SEO Ultimate Guide 2020

Chibi

I want to know everything about SEO and content marketing.

I’m learning SEO and looking for a good learning material.

Chibi

I’m learning SEO and looking for a good learning material.

Chibi

If you have these questions, I’m here to help you.

Hi everyone, my name is Heysho(@japaneseseo). I’m an SEO expert based in Tokyo.

Heysho

Nice to meet you!

Today, I’m gonna go over everything I know about SEO.

Here are the topics.

What is SEO?
Benefit of SEO
Types of SEO
SEO Tools
How to learn SEO
SEO Companies

If you have any questions, feel free to leave your comment or ask me on LINE@.

Heysho

Let’s get started!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

It’s a technique to help improve rankings on Google Search.

For example, when you type the keyword “how to find a girlfriend” on Google Search, Google shows you the list of articles to solve your problem.

If you apply some SEO techniques to your website, you can show my website on the top of the search result page.

That’s how it works.

What are Search Engines?

A search engine is a program to search for information by typing the query.

The popular search engines in Japan are as follows;

Practically SEO can be used for any search engines but when people talk about SEO, it’s usually for Google’s search engine.

The Concept of SEO

The concept of SEO is to solve problems.

When people have a problem, they type a keyword on Google and find the answer.

It means that if you have a good solution to the question, your article can rank up higher.

That is why it’s important to find the problems behind the keyword and give them your best solution.

How Can You Leverage SEO for Your Website?

Generally, SEO experts set their goals as follows.

Sales… Increase the number of conversions and the conversion rate
Awareness… Increase the traffic from search result pages
Branding/Reputation… Improve ranking on the brand search

Benefit of SEO

In digital marketing, CRO generates the highest ROI and SEO comes on second.

SEO comes on top in the long term.

In short, SEO can help you with your business on the following aspects

Help increase the website traffic and sales online
Answer every question from your target customers on the purchase journey
Help improve your brand awareness

For example, what happens when you are selling your products online and your customers cannot find your website online?

What happens when your target customers are looking for information online and your website shows up on Google and they visit your website?

SEO can bring you consistent website traffic from Google without spending any money.

Types of SEO Techniques

SEO used to be a technique to improve rankings for Google Search.

Nowadays, SEO experts are taking care of more variety of works.

For example,

Content Marketing… Gain more online presence by posting blog articles
Local SEO … Gain more visibility on Google Map
On SERP SEO … Gain more visibility on the particular Search Engine Results
YouTube SEO … Increase the search rankings on YouTube Search
SERM(Search Engine Reputation Management) … Push down the negative articles on the branded keywords
Google Discover Optimization … Optimize the blog/news articles to appear on Google Discover Feed
Voice Search SEO … Optimize your website for Voice Search(Google Home, Siri, Alexa)

It doesn’t mean you need to start focusing on these new techniques, but It’s important to identify which strategy is right for your business.

Although there are a lot of latest and fancy SEO techniques available in 2020, the traditional SEO would make generate the highest ROI so I would suggest going with the basics if you are a beginner.

The followings are some of the important techniques;

Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the activity to identify the popular words and phrases people search on Google.

What we do here is to list up the keywords with a good amount of search volume, and relevant keywords with your business.

SEO Writing

SEO writing is a technique to write SEO-friendly content for example…

Include the right keywords in the right place
Identify the user’s needs and provide solutions
Make your sentence easy to read

Content Audit, Keyword Mapping

A content audit is a strategy to evaluate all the content’s quality and measure if it’s effective.

Keyword mapping is a process to match all the target keywords and all the content.

Both are a really important process to optimize the contents on your entire website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a technique to optimize website codings so that Google can easily spot your website and understands your website contents.

Breadcrumbs
HTML5 implementation
Sitemap
Broken links
Https
hreflang
Redirect
Canonical
Duplicated contents
Keyword Cannibalization
Mobile-first indexing
AMP
Responsive website

SEO Tools

Most SEO experts use SEO tools to do some research to get insight and track performance.

Here are the common SEO tools that can help you find opportunities to find solutions.

Types of SEO Tools

Website traffic analytics tools
Keyword research tools
Rank tracker
Crawling tool
Backlink analytics tool
Competitor analytics tool

Popular SEO tools

Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Ahref
SEMRush
Conductor Searchlight
Screaming Frog SEO spider

Based on my experience, most SEO experts use Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Rank Tracking tool.

Screaming Frog and Ahref are also the popular ones among the advanced marketers.

How to learn SEO

There are 3 ways to learn SEO.

Learn by Books, online courses
Learn by others(Influencers SNS, Blog, YouTube, etc)
Learn by running your own website

If you are a beginner, I would suggest learning from online courses such as Udemy at first.

They often have $10 sales and you can take the whole SEO course to cover every topic.

If you are an intermediate or advanced level, I would suggest following some influencers for example Rank Fishkin, Brian Dean, Neil Patel, John Mueller etc.

There are some online communities for SEO experts too for example Click Funnel, Online Genius, etc.

Related Article Popular SEO/Digital Marketing Blogs