SEO for Dummies – First Steps to Drive Organic Traffic to your Website

If you tried searching on the Internet for tutorials or ebooks about Search Engine Optimization. If you are now more confused than when you started searching, probably this post is for you. It might help you. At least you will get a little clarification on what you need to do if you want driving organic traffic to your website.

Reality is, it is hard. This because it takes time and effort. If you see quick results it means: 1) probably you cheated and 2) It will not last long. I give to people who ask me about SEO consultancy the example of building a house. You start from the foundation, then you build the walls and then the roof. So in order to build the roof, you need to build a support to keep it stand. The same is for SEO. You need first to be sure you have built your foundations before starting with more competitive tasks.

As I am talking about “increasing organic traffic” I will take for granted that your website follows the Best Practices given by Google. If not, I will write a post on that topic in the future, but now I want to focus only on how to drive organic traffic on a website.

It all starts with a Search Online

It all begins with a Google Search. Searches are varying and different in nature. For example, a search can be informational (eg. What is SEO?) or transactional (eg. I want to book a hotel room in Dublin City). It also can be very generic or very detailed. In the case that a search is very generic, you will notice that the big websites usually dominate the scenes. They have high authority, backlinks and they can cover almost every generic topic. Another search instead might be very specific, where it uses a “Long tail keywords”. This is when a user specifically requests a particular information. One example I give you is this post I wrote it some time ago on how to fix an issue with Windows 10. I called it “How to Fix SBAVMONL DLL Error In Windows 10 Once For All“. As you can see it, it is a specific subject for a more niche audience. This is the “secret” where you need to write your posts, not on Windows 10 errors, but on your niche. Being specific you will attract less audience but you will be sure to start driving organic traffic, increasing also CTR.

Knowing your niche, you can start writing on topics and be helpful to your users. For example, you might encounter in your profession some issues or difficulties that others are facing and you have the right solution. You might find already answers online as well as nothing. In the first case, try to write your post better, adding insights that other posts don’t provide. In the second case, you need to be sure to write a very good piece of content, otherwise, your competitors will steal your idea and write a better content than yours.

What usually happens with long tail keywords is that the traffic is lower than generic ones. You may think “bad” but in reality, those searchers are the one you need to fulfil if you want to start growing your organic traffic.

How should be the structure of your post?

Try to make a list of topics you can cover in your website who belongs to your niche. On each topic try expand them with subtopics adding issues or missing information that an user would need to know. Once your list is fulfilled, take one of this subtopic and try to write in the following structure:

  1. Introduction – What is the topic about? Explain briefly what it is the problem
  2. Content – Add discoveries and researches about this topic. What have been proposed so far to fix it? Have it worked yet? Is there any point of weakness where you contribute to solve the issue better?
  3. Conclusion – Tell your user why they are benefiting from your contribution and if you want you can also that this is based on your professional experience.

You will have then to publish more than just one. This way if you mention something that you wrote in a previous post, you can link it to it, this will help to grow the page value of your previous posts.

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