Hey everyone, my name is Sam Oh and welcome to the SEO fundamentals course by Ahrefs.
In this course, I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of SEO with a heavy focus on execution.
And while it's a beginner's SEO course, I don't want you to be fooled by the word "beginner."
Even for an 8-figure business like ours, we don't do anything crazy technical
or complicated.
Right from the start, we've stuck with the fundamentals of SEO that led to
compounded growth.
And today, our site gets over a million monthly visits from Google search alone, making SEO
one of our most effective strategies to get traffic to our site.
So the course is broken down into four modules plus this video, which is more
of an introduction to the course as well as an SEO 101.
In this video, we'll go over the basics of SEO and cover things like what it is, why
it's important and how it works.
You'll then move on to module 1 which is on keyword research.
Throughout these lessons, I'll show you how to find keywords to target that can
benefit your business.
It'll also set the foundation for the next module, which is on-page SEO.
In this module, we'll talk about optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords.
The next module will be on link building.
This is one of Google's most prominent ranking signals which has proven to contribute to
higher rankings in search.
Finally, we'll finish off the course with the basics of technical SEO, which will mostly
be about best practices and website maintenance.
And we'll be releasing a module each week to give you time to actually apply what you've
learned to your website.
So if you're not subscribed then make sure to do that and hit the bell icon so you don't
miss out on the rest of the course.
Alright, let's kick things off with the SEO basics.
We'll talk about what search engine optimization is, why it's important and how Google works.
SEO stands for search engine optimization.
And it's the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's
organic search results.
Now, let's talk a bit about how they work.
If you're completely new to SEO, then it's easiest to think of search engines as libraries.
But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages.
So when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in
its index and try to return the most relevant results.
And SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result.
Now, you might be thinking: why should I focus on SEO when there are so many
other marketing mediums?
Well, there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization and
in my opinion, these three things make SEO the best traffic source.
#1. Unlike paying for ads, search traffic is free.
#2. Organic traffic is typically consistent once you're ranking high.
Whereas other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes
that usually end up fading to nothing.
And it makes sense because social media networks are designed to
surface fresh content.
Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box.
Whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information.
And the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month.
And #3. You have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn't have
access to otherwise.
In fact, as of October 2019 there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world.
And almost 4 billion of those people are Google users.
This is why search engine optimization is an 80 billion dollar industry and why marketers
from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today.
Everyone wants their business to get discovered and SEO is the perfect way to do that.
Now, let's briefly talk about how Google works.
And there are two parts to this.
The first is crawling and indexation.
And these two things are what actually allows Google to discover web pages and create their
search index.
So to actually attain information, Google uses crawlers, also known as spiders,
which gather publicly available information from all over the web.
The spiders will start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds.
They then follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages.
And this process goes on and on, allowing them to collect a ton of information.
They then take all of this data back to Google's servers to be added to their "search index."
And that's what people like you and I are searching through when we key in a query
in Google.
Now, if you were to search for something and Google returned every result that mentioned
your words on the page, then you'd end up with really bad results.
This brings us to the second part, which is Google's ranking algorithm.
Google has hundreds of ranking signals and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to
600 times per year.
So to be frank, no one knows exactly how their algorithm works.
But they've given us clues and some guidelines to better understand the factors that are
most important.
In addition, third-party companies like ours have done studies to test and
better understand these factors.
Now, I won't bore you with over 200 ranking signals, many which are just speculation at
best, but I do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you'll need
to understand from a fundamental standpoint.
First are backlinks.
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another.
And Google has said on their How Search Works page that if other prominent websites
link to a page, that's proof to be a good sign that information is well trusted.
The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes.
When a page receives a backlink, it's essentially another website vouching
for the content on the page.
And the more "votes," you get from credible sources, the higher the trust.
And we also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive
correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page's organic traffic.
Second is search intent, which represents the reason behind a searcher's query.
And if you think of Google's goal for search, their job is to return the most relevant results
for any given query.
So with that said, you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top ranking
pages for the query you want to rank for.
For example, if you search for "slow cooker recipes," you'll see that the search results
are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes.
So if you try and rank a product page where you're selling a slow cooker, you won't be
matching search intent and therefore, you won't rank.
Now, if we change the query to just "slow cooker," you'll see that the dominant types
of pages are eCommerce category pages.
So if you try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes, then you probably won't rank
because you're not matching search intent.
This is a critical concept to understand and I'll share a simple 3-step checklist you can
use to determine search intent for any query in the next module.
And third is content depth.
Search engines are made up of computer programs.
So they can't actually read and understand text like you and I would.
Nevertheless, Google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology
that understands content to a certain degree.
But it's your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject.
For example, if you look at the top-ranking pages for the query "how to drive a car"
you'll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt, familiarizing yourself
with the gas and brake pedals, adjusting your seat and mirrors, and other things
that a first-time driver may not know.
Basically, you want to be able to answer the searcher's query the best that you
possibly can.
And naturally, it should lead to content that has depth.
Now, it's important to note that depth doesn't always translate to length.
For example, a topic like "how to turn off iphone 12" doesn't need to and shouldn't
be long.
In fact, the top-ranking page is only 185 words.
But the content itself solves the user's query from start to finish.
Alright, so the basics are in the book and it's time to move on to the keyword research
module, which will be published throughout this week.
So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future lessons.
And if you're watching more than a week later from this video's publishing date, then
just check the description where we'll leave links to all of the other lessons in the course.
I'll see you in the next module.