SEO is the foundation of a successful website. Considering that an estimated 51% of site traffic originates from organic search, it is clear that where a website appears on the SERP will greatly impact the site’s overall traffic success. Properly done, SEO can drive engagement, conversions, and revenue.

These SEO basics are a good way to start your way towards successful SEO. SEO is often untended by businesses, however, because it can feel daunting to get a site optimized so it appears high in the SERPs. SEO is a less glamorous form of marketing as it often requires waiting weeks to start to really see the impact of your efforts. By just taking a few minutes a day, however, to focus on taking a few basic steps towards using SEO, you can increase your visibility and therefore your success online. Here are 8 SEO basics you need to get started.

Want to get the most from your SEO? Here is how to maximize your ROI.

SEO Basics 1: Who do I create content for?

Before you can move forward with your SEO plan, you must first know exactly for whom are you are writing. This means breaking down your target customers into customer personas. These categories will help you understand the pain points and needs of your unique audience so that you can tailor the material to engage them.

You can begin to build your target personas by examining and your current and past customers. You want to understand what they wanted to see from a business and what brought them to you. You can also use market research to supplement your findings. It is also important to know exactly when a prospective client will be engaging with your content.

Reports, such as white papers or case studies, tend to serve customers who are further down the buyer’s journey, while blog posts about the industry are often explored by those in the beginning Awareness stage. The type of content as well as the material you cover should all be tailored to meet the needs of particular customers at certain points in their buyer’s journey.

SEO Basics 2: What kind of content do people want to read?

Once you know who you are writing for, the next part is understanding exactly what they want to read. This is keyword research. By doing keyword research you can examine factors, such as the traffic and level of competition for a particular keyword. This can help you pinpoint concepts that your targeted personas are likely to be searching for, improving your chances of attracting a strong audience.

Using a platform like BrightEdge will also allow you to go one step further. Once you have selected a keyword to be tested, you can also check the top 10 domains ranked for the keyword. This will not only help you see if the keyword is worth pursuing, but it will also give you added insight into the types of content and information that have already been well-ranked for this topic. This is a shot of the BrightEdge Recommendations capability which provides actionable on-page and off-page insights. 

SEO Basics 3: How do I write content that is easy to digest?

Armed with your topic and the understanding of the ideal audience, you now need to create fresh content. As you develop your material, the customer should be the center focus. Make sure the content adds something of value for your readers. Use your professional expertise to offer them unique insight. This value will not only improve engagement, but it will also help to cast you as the helpful professional to whom they should return when they have more questions about your industry. Remember that in online marketing, this is often the opportunity to begin to build a relationship with your prospect, so you want to get off to a strong start.

When considering your content, it is also important to think about your format. Customers have ever-decreasing attention spans with the average now down to around 8 seconds. Using features such as bullets, lists, headings and short paragraphs all make your content easier to scan and digest. This will help people retain your material and better understand the depth of the information you can provide.

SEO Basics 4: How can I help people find my content?

Once you have your high-value content prepared, you need to find a way to get that content in front of the targeted customers. People do not magically find quality content, you need to engage in a few best practices to improve the visibility of your material.

To begin, make sure you have included your keyword 5-10 times throughout the content, depending on length. This includes the H1, at least one H2 and naturally a few times in the body of your content. Remember as you begin this step, however, that keyword stuffing is frowned upon both by readers and by the algorithms. Google has taken great care to downgrade the sites that use stuffing techniques to try and make their thin content seem relevant despite its lack of depth. Instead, your focus should be to naturally incorporate your targeted keyword in your material.

Remember that this includes semantically related keywords. Google continues to push towards semantic search with their updates such as Hummingbird and RankBrain. In other words, they work to understand the context and intent behind a query. Including related keywords naturally in your material will help to further establish your relevance to the search algorithm.

Keep in mind that your efforts to get your content in front of the right people at the right time also includes distribution. Your plan should include your social media platforms as well as email lists (learn more about social media metrics). Delivering your content to the people who are the most likely to appreciate it can help boost your traffic and engagement rates, both of which are considered by search engines when determining the position of the article on the SERPs.

