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February 7, 2022

Learning SEO: Expectation Versus Reality

If you believe some Facebook groups, you’d think it was easy to get a website to rank well on Google.  All it takes is regular posting of blogs, right?

Wrong.

I often come across groups on Facebook where frequent blogging is touted as the answer to a top spot in the search engine pages, or that using image alts is the answer to everything SEO.  Well, if you take your online business seriously, you’ll know it takes effort and commitment to get a website to rank well on Google and keep it there.

Learning SEO: Expectation Versus Reality

Learning SEO can be a tough lesson in expectation vs reality.  Yes, it is possible to learn the fundamentals of SEO and manage it all yourself (you can download my Free Starter Kit to get started) but results won’t just fall into your lap.  Sustained online visibility takes work – and you need to spend time (and sometimes money) each month to keep your website where it counts….at the top of the search engine pages, in front of your target audience and ahead of your competitors.

When we look at the fundamentals of SEO, it’s obvious why blogging and adding Alt Text to images won’t cut it.

The fundamentals are keyword research, backlinks and technical SEO.  Technical SEO involves improving the infrastructure of a website (such as sitemaps, page speed, navigation, URL structure, schema etc) so that the pages can be found, crawled, understood and indexed by the search engines.

I always recommend that people start with keyword research, making sure that they understand the fundamentals.  You’ll need to really dive deep into your niche market to discover what searchers are searching for related to your products or services and your keywords need to take into account search intent, audience, relevance, authority, keyword competitiveness and search volume.

Most keywords are chosen to attract motivated searchers who are ready to make a purchase or at the very least, who could convert into customers over time.

Once you’ve done thorough keyword research, you can start writing meta data (including SEO titles and meta descriptions), building links from a range of niche and relevant websites and doing technical SEO for things like fixing broken links and improving page speeds.

The Reality of Learning SEO

But even if you’ve learned all about these elements and tactics and have implemented them on your website, it’s not a case of ‘setting and forgetting’.   Changes are often necessary to improve a website’s page ranking, plus the search engines’ algorithms are constantly changing too, so you need to move with the times to stay relevant.

You also need to update your page content to include your keywords and add fresh content that is useful to readers, which answers their queries, keeps them engaged and entertained and importantly, which meets the search engines’ requirements.

Perhaps this is where the misnomer arises that frequent blogging will get a website to rank well.  Some people think the more they post, the better for their SEO.

But it’s not about quantity.  Content is all about quality – and it needs to meet the readers’ expectations, the search engines’ requirements and it needs to be better quality than the content which is currently ranking on Google.  I always recommend that my clients ask themselves the following question: ‘Is my web content the best in my industry for the search term I want to rank for?’

Help Your SEO Reality Meet Your SEO Expectations

It’s not easy doing SEO on your own and you probably (definitely!) aren’t getting the results you deserve.  So, if your SEO reality differs from your expectations and you could do with a helping hand, get in touch with me at The SEO School or email me to discover how my online SEO course can help boost your online visibility and get your webpages ranking well on Google.

I’d love to help you achieve your business goals!

You might also enjoy “Can I Learn SEO On My Own?” and “Why Local SEO is Important to your Business

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