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SEO Ultimate Guide 2020

Ultimate SEO Guide

Chibi

I want to know everything about SEO and content marketing.
I’m learning SEO and looking for a good learning material.

Chibi

Chibi

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

Related Article What is SEO?

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.

Related Article How to Keyword Research for SEO【Begginer】

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

Related Article How to Write SEO-friendly Articles
Related Article How to Target Multiple Keywords with One Article

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.

Related Article What is Content Audit? Tips and How to Create a Template

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

Related Article How to code SEO-friendly Websites with HTML5 Elements?
Related Article 【Multilingual SEO】What is Hreflang? How to set up on WordPress

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.

  1. Learn by Books, online courses
  2. Learn by others(Influencers SNS, Blog, YouTube, etc)
  3. 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

SEO Companies

If you are thinking about growing your companies business by SEO and can afford the cost, it would be good to outsource to SEO/Digital Agencies.

What they can offer you is to correct the coding or errors, track the performance, and give you some suggestions for content strategy.

The average cost would be $3,000 ~ $10,000 per month.

I would suggest working with well-known agencies since some small agencies offer really low-quality services.

Related Article The Top Japanese SEO Agencies and Experts in Tokyo

Conclusion

Thanks for reading!

If you like anything about SEO, let’s connect and do something exciting together.

Heysho

Arigato

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