SEO Basics 5: How to I create a pleasant user experience?

Once you get people on your website, you want to make the entire experience pleasant for them. This means features, such as fast load times and using images. Customers quickly grow impatient and annoyed when a website takes too long to load. One study found that an increase of just 1 second in load time can decrease conversions by 7 percent. You can improve your load times by taking steps, such as:

• Only using the most necessary plugins
• Enabling browser caching
• Optimize images that are too heavy

While it is important to use appropriately-sized images, the visuals themselves can also help improve the user experience. Unique images, particularly those that directly involve your company, such as personnel or your products and services, tend to be great. Most people are very visual, and adding images helps you tap into that power to make your material seem more interesting. Using these two steps will help to increase engagement and will decrease bounce rates.

SEO Basics 6: How do I make my site easy to navigate?

As people arrive on your website, you want to help them move around your page. They should be able to clearly understand where they are in your website in relation to everything else in the domain. If they want to learn more about your company itself, for example, then it should be obvious where they can find an About Us link. Your sitemap should also be uploaded to Google to help the search engine understand your site as it crawls the domain.

Your URLs should similarly be clearly structured. Rather than having your domain followed by several random letters and numbers, it should clearly indicate where the person is on the site. For example, yourdomain.com/blog/8-seo-basics. This will also help you add in another keyword, boosting your relevancy.

SEO Basics 7: How do I get people to engage with my site?

Now that you have people on your website, you want to do everything you can to keep them on the page. The more a person reads and engages with your website, the easier it will be to help them build a relationship with you. They will be more likely to remember your brand and view you as a trusted authority. As they prepare to make a purchase, it is a natural inclination to lean towards those with whom they already have a relationship.

As people spend more time on your website, they are also sending valuable signals to the search engines, letting them know that they appreciate and trust your content. You can nurture this engagement a few ways. One important means is through internal links. These links will provide access to resources for those who want to learn more about these related subjects. You should have all links in your piece open into a new window. This improves the user experience and encourages people to come back to the original article easily. Your content should also be followed by relevant CTAs.

Your chief goal with your content is to nurture leads and encourage them to move further through the buyer’s journey. Relevant CTAs are a great way to tap into the interests of your reader and encourage them to move to the next stage in the process. This is one of the nearly unlimited reports generated by the BrightEdge Story Builder.

SEO Basics 8: How do I track metrics and analytics?

As you begin to do SEO on your website, you also need to track metrics. It is not optimal to run an SEO campaign based upon intuition or feelings. When you are just getting started in SEO, there are a few key areas that you want to focus on your:

• Traffic rates by channel
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rates
• Cost per conversion

These numbers will help you see how well your SEO efforts are helping to bring more people to your website and how interesting they find your material. As you mature in your SEO process, you will also want to start looking at more in-depth metrics, such as how your performance is changing month-over-month and year-over-year. You will want to explore how your performance is impacted by different campaigns as well. Fortunately, a platform like BrightEdge allows you to customize your analytics so you can easily get the information you need at each stage of your campaign.

Organic is the largest driver of traffic towards your site. Learn more here.

SEO is an important part of any marketing campaign. Following each of these SEO basics will help you succeed.

SEO is the foundation of a successful website. Considering that an estimated 51% of site traffic originates from organic search, it is clear that where a website appears on the SERP will greatly impact the site’s overall traffic success. Properly done, SEO can drive engagement, conversions, and revenue.

These SEO basics are a good way to start your way towards successful SEO. SEO is often untended by businesses, however, because it can feel daunting to get a site optimized so it appears high in the SERPs. SEO is a less glamorous form of marketing as it often requires waiting weeks to start to really see the impact of your efforts. By just taking a few minutes a day, however, to focus on taking a few basic steps towards using SEO, you can increase your visibility and therefore your success online. Here are 8 SEO basics you need to get started.

Want to get the most from your SEO? Here is how to maximize your ROI.

SEO Basics 1: Who do I create content for?

