Guide: SEO for Beginners – 10 Steps to the Top of Search Engines

Install Google Search Console

With Search Console, you can directly monitor which keywords your site appears for in Google and which of those keywords people have clicked on.

• You can see which keywords bring the most visitors to your site
• You can see which are your site’s most important pages from an SEO perspective
• You can see which sites link to yours
• You can submit your sitemap to Google
• Check your site’s loading speed
• Check for site errors
• Check your site’s security

I claim that Google Search Console is the most important of all SEO tools.

Install Google Analytics

With Google Analytics you can

• Track how many visitors you get from Google
• What visitors do on your sites
• Whether users on your sites do what you want them to do (e.g. contact you)
• See what sources bring visitors to your site

Pro tip: It’s worth combining Google Analytics and Search Console so they share data with each other

Decide what you are aiming for and set KPIs
(Key Points of Interest)

Here are the typical goals:

• Organic traffic. Additional traffic to your sites is always positive.
• Brand awareness. Better visibility in various search results increases your brand awareness. It also works the other way around. Well-known brands often rank well in Google too, because their search results are more likely to be clicked.
• Growing external links (backlinks): External links, or backlinks, are still one of the biggest factors in search visibility. External links from trusted sites are a sign that your site provides such high-quality information to the reader that others want to use it as a source.
• Specific position in search results. Sometimes the goal of search engine optimization is simply to improve visibility for a specific search term. Maybe you want to move a big search term from position 10 to position 3.

By defining the goal or goals, it is possible to track the results of search engine optimization more precisely.

I recommend building a dashboard for yourself with Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) that allows you to easily track these metrics as search engine optimization progresses.

Try Google’s autocomplete

Each of these words is something people search for a lot on Google.

They also work as suggestions for what topics you should write content about on your website.

This data comes directly from Google, so I believe these words are very important. Google’s autocomplete for search keywords is the easiest way to do keyword research.

Export keyword list to Google Sheets

Create a filter from the keyword list and add conditional formatting that allows you to color code the keywords in the following style.

This helps you easily see the good keywords worth investing in for search engine optimization.

Add a keyword to the page URL

Keep your site URLs clear and easy to read.

Remember to add the keyword to the URL that you want the page to be found for in Google.

E.g. this page’s URL is /hakukoneoptimointi-pikaopas, because I want this page to be found for the search “Hakukoneoptimointi pikaopas”.

Use the search term in the first paragraph of the page

This way Google can more reliably rank the page for exactly the search term where you want it to appear

Identify site error messages and loading speed

If your site has technical issues with security, mobile optimization, loading speed or other content, you won’t appear in Google.

You can easily see error notifications in Google Search Console