How to Start in SEO: Tools & First Steps

Welcome to the 5-Minute Podcast where we talk about search, social, strategy, and all things digital marketing. My name is TJ Kelly with 3MediaWeb. Let's get started. Today on the show, the question we hear a lot from SEO clients is, how do I get started?

What's the first thing or the first few things I should do if I'm just starting out in SEO? So let's dive in. A lot of things in the SEO world or in the marketing world start and end with the phrase, it depends. So bear with me on this, but it depends.

Generally speaking, if you have never done a single thing in SEO, you just started your website or you're just making a career change or something like that, you just learned that SEO existed, then the first thing you're going to want to do is what's called an SEO audit. All right. Sometimes this is referred to as a technical audit or an on-page audit or a backlink audit or a competitor audit. There's all these different ways to spin an SEO audit and they're all great and they all reveal different information.

In general, the whole point of an audit is to figure out where you stand today, right? SEO is a contest and you need to try to win and in order to win, you need to figure out what's broken or how are your competitors beating you so that you know what you need to fix and add to your website to make it competitive against whoever you're up against in the search rankings. So you can't figure out where that roadmap points to if you don't know where you are yet. The audit tells you where you are and therefore tells you where to start So first things first I would use a tool called Screaming Frog and run that tool across your website What it going to do is give you a spreadsheet of every page on your website that it can find with a whole bunch of columns There might be 50 different columns on this spreadsheet looking at the title tag on all your pages the meta description the H1 tags the H2s how many words are on the page what the download size the bytes or megabytes of weight of each page all kinds of different information about every single page on your website And then you can sort that and break it out by showing a report of only the pages that are missing a title tag or missing a meta description or have duplicate H1 tags or any of these kind of on-page SEO problems.

Sorting out those problems will basically get you back to the starting line. Once you have that stuff fixed, that is where you can now start investing in a real long-term SEO strategy. So do that first. Screaming Frog on-page audit.

Clean up all those errors first. Once you have the Screaming Frog audit done, you're going to want to figure out which content on your website is working well for the keywords you want to rank for, the topics you want to be an authority in, and then where are there gaps in that content. Alright, so SEO, if you think of it this way, you're always searching for something. You need to think of what are people searching for and how well do I rank for that.

Put yourself in the mind of your user and reverse engineer their thought process to figure out what topics and phrases are working best in their mind. And therefore, make sure your content matches up with that. So the best tool for this, I think, is a tool called Ahrefs. A-H-R-E-F-S.

Ahrefs.com. It a little pricey but it absolutely worth it They have a content analysis tool You feed your keywords and it will run through every page and say all right these four pages look like they covered pretty well with your topics These 50 pages over here are not lining up with your content Oh and by the way your competitors, here's five of them who are doing better than you are with these particular keywords. So then you can go and model those competitors.

Oh, I see. They've got a 2000 word blog post and three different YouTube videos, and they've got some how-to infographics, and they've got some social shares. You can reverse engineer what they are doing to be more successful than you. And then of course that helps you put a plan in place to go ahead and beat them at their own game.

So after your content analysis is done, the next thing is gonna be your backlink profile. Again, I'm sticking with Ahrefs to monitor this. You basically will run a report in there and it will show you how many backlinks you have, how many websites and pages on those websites are linking back to you. I guarantee you're going to find a whole bunch of links in there you did not know about and some of them that look a little weird.

Sometimes those are worth disavowing or telling Google, I don't want anything to do with this weird website that looks spammy or something. But by and large, there's just a lot of scrapers and crawler tools out there that are going to link to you. It's not that big a deal in most cases. What is a big deal is looking for other opportunities where you can get websites to link back to yours.

And again, you can look at who's linking to competitors. That's an invaluable tool in SEO because if somebody is willing to link to a competitor, that's a pretty good lead to figure out if that same website is willing to also link to you or if one of their competitors is willing to link to you to try to keep up with the Joneses. It's absolutely a bit of a sales strategy and there's some psychology involved in it. How you earn those backlinks that an entirely separate episode There some outreach involved but really that comes down to give them something that is worth linking to Make sure your content is valuable to their audience as well as yours So Ahrefs Backlink Profile Reports that your third step And then lastly, you're going to want to monitor progress and making sure all the work you've been doing is actually having a positive effect.

My favorite tool for doing that is SEMrush, semrush.com. You can do this for free by monitoring up to 10 keywords. If you want more than 10, you've got to upgrade.

Ahrefs can do this too. So if you want to minimize the number of tools that you're paying for, it is possible to stay within Ahrefs. Personally, I happen to like SEMrush better for this, but they will give you a report of all the keywords you've got. I think the base level of paid membership gives you 1,500 keywords that you can monitor.

And every week, they're going to update that. Really every day, they're going to update that report and tell you if your ranks went up or down, did your competitors go up or down, and you can tag each of those. So I want to look at this line of business keywords, there's 50 of those. This line of business keywords, there's 100 of those.

You can monitor those in groups by tag. It's a really robust tool. So that is how you're going to measure your progress and see if this time investment has been worth it and valuable for you. Of course, there's also Google Analytics to look at your traffic and organic referral traffic, that kind of thing, to monitor that There are actually more people showing up.

It's not just ranks. It's also traffic. And then you got to look at business. But that's a separate episode.

All right. There's your breakdown on how to get started in SEO. You know how we do it in five minutes or less. Your daily search, social and strategy, digital marketing update.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.