Before you can move forward with your SEO plan, you must first know exactly for whom are you are writing. This means breaking down your target customers into customer personas. These categories will help you understand the pain points and needs of your unique audience so that you can tailor the material to engage them.

You can begin to build your target personas by examining and your current and past customers. You want to understand what they wanted to see from a business and what brought them to you. You can also use market research to supplement your findings. It is also important to know exactly when a prospective client will be engaging with your content.

Reports, such as white papers or case studies, tend to serve customers who are further down the buyer’s journey, while blog posts about the industry are often explored by those in the beginning Awareness stage. The type of content as well as the material you cover should all be tailored to meet the needs of particular customers at certain points in their buyer’s journey.

SEO Basics 2: What kind of content do people want to read?

Once you know who you are writing for, the next part is understanding exactly what they want to read. This is keyword research. By doing keyword research you can examine factors, such as the traffic and level of competition for a particular keyword. This can help you pinpoint concepts that your targeted personas are likely to be searching for, improving your chances of attracting a strong audience.

Using a platform like BrightEdge will also allow you to go one step further. Once you have selected a keyword to be tested, you can also check the top 10 domains ranked for the keyword. This will not only help you see if the keyword is worth pursuing, but it will also give you added insight into the types of content and information that have already been well-ranked for this topic. This is a shot of the BrightEdge Recommendations capability which provides actionable on-page and off-page insights.

SEO Basics 3: How do I write content that is easy to digest?

Armed with your topic and the understanding of the ideal audience, you now need to create fresh content. As you develop your material, the customer should be the center focus. Make sure the content adds something of value for your readers. Use your professional expertise to offer them unique insight. This value will not only improve engagement, but it will also help to cast you as the helpful professional to whom they should return when they have more questions about your industry. Remember that in online marketing, this is often the opportunity to begin to build a relationship with your prospect, so you want to get off to a strong start.

When considering your content, it is also important to think about your format. Customers have ever-decreasing attention spans with the average now down to around 8 seconds. Using features such as bullets, lists, headings and short paragraphs all make your content easier to scan and digest. This will help people retain your material and better understand the depth of the information you can provide.

SEO Basics 4: How can I help people find my content?

Once you have your high-value content prepared, you need to find a way to get that content in front of the targeted customers. People do not magically find quality content, you need to engage in a few best practices to improve the visibility of your material.

To begin, make sure you have included your keyword 5-10 times throughout the content, depending on length. This includes the H1, at least one H2 and naturally a few times in the body of your content. Remember as you begin this step, however, that keyword stuffing is frowned upon both by readers and by the algorithms. Google has taken great care to downgrade the sites that use stuffing techniques to try and make their thin content seem relevant despite its lack of depth. Instead, your focus should be to naturally incorporate your targeted keyword in your material.

Remember that this includes semantically related keywords. Google continues to push towards semantic search with their updates such as Hummingbird and RankBrain. In other words, they work to understand the context and intent behind a query. Including related keywords naturally in your material will help to further establish your relevance to the search algorithm.

Keep in mind that your efforts to get your content in front of the right people at the right time also includes distribution. Your plan should include your social media platforms as well as email lists (learn more about social media metrics). Delivering your content to the people who are the most likely to appreciate it can help boost your traffic and engagement rates, both of which are considered by search engines when determining the position of the article on the SERPs.

SEO Basics 5: How to I create a pleasant user experience?

Once you get people on your website, you want to make the entire experience pleasant for them. This means features, such as fast load times and using images. Customers quickly grow impatient and annoyed when a website takes too long to load. One study found that an increase of just 1 second in load time can decrease conversions by 7 percent. You can improve your load times by taking steps, such as:

• Only using the most necessary plugins
• Enabling browser caching
• Optimize images that are too heavy

While it is important to use appropriately-sized images, the visuals themselves can also help improve the user experience. Unique images, particularly those that directly involve your company, such as personnel or your products and services, tend to be great. Most people are very visual, and adding images helps you tap into that power to make your material seem more interesting. Using these two steps will help to increase engagement and will decrease bounce rates.

SEO Basics 6: How do I make my site easy to navigate?

