If you aren’t aware, there are a TON of great resources all across the internet. The hard part of this is having to sift through all of them and figure out which ones are actually quality resources that will really teach you something rather than just wasting your time. Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is one of those great, and free, assets that will actually leave you with some knowledge. If you’re still wondering whether or not it’s worth your time to go check it out, allow our brief outline below to give you the tools you need to decide.
Who Is This Guide For?
Directly quoting the Google Beginner SEO Guide, this guide is for you “if you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search”. While this is a great description, it also leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Therefore, we compiled an easy bullet list that you can scan and see if you identify with any of these.
- Business Owners
- Website Designers
- SEO Specialists
- SEO Enthusiasts
This might seem like a small list, but it really does encompass the majority of people that would find this guide helpful. Business owners can consist of everything from a hair stylist/salon to a veterinary clinic to a full service digital marketing agency like ours at SEO Smooth.
What Does The Guide Cover?
The Google Beginner SEO Guide is actually a twelve part guide with a variety of contents. Maybe you are just starting your business and are in the early stages, or maybe you have been running your business for a while but really want to sharpen your knowledge and skills of SEO. The great thing about this is that the Google Beginner SEO Guide also introduces a lot of concepts and explains them as well. The guide includes information surrounding topics such as:
- Glossary: Explains words that you might not be familiar with inside this guide if you aren’t comfortable with SEO
- Is your site on Google?: An explanation of how to know if your website is even visible on Google at this point, and if for some reason you are currently invisible the guide also gives a list of common reasons why this might be happening
- Getting your site on Google: A further explanation that dives into Google’s search guidelines and more about how to improve your website’s visibility on their search engine
- Finding an SEO expert: Google gives a list of things that hiring an SEO expert can help with as it pertains to improving your website’s SEO and gives a detailed explanation with links on how to hire an expert as well as Google’s webmaster guidelines
- Helping Google and its users understand your content: This details ways to title pages, use meta tags, and best practices and what to avoid in helping Google and search users better understand your content
- Managing your appearance in Google’s search results: Examples and tools on how to organize your site hierarchy, site navigation, URL displays, and more
- Optimizing your content: How to make your site interesting and useful, as well as best practices on how to create fresh, trustworthy content that attracts customers
- Optimizing your images: This part teaches you how to use HTML with your site images, and how to help search engines find your images to make your site more relevant
- Mobile-friendly importance: Making your site mobile-friendly is imperative in today’s day and age as most users are on their mobile devices rather than a desktop, and this really explains how to do that
- Promoting your website: A detailed description on how to promote links to your website through local listings as well as paid search campaigns
- Analyzing performance: Once you’re a seasoned SEO pro, you’ll want to know how to track and analyze your website’s performance
12. Appendix: This includes all links used throughout the guide
This might seem like an overwhelming amount of information, but if you know where you are struggling in your business the guide lay out does allow you to easily jump to the content you need while ignoring the parts you may already know. We hope this bullet point summary of what the Google Beginner SEO Guide entails and hopefully it can help you out wherever you are needing it!