop: 1,700 monthly searches.

iphone charger: 34,000 monthly searches.

best smartphone: 41,000 monthly searches.

And these search volumes are only for US based searches.

But here’s the thing:

Even though there are billions of searches every single day, our recent study shows that

91% of content gets no traffic from Google.

So how do you join the other 9% of web pages and start getting free, consistent, and passive

traffic from Google?

If you’re a beginner to SEO, then you’re going to want to watch this whole tutorial

because I’m going to show you how to start attracting customers from the

world’s

largest

search engine.

Stay tuned.

[Music]

What’s up everyone, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search

traffic, research your competitors, and dominate your niche.

This tutorial is called “SEO for beginners” because even if you haven’t got the slightest

clue what SEO is, you’ll have very clear and easy action items that you can implement

into your website right away.

So we’ll be covering the most important things that you should know to ensure that

your website is optimized for search.

Let’s get started.

So what is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

It’s the process of optimizing your website and webpages to get free organic traffic from

search engines like Google.

Think of Google like a filing system in a library.

The library has billions of books with hundreds of trillions of pages.

So let’s say that you want to find something on, “global warming.”

Then Google would search through these books and extract pages that contain your keywords

or closely related words.

But as I’m sure you know, search results aren't returned in any random order.

Google tries to return the most relevant results first by using sophisticated algorithms.

And they're so good at this, that most of us never have to click through to page 2 of

the search results.

Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work or the exact factors it looks at to rank

a webpage, but we do know a lot of the so-called "Google ranking factors," so we are able to

make some optimizations.

So your job is going to be two-fold:

Number 1, we need to make sure that it's easy for search engines to understand what your

page is about and create that content that matches what we call, “the searcher’s intent," right?

And number 2, we need to show Google and other search engines that it’s ‘worthy’ of ranking.

So throughout this tutorial, let’s say that I’m a new and budding photographer and I

live in Toronto, Canada.

I’m starting my new wedding photography business called “Sam PhOHtography.”

Yup, I’m pretty awesome...

but I don’t have any friends, so referrals are out of the question.

Alright great.

Step 1 is to find relevant keywords that people are searching for and see how these search

queries fit into your business.

The easiest way to start finding relevant keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of

a potential customer.

So I would think that a bride or groom looking for some magical wedding photos would search

for “wedding photographer in Toronto.”

Makes sense, right?

So I’ll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer tool, which is one of our SEO tools that provides

rich data on Google searches, and I’ll enter in that search query here.

I’ll also change the country to Canada since people in other countries, they probably

aren’t looking for a Toronto based photographer as often.

Now, I’ll run the search.

And you can see that there are only around 60 or so monthly searches for this keyword

phrase, which is far from exciting.

But looking below, you’ll see that the parent topic for our query is different.

The parent topic determines if you can rank for your target keyword, so the one that we

originally entered here, while targeting a more general topic on your page instead.

In this case, the parent topic is showing that more people search for, “toronto wedding

photographer,” over “wedding photographer in toronto.”

Now, if we scroll to the bottom of the page, you can see the top 10 Google rankings for

your target keyword and a bunch of keyword metrics.

I’ll just touch on two of them for this video:

traffic and keywords.

Take a look at these two ranking pages.

You can see that they generate well over a thousand search visitors every single month

and next to that, you’ll see that each page individually ranks for hundreds of keywords.

If we click on the number of keyword rankings here, you can see all of the different keywords

and the ranking positions in Google search.

This is a good thing to do because you already know that Google is ranking this single page

for all of the keywords, so why wouldn’t you be able to rank for these keywords and

maybe even more?

Try and remember this part, because we will be exploring things like keyword usage multiple

times throughout this tutorial.

Alright, now that we have a list of keywords, it’s time to optimize your pages.

In the world of search engine optimization, this is called “on-page SEO.”

Since we know the keywords that people are searching for in Google, it gives us clues

on the language we should use to let both Google and potential customers know what your

page is about.

For example, knowing that “toronto wedding photographer” is a more popular search query

than “wedding photographer in Toronto”, that will help us make smarter copywriting

decisions.