As people arrive on your website, you want to help them move around your page. They should be able to clearly understand where they are in your website in relation to everything else in the domain. If they want to learn more about your company itself, for example, then it should be obvious where they can find an About Us link. Your sitemap should also be uploaded to Google to help the search engine understand your site as it crawls the domain.

Your URLs should similarly be clearly structured. Rather than having your domain followed by several random letters and numbers, it should clearly indicate where the person is on the site. For example, yourdomain.com/blog/8-seo-basics. This will also help you add in another keyword, boosting your relevancy.

SEO Basics 7: How do I get people to engage with my site?

Now that you have people on your website, you want to do everything you can to keep them on the page. The more a person reads and engages with your website, the easier it will be to help them build a relationship with you. They will be more likely to remember your brand and view you as a trusted authority. As they prepare to make a purchase, it is a natural inclination to lean towards those with whom they already have a relationship.

As people spend more time on your website, they are also sending valuable signals to the search engines, letting them know that they appreciate and trust your content. You can nurture this engagement a few ways. One important means is through internal links. These links will provide access to resources for those who want to learn more about these related subjects. You should have all links in your piece open into a new window. This improves the user experience and encourages people to come back to the original article easily. Your content should also be followed by relevant CTAs.

Your chief goal with your content is to nurture leads and encourage them to move further through the buyer’s journey. Relevant CTAs are a great way to tap into the interests of your reader and encourage them to move to the next stage in the process. This is one of the nearly unlimited reports generated by the BrightEdge Story Builder.

SEO Basics 8: How do I track metrics and analytics?

As you begin to do SEO on your website, you also need to track metrics. It is not optimal to run an SEO campaign based upon intuition or feelings. When you are just getting started in SEO, there are a few key areas that you want to focus on your:

• Traffic rates by channel
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rates
• Cost per conversion

These numbers will help you see how well your SEO efforts are helping to bring more people to your website and how interesting they find your material. As you mature in your SEO process, you will also want to start looking at more in-depth metrics, such as how your performance is changing month-over-month and year-over-year. You will want to explore how your performance is impacted by different campaigns as well. Fortunately, a platform like BrightEdge allows you to customize your analytics so you can easily get the information you need at each stage of your campaign.

Organic is the largest driver of traffic towards your site.

SEO is an important part of any marketing campaign. Following each of these SEO basics will help you succeed.

How Do I Create an Attribution Model?

To begin tracking attribution model, you want to consider the model that fits your organization best. Think about the business model you have and the goals you want to achieve with your campaign. Review the different model options and see which one will align best with the goals of your digital marketing strategy. You can set up attribution models both in Google Analytics as well as some social platforms, including Facebook.

To set up your attribution model in Google, you will need to begin by logging into your Google Analytics account. You will need to access the Admin portion of the site. Then go over to the Personal Tools & Assets and click on Multi-Channel Funnels Settings.

Understanding Attribution Models

Once you have entered this portion of the Analytics page, you can add new attribution models, which allow you to select baseline models based on the strategy you want to use for your page. Google gives you choices between Linear Model, First Interaction, Last Interaction, Time Decay, and Position Based (or U-Shaped) models.

Once you set up your attribution model, you can start tracking how customers move in your website. You can begin to gather information about the ability of different parts of your site to engage with prospective customers and encourage them to convert.

If you promote ads and content on Facebook and Instagram, you will also see that you can track some attribution data through social media as well. Specifically, Facebook and Instagram will let you know if a customer took a particular action on your ad and site within a certain number of days of viewing your ad. This can help you gain a better understanding of how your ads influence people’s buying decisions. You can combine the data you gather through Facebook to see how your social media ads play in with the rest of your touch points. You can then see how those customers arriving from Facebook ads behave on your site and the types of other touch points they make before a purchase.

User-generated content describes material that is produced by people rather than a brand. The term describes the articles, reviews, videos, and posts people publish that contribute to the brand’s reach and reputation. For example, social media platforms are filled with user-generated content as people create posts that reflect their experiences.

Why is user-generated content so important?

