Beginner’s Guide to SEO in 2024: DIY Strategies for Success

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the same position I was four or five years ago regarding SEO. I had created a website that worked and looked fine, paying no attention to what the search engine might encounter on my site.  I had heard people mention SEO and “best practices,” but, being as self-assured and full of abject hubris as I was in the before-times, I simply did not care. I knew how web development worked. And my website looked good, damn it! If people were meant to find it, they’d find it, I naïvely believed.

But, it was not so.

Our first foray into SEO started with a happy accident, and since then, we’ve been developing our own techniques and building a track record of ranking our site and others higher in search results. But beyond that, one of our focuses here is to provide education to our clients on how they can continue achieving results on their own. We coach them on updating their website design with SEO in mind and writing new content to rank higher in search. And so, here are some of the tips, tricks, and notes we’ve shared with beginners who are new to SEO.

Understanding Keywords

It sounds obvious, but the first step to ranking higher in search is to know what your ideal customers are searching for. This starts with understanding your own niche and target audience. Assuming you’ve got that nailed down (well done, you aspiring marketer, you), we can move on to finding the keywords we want to target.

Begin by compiling a list of broad terms related to your niche—use your industry knowledge and common questions from customers. Ask people what they googled to find you or your competitors. You can even perform your own search analysis by checking out what Google’s Autocomplete suggests when you type in terms related to your business, or what other “suggested searches” populate after you hit “enter.” Once you have a list of broad terms, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs (among many others) to determine the search volume (how often those terms are searched) and keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank higher) for the specified keywords.

Know when to use keywords (and when not to)

The next step is to begin using your keywords—but don’t overdo it.

Do: Use keywords in your page title and meta description.

Don’t: stuff your headings with as many keywords as possible. This used to work, but then Google caught on and it now actively harms your ranking.

Do: use your keywords naturally in the body of your page!

Don’t: write your body copy exclusively for the bots.

While using your keywords is important, it’s equally important to keep in mind that you’re writing for bots and for people. This is critical for two reasons: first, Google can tell when you’re trying too hard, and two, users can tell something is…off. When someone clicks onto a page that’s a jumbled-up keyword-salad, they back right on out and click the next link down until they find a page that feels like it was written by an actual human person. This hurts your bounce rate (more on that later) which hurts your ranking overall.  

Title and Meta Description

The title of your page is the first thing users will see in search results, so it needs to be appealing and enticing – but it also needs to be an accurate representation of what’s in the page. The same goes for your meta description: it should be engaging enough to coax visitors into clicking through, but it can’t just be a tapestry of keywords or something a user may want to see on a website – if Google detects that your title or meta description don’t accurately reflect the content of your website, that will hurt your ranking.

While the title and meta description are certainly good places to weave in keywords when they fit naturally, it’s again important to remember that this is your website’s first impression with your potential users – make it count. Treat it like the elevator pitch for your page (in 155 characters or less).

Have a structure and be accessible

Like I mentioned before, in the old days of SEO, before Google got wise to all of us markers thinking we were oh-so-clever, the way to rank higher was to cram as many keywords into your headings as possible. You know those recipe articles that go on for dozens of paragraphs, all leading with a heading that uses the phrase “Chocolate Soufflé” as many time as humanely possible? That’s the strategy they’re shooting for.

Nowadays, headings are still beneficial to your SEO, but more indirectly. Google ranks websites that are more well-organized and accessible higher, and headings are important to organization and accessibility. So it’s not as much the content of your headings that matters, as much as it is the fact that you have headings at all. And they need to be used correctly – each page should have exactly one H1 tag, and the heading levels from there should be sequential (don’t skip heading levels like going from H2 to H4 – there must be an H3 in-between)

You should also use all the other accessibility features available to you like alt-text, link descriptions, sufficient contrast, and responsive design. All of these things improve the user experience for everyone, meaning your content is available to more people, and as an added bonus, the search engines prioritize accessible content and will score your website higher for following accessibility best practices.

Look Good, & Be Easy to Navigate

After all the technical jargon about structure and heading levels and description best-practices, the thought “a website should look good” maybe seems a little basic, but it is important. Here’s why: search engines can tell how long users stick around on your website, how many pages they look at, and when they back out and try another website (that’s your “bounce rate”). When you have a high bounce rate or low number of pages viewed on the site, they are going to score your site lower.  

There are a lot of ways you can lower your bounce rate and keep users exploring through the pages on your site, but the basics are: it needs to look good, and it needs to be easy for users to find what they need. I’m right on the edge of the millennial/zoomer divide, but anecdotally I’ll say this: TikTok has fried my brain and if within 5 seconds of opening your website I don’t either 1) have the information I need or 2) intuitively know what link I need to click in order to find it, I’m hitting the back button and trying the next link down. Your design, page structure, navigation, and internal linking need to be conducive to finding information quickly.  

Have Realistic Expectations and Keep at It.

It’s important to have realistic expectations lest you become discouraged, so the last tip I have for you is this: stuff takes time. SEO-minded changes take not days, not weeks, but months to impact your website’s rankings. You can’t expect to go from position 75 on a search term to 5 overnight.  

With that in mind, keep updating and adding to your content regularly. Train the algorithms on the type of content you create and keep it coming.

Getting Started

This article is far from exhaustive, but it should serve as a decent foundation for getting started with SEO. There’s a lot that goes into it, and it really can seem daunting – but like anything, taking incremental steps is better than taking none at all.  

When you start by implementing some basic strategies (even simply reviewing your website for improper headings or rewriting your meta descriptions) you may be surprised how the little things can go a long way.

Start today with the basics. Keep working on changes and monitor the impact on your search rankings over the next few months in order to continuously refine your approach. With patience, perseverance, and a little creative copywriting, you’ll find your way to be rewarded by that sweet, sweet algorithm.

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