So for your homepage content, you might want to say, “Hi I’m Sam, a Toronto wedding

photographer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” instead of “Howdy, I’m Sam and I do wedding photos

for couples in Toronto.”

But I do need to make two things very clear:

First, you don’t have to use your exact match keyword since Google has gotten pretty

smart at understanding what your page is about.

And second, it’s very important to note that you shouldn’t try to trick Google by

using keywords where they don’t belong.

Your first priority should be to optimize for people because the last time I checked,

robots aren’t going to pay you for your services.

Here’s an example of what you shouldn’t do:

"I’m a Toronto wedding photographer that does Toronto wedding photography for your

Toronto wedding.”

This is known as keyword stuffing and long story short, it does more harm than good.

So key takeaway?

Don’t do it.

So for on-page SEO, I want to pass on 4 very basic, but important tips that you can use

on every page you optimize.

First is to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions.

When you look at the Google’s search results, you’ll see this part in blue and the text

below.

The top part is called your title tag and the other part is the meta description.

The purpose of these is to entice someone to click through to your page.

And if people are actually clicking through to your page, then that’s telling Google

that your page is likely relevant to the reason why they had searched for the query in the

first place, right?

And you can see that Google actually even bolds these keywords and similar keywords

within the search results making them stand out.

With that in mind, I might create a title like, “Award-Winning Toronto Wedding Photographer,”

and then my brand name.

But of course, if you’re going to do something like this, it should be true.

Then for the meta description, you can explain in a couple brief sentences what the page

is about.

But rather than putting a generic description that everyone else is doing and calling yourself

the best, you can put something like:

“Sam Oh was rated the Star’s Best Toronto Wedding Photographer.

He combines creativity with science to capture life’s happiest day in a million pixels.”

Awww...how sweet is that?

Now this would make me as a consumer want to find out who this awesome photographer is.

The last part of on-page optimization is the most important and that’s the actual content

on the page.

For a typical wedding photography home page, I might have some images, a short “about

us” or “about me” section, possibly the services that I provide, and some testimonials

from happy brides and grooms.

Without over complicating things, you’ll likely want to use your primary keyword phrase

in the main headline, often referred to as an H1 tag.

And looking at one of the top ranking pages, you’ll see that they did this right here.

An example of what you probably shouldn’t be doing is something like this:

hello there.

The H1 or heading tag here says, “hello there” which doesn’t help anyone understand

what the page is about.

And remember, your job is to help Google best identify your page as being relevant to the

user’s search query.

I’ll go back to the organic keywords report in Ahrefs to see one of my competitor’s

keyword rankings and see if there are any other ideas that might help Google better

understand what my page is about.

You can see some other relevant keywords in here like bridal, photos, and GTA, which stands

for the Greater Toronto Area.

So as you’re writing the copy for your page, you might want to keep these in mind and sprinkle

them in where it makes sense and reads naturally to visitors.

Alright, so let’s take this Sam PhOHtography example one step further.

Let’s say that my business was growing, I got a lot more experience under my belt

and I found out that I have some mad skills in areas like landscape, portrait, travel,

product photography.

So I decided, heck, I’m going to offer those services too!

Rather than trying to rank my homepage for keywords that aren’t exactly related, I

could easily create new services pages.

So I’d do the same thing by first going to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.

Then I’d type in something like “toronto product photographer," and I’ll quickly

look at the search volume and see it has 100 or so monthly searches in Canada.

Then I’ll take a look at the parent topic that has around 200 searches.

And here’s a quick but super interesting side note.

With wedding photographers, people seem to be searching for “Toronto wedding photographer”

the most.

While people looking for product photographers in Toronto are searching for “product photography

Toronto.”

So this step is vital to ensure you’re targeting keywords that will provide you with the most

exposure for your pages.

So for our services page, we would do the same thing as we did before with the title

tag, meta description, and the content on the page.

The last thing you should do is to include your primary keyword phrase in the URL of the page.

So for a product photography services page, your final URL might look like this:

If you’re a Wordpress user, you can just click here and edit it using hyphens to separate

spaces.

So in this case, I would change it to product-photography-toronto.

A really quick hack you can do is to look at the top 10 rankings and see how they’ve

optimized those pages to rank there.