User-generated content can be incredibly powerful for businesses. According to Nielsen, word-of-mouth marketing is the most trusted form of advertising. Similarly, Reevoo found that 70 percent of people found content produced by their peers to be more valuable than content produced by brands-- even professionally written material. Having customers create high-quality, positive content about your organization can have a powerful impact on your brand’s reputation.

User-generated content can also help you build a community and following around your content. This allows you to tap into the psychological principle known as the ‘bandwagon effect’. When people notice their friends and family-- people whose opinion they trust-- using a particular brand, they feel more inclined to try that brand as well. A strong community also helps to build loyalty, which means that your customers will feel more inclined to stick with your brand rather than finding alternatives.

How do I use user-generated content?

Communication is the key to convincing people to create user-generated content. For example, you can encourage people to post pictures of themselves using your products or post success stories after using your services by offering rewards or prizes.

Encourage conversation on your social media pages by asking questions and then participating in, but not dominating, the resulting dialogue. Offering people opportunities to write guest posts for your blog or website about their experiences can also be a fantastic way to encourage bonding and loyalty. Building a strong social media page can be instrumental in encouraging user-generated content.

User-generated content is a wonderful way to build loyalty with customers and also receive trustworthy, free advertising that can improve your brand reach and reputation. Brands should incorporate methods of generating this type of content into their broader marketing schemes to take advantage of the social nature of the modern digital ecosystem.

Related Resources

• How to create content that measurably performs?
• How to manage SEO efficiently?
• Take a fun 3-min Digital Marketing Quiz
• How to boost your online marketing with effective UX?

Which Attribution Theory Examples Work Best?

Each of the models here have some benefits and drawbacks, leaving brands to determine the model that will best suit them. You will need to think carefully about your goals for your marketing strategy as you consider the type of attribution theories you want to use. You also need to think about the ability of your organization to measure the impact of the different touch points.

For example, if your brand is in the early stages of marketing and has not dealt with attribution too much in the past, then it might be preferable to start with a one-touch attribution model as you begin to get the hang of the process. As your marketing matures, you may have the bandwidth to handle a more complex attribution model.

In this situation, consider the goals of your campaign. If you want to pay close attention to brand awareness, then a first touch attribution model may fit your needs best. On other other hand, if your content for the beginning of the buyer’s journey regularly performs well and you need to pay close attention to the end of the journey, then a last-touch attribution model may be the direction that you need to go.

One-touch models may also work well for businesses who have a very short buyer’s journey. Certain e-commerce brands, for example, that typically sell to people on the first or second time they visit a page, may find that a one-touch attribution model works well for them.

Many other businesses will want to gain a more accurate picture that can be obtained through the multi-touch attribution models. These models do a better job of measuring the impact of the different touch points along the way, understanding that not one moment deserves all the credit for converting a lead into a customer. The truth of this position may be strengthened for businesses who have a significantly longer buyer’s journey. For example, someone preparing to buy a car often think about the decision for a while before making a purchase. The touch points along the buyer's journey, therefore, will likely have a greater significance.

These organizations may find that the u-shaped attribution model fits them best, allowing them to accurately see the value of the different touch points along the way while also acknowledging the importance of the first and last moments in the journey.

Consider your business model when determining the attribution model that will fit best for you. Think about which one most accurately aligns with what you need to track for the future of your digital marketing campaigns.

The data you collect from your attribution model will likely have a significant impact on how you run your digital marketing strategy moving forward. When you know which touch points perform the best, it becomes easier to construct campaigns that will have the maximum impact. Therefore, think carefully about how you want to set up your attribution model.

What is an Attribution Theory Example?

There are several attribution theory examples. Since it is impossible to know exactly what touch points deserve the most credit for converting prospects into leads, marketers turn to one of a few different theories to make the best possible guess regarding attribution. These theories generally have their benefits and drawbacks that might appeal to different marketers.

The first-touch attribution model

The first-touch attribution model assumes that the first interaction between the brand and the customer is the most important. In other words, since this touch point engaged the customer enough that they felt encouraged to continue to learn about the organization, it deserves the credit if the lead converts.

