SEO for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization. SEO = how people find you on Google organically.

Every business and startup needs to intentionally cultivate how people find their website via search engines like Google. But for the majority it’s not a priority.

This is because SEO has historically been viewed as something that takes months (if not years) to build out and start seeing the fruits of your labor. Of all the marketing and growth channels, it’s notoriously one of the “most opaque channels” and “takes the longest to develop”.

But if you can find a way to crack the code to generating organic traffic to your website with SEO, it can be one of the most useful growth engines in existence. And in reality, it can be done in weeks, not months (if you know what to do).

Why is it such a google channel? Well:

1) It’s high-intent. When someone goes to Google they are actively looking to solve a problem, whether it be an answer to a question, a recommendation, a product, a guide, or a resource. Unlike ads or content marketing or influencers, which are all passive channels (they just show up without you really “asking” for it)

2) It’s essentially free. Yes you can pay for tools to help you cultivate and improve your SEO (I’ll outline my toolkit below), but in theory it doesn’t require any budget to build organic search traffic, as opposed to ads, influencer marketing, etc. which are all explicitly paid channels.

3) It compounds. Once you start getting a few good pages that Google’s algorithm is willing to show people in response to their queries, it’s like building a fire. Google begins to trust your site, you add more pages, it shows it to more people, and pretty soon it grows exponentially, showing up in front of more and more people — different from an ‘owned’ audience like social media or a newsletter, which grow more or less linearly

So with all that said, over the past couple months I’ve begun focusing on building SEO for Uptrends.ai, and in the past few weeks we’ve started to see some serious results.

In October, roughly 30% of our traffic to our website came from good-ol’ free, organic Google Search queries, a few thousand visitors — roughly 3x what we were getting two months ago:

I am not an expert, but I know a few things about how to build SEO at this point. And with a few hours of spare time, you can also learn how to implement kick-ass SEO without breaking the bank or contracting it out to an agency. Allow me to explain.

SEO for Dummies

To get started with SEO, there are essentially 4-5 tools and resources I’ve used to go from 0 organic search traffic to thousands of visitors per month. Here they are:

1. Pat Walls’ Lean SEO Course

First, it’s important to understand the basics of SEO. There are plenty of free resources online to get the 101. Twitter is honestly a great place to find tips and tricks (happy to share a list of my fav bookmarked SEO tweets if helfpful).

But if you are looking for an all-encompassing guide to getting started with SEO, the first thing I’d recommend is buying the Lean SEO Course from Pat Walls at StarterStory.

It costs $249, which may appear spendy, but this is essentially the SEO Bible for beginners. It’s 15 modules, 30-60min each, covering everything from how Google works, to how to generate ideas for blog posts and pages, to implementing and iterating.

This course got me from ~100 monthly organic site visits to ~1,000, and laid the groundwork for everything else that followed.

2. Keyword Research Tools

The core of SEO is essentially just 1) finding out the types of things they your target customer is likely to search on Google, and 2) creating relevant content that shows up in Google for the things they search.

Finding what your target customer is searching for is all about keyword research. And to find good keywords to rank for, you will probably want to use a keyword research tool — this helps you find which keywords & phrases (ex: “coleslaw near me” or “stock market alerts tool” or “how to pay for unemployment insurance”) are highly-searched, which ones your competitors are ranking for, and which ones have high or low competition.

For keyword tools, I would recommend either Ahrefs.com or KeywordsEverywhere.com — The former is the ‘industry standard’ at $99/mo with all the overkill bells and whistles you could ever need to find good keywords, the latter is a $12/yr browser extension that overlays onto Google and shows keywords stats and recommendations.

I’ve used both, they both get the job done. The goal with these is to use them to create a list of the top few hundred keywords that you should be ranking for, then from there make content (ie. pages on your website, like blog posts) that use those search terms.

Next of course, you need to make the content…

3. Content Generation / Tuning

For generating content, the best tool I’ve ever come across is SEOBotAI.com from John Rush (if you’re not following him on Twitter, he’s an absolute goldmine of general startup and growth hacks)

SEOBotAI is exactly what it sounds like — an autopilot tool that connects to your website and generates highly-optimized blog articles that will rank for your target audience and keywords.

It’s honestly crazy how good the content comes out, and it’s helped our site tremendously. You can create an account for $20/mo to get 3 AI-generated articles, $99 for 20 articles, or a few hundred for 100 articles per month.

The caveat is that this is autopilot content, and it’s AI-generated. So it’s a good thing to plug in and run in the background to boost your SEO presence with more content, but I wouldn’t recommend using it as your sole source of content generation.

It’s best to couple this with some manual keyword research using the best-practices outlined in Pat’s SEO course to develop your own ‘tent-pole’ content by hand.

Then, once you have content, the last step you need is to optimize it…

4. SearchAtlas OTTO

The last tool I’d recommend is OTTO from SearchAtlas. This is essentially an AI system that plugs into your website and crawls it to recommend ways to optimize it for showing up in Google Search better.

Things like the fixing broken links, adding alt text to images, improving meta descriptions and titles for blog posts. SearchAtlas OTTO can either recommend these and you can implement them yourself, or you can turn it on autopilot and it will automatically make improvements for you!

The service costs $99 per month, and you can also do some of the other things that Keyword Research Tools or SEOBotAI does in here as well to generate content and blog posts, but these aren’t as much of its specialty.

Optimizing your content with OTTO will take 2-star pages and make them 5-star pages that show up in the top few results of Google. Ultimately, it’s the easiest way to convince Google that your website is legit, by cleaning up small errors and polishing it.

Takeaway

Overall, I’d recommend 4 paid tools for building out your DIY SEO stack:

1. Pat Wall’s Lean SEO Course: $249 one-time payment

2. Keywords Everywhere: $12/year tool to find good keywords

3. SEOBotAI: $20/mo to generate good content for you automatically

4. SearchAtlas OTTO: $99/mo to optimize your content once it’s live

Overall in 1 year you can have a professional grade search presence for something like $1,600 all-in, and that’s IF you use all these tools. In reality, that’s just what I’m doing — you can get by without needing all of them.

This is really just scratching the surface of SEO, and I wish I had time to do a more comprehensive guide into how I find good keywords and incrementally develop and optimize content around them. There’s also other things like backlink building, programmatic SEO, search-engine marketing, and lead magnets for converting visitors to paid users, which we could dedicate a few more blog posts to each.

If this is intriguing or helpful at all, let me know and I’d be happy to elaborate.

For now, hope this helps!

Peace,
Ramsey