So if we look at the Google search results for, “Toronto product photography,” you

can see that some of the pages are keyword stuffing in the title tags and that the meta

descriptions are all kind of cheesy or they're truncated.

Clicking through to this result, you can see that it’s just a classifieds site, similar

to Craigslist, so it’s clearly not optimized.

Clicking through to this one, you can see that they included their keyword phrase in

the heading and title tags, but then there’s pretty much no content on the rest of the page.

And then clicking through to this one here, this one seems to be over optimized for their

keyword target.

And if I do a ‘find’ for the word “photo” you can see over 110 instances of it on this

page, which again, will do more harm than good in the long run.

What you’re seeing here is an opportunity to overtake these search results.

Basically, Google has no choice but to choose the best options from a bad pool of pages.

Alright, so by this point, we’ve optimized our main pages for our different services,

and we've covered the basics of on-page SEO.

And if you’ve done this for all of your key pages, then I can assure you that you

are miles ahead of a lot of your competitors.

The next part and arguably most important piece of ranking high on Google is off-page

SEO.

Off-page SEO often refers to link building.

And link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your web pages.

Basically, links act as votes or other people vouching for your website saying:

“hey, these people are really good at what they do and I trust them enough that I would

send my visitors to their website.”

It works in a similar way that you would refer your friend to buy a product from whatever

store because you’ve tried it, used it, and loved it.

In general, the more quality backlinks you can get from relevant pages, the higher you’ll

rank in Google.

Now I’m putting the emphasis here on the word “quality,” because there are a lot

of different types of links you can get from like forums, directories, and editorial links

to name a few.

But if you think about it, a place like a forum where virtually anyone can place a link

will likely hold less value than a link from someone else's blog.

But to be clear, other types of links will still hold some kind of value, but probably

not as much as links like editorials would.

So if you’re focusing on quality, then you’ll probably want to prioritize editorial links.

And the main way to get links from other people’s blogs is through something that SEOs often

refer to as “outreach.”

And outreach is exactly the way it sounds.

You’re contacting people and asking them for a link.

But you can’t just email someone and be like, “yo!

I need a link.

Hook it up.”

It doesn't work that way.

There are a three things that you need in order to make your outreach campaigns more

successful.

1. You need people who are actually interested in the stuff that you do.

2. You need a good reason to contact them.

3. You need a pitch that somehow benefits them.

Let’s go through a few examples, shall we?

First we need to identify people who are interested in what you are doing.

The most commonsensical one in the context of link building are websites that have already

linked to your competitors.

You can find these pages by going to Ahrefs' Site Explorer and entering in a domain or URL.

So I’ll enter in mangostudios.com, who also does wedding photography in Toronto.

I’ll also narrow our search down to pages that are linking just to their home page.

From here, I can click on the backlinks option in the left column.

And here, I’ll use this filter to narrow down the backlinks to only links within content,

since I mentioned that I want to get some editorial links.

On the left side, you can see the websites that linked to the target URL or domain and

on the right side, you can see which page they linked to and the context of the backlink.

Next, let’s click through to this one on "Jaw-Dropping Gorgeous Wedding Flower Ideas."

You can see that there are a bunch of pictures of flowers.

And hey!

I actually have a great one that’s way better than all of these.

So let’s check that off on our checklist for successful outreach.

We now have a prospect.

So I can contact the author, Nicole, and let her know about one of my pictures that was

published in some kind of wedding magazine, because it’s that awesome.

So this now fulfills checkbox #2.

We have a good reason to contact her because we have something relevant to her piece.

And of course, I’d be giving her rights to publish my photo, which also checks off

#3.

As a side note, it doesn’t mean that she’ll publish my photo or give me a link.

As a general rule of thumb, the better the ‘excuse’ you can come up with to contact

the author, the better your chance will be to get the link.

Another good reason to contact someone is to offer a guest post.

Blog owners are always on the hunt for new content and since your site is new, you’ll

be getting in front of someone else’s audience in exchange for some of your time and content

where you could easily use some watermarked photos that you’ve taken.

With guest posts, your reason to contact them is pretty reasonable and you’ll be providing

value, which is free content (that should be good), that benefits them and/or their

website.

The next outreach prospect you can find are businesses in a lateral non-competing niche.

So as a wedding photographer, you might want to contact other local flower shops, reception

halls and wedding planners.

If you look at the “jaw dropping flowers” article, you can see that there are two people

mentioned in the article.

There’s Mango Studios, which is the site that we’re analyzing, as well as an event

and design planning company.

You can contact these people to form meaningful relationships.

Just think about it for a second.

Your businesses go hand-in-hand and you can pass on referrals to each other, you can link

back to each other as a ‘preferred vendor’ or link to others’ content in guest

posts where it's relevant.

And this isn’t limited to just local businesses.

This applies to everyone.

So, find some solid partners who are on that same journey as you in a lateral niche and

help each other out.

Now with link building, there are numerous tactics and strategies, so if you want to

expand your knowledge in this sphere, then I highly recommend watching our series on

link building where you’ll get a full scope of how to do this effectively.

Alright!

We are on to the last SEO tip that I see a lot of beginner’s avoiding.

Now, if you have something to sell, setting up your homepage and product/services pages

is probably the first thing that you’ll do or did and for good reason.

These are the pages that will directly generate leads and revenue for your business.

But here’s the final tip: start blogging.

Now, I’m not telling you to write about how you changed your storefront sign from

red to green.

By blogging, I’m referring to providing practical content that can and will help your

prospective customers solve problems.

In Dr. Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious: "Why Things Catch On," he shares his research

on why content gains popularity and even goes viral.

Content that provides “practical value” was one of the key factors to success.

People don’t just share funny cat videos or emotional stories.

They share things that help others.

And the same goes for gaining links.

People are more likely to link to your content if it’s helpful, actionable, and solves

a problem.

Look at what we do for the Ahrefs blog.

We have numerous SEO tools, but we tackle different big topics like keyword research

and link building.

And even if you don’t use our tools, you can gain a ton of value through these monstrous posts.

But you’ll see that we include shortcuts or hacks where our tool can make doing SEO

a whole lot easier.

To further prove my point, if you look at the “top pages” report inside Site Explorer,

you’ll see that the pages that generate the most search traffic for us, mostly come

from our blog articles.

Blogging lets you reach large audiences.

For example, we saw that Toronto wedding photographer

had around 900 monthly searches in Canada.

Let’s look up something like “wedding venues Toronto” in Keywords Explorer.

You can see that it has around 1,400 monthly searches in Canada.

If you’ve been in the wedding photography business long enough, then you’ve probably

done shoots at numerous venues.

So you could create a post with helpful and practical value.

For example, I might create an article of some of the best venues that I had taken photos

at and display pieces from my portfolio within the blog post.

I would also detail pros and cons of each place, pricing information, location details,

items on their catering menu, or anything else that would be genuinely helpful to a

person visiting this page.

And if you think about it, people usually book the venue before the photographer.

So there’s a solid chance that after people see some of your stunning watermarked photos,

they might look through your portfolio, and contact you for a quote that can generate

more customers for you.

And if you think about it, they may have never discovered you through a different means because

they didn’t type in a keyword phrase like “Toronto wedding photographer," or their

friends didn't refer you to them.

When you’re thinking of these ideas, put yourself in the searcher’s shoes.

What would they be looking for and what would help them solve the query?

Now, when you’re picking topics, try and stick with ones that provide value to your business.

So as a photographer, I would want to almost always showcase my work because I would be

judged by my portfolio.

As a software company, we showcase how our tools can help in people’s SEO process because

people will buy our tools if they see how it benefits them.

As a coffee roastery, you might show them how to make the perfect cup of coffee or an

article on how to roast beans.

I cannot emphasize enough, how much a blog can help you boost your SEO efforts.

It’s a great way to get ahead of your competitors who have been in the game for longer than

you, but they've been targeting only these ‘obvious’ keywords.

From here, you can just rinse and repeat the keyword research process, the on-page optimization

tips, and continually build links to your content and articles and start climbing the

Google search rankings.

We have a ton of really helpful videos where we expand on these topics, so I’ll leave

links to those in the description.

Make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials and if you have

any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I would be happy to jump in and help out.

Sam PhOHtography, signing out.