This attribution model will definitely help brands better understand what strategies help them get their brand name out in front of customers and how well they succeed in bringing in the new leads. Unfortunately, the data you collect from this strategy will be heavily slanted towards top-of-the-funnel content, not taking into account the value and important role of bottom-of-the-funnel content.

Using Multi-Touch Attribution

The last-touch attribution model

The last-touch attribution model works on the opposite system of the first-touch attribution model. With last-touch attribution, the last touch point customers have with an organization before converting receives the most credit. The thinking here assumes that the one that convinced the person to actually click the ‘buy’ button should receive the most credit. It does not take into account the importance of the earlier content. This content convinced the person to engage with the brand and then nurtured them until they felt ready to buy.

With these shortcomings of the last-touch attribution model, it makes sense that this model gives too much credit to the end-of-funnel content. This makes it a challenge to accurately measure the importance of the content produced for those earlier in the buyer’s journey. Of course, to successfully convert leads into customers, brands need access to a wealth of engaged leads, which means that high-quality top-of-funnel content is also important for a successful digital strategy.

One popular variation of the last-touch attribution model is the last non-direct click model. This model eliminates the last clicks that come through the customer typing your web address into the search bar. Assuming that if they type your address, you have already successfully nurtured this lead. This helps to eliminate some of the bias toward end-of-funnel content while maintaining simplicity, but still doesn't adequately measure top-of-funnel influence.

Linear attribution model

The linear attribution model assigns equal value for the conversion to each touch point the customer encountered along the way. It attempts to maintain the simplicity of the one-touch models without neglect the importance of the top, middle, or bottom part of the buyer's journey.

While this model does help you gain a more accurate picture of how your prospects interact with your site while leading up to a purchase, it does not do a good job of differentiating between strategies.

Time-decay attribution

Time-decay attribution assumes that as people get closer to conversion, their touch points carry more weight. Therefore, it assigns an increasing value to each of them as the lead gets closer to purchasing. The top-of-the-funnel content, therefore, will receive the least credit, while the bottom-of-the-funnel action that the customer took right before clicking ‘buy’ receives the most.

This model attempts to give credit to all of the touch points along the buyer’s journey while also acknowledging that not every one has the same impact. It assumes that as customers get closer to conversion, the ones that keep them moving forward have the most impact.

U-Shaped Attribution

U-shaped attribution also tries to better understand how different touch points might differ in their effectiveness to nurture leads. This specific model believes that the first and final ones have the greatest impact on the behavior of a lead. The first one is the one that interested them in the brand and the final one is the one that drove them to finally convert. The touch points in the middle receive an even division of the remaining credit. In other words, this model attempts to combine the benefits of all the previous models. Typically, this model works with 40 percent of the credit going to the first and last touch points and the remaining 20 percent getting divided evenly among the ones in the middle.

After you've chosen the attribution model you want to go with, you'll need to begin tracking attribution by setting up a model. You can set up models through Google Analytics and some social media platforms, including Facebook.

What is Marketing Attribution?

Marketing attribution describes the process of looking at how customers moved through your buyer’s journey towards conversion in an attribution model. You attempt to determine which touchpoints had the biggest impact on the person’s decision to make a purchase. A quality attribution strategy will help you better understand what moments matter the most to prospective customers and how to design your buyer’s journey to be as effective as possible.

With a quality attribution theory, you will learn what marketing strategies are most effective and which ones need some work. You will learn how to improve your sales funnel and better engage with prospects.

Understanding the modern customer

The modern consumer does not typically interact with a brand only one time before deciding to make a purchase. Instead, they will typically interact with brands across multiple channels and platforms as they research their pain points and potential solutions.

When a person realizes that they have a problem they want to solve, they often turn to the internet to learn about potential solutions. Online, they get to learn about potential products and services they can buy to help them solve their problems. They begin to uncover the different companies who claim to have the capacity to help.

These companies then want to begin to build relationships with these prospective customers. You want to help them see that they can trust your organization. They want to know that you are a thought leader and that you can solve their problem in the best possible way.

The content you produce lays the foundation for this relationship. It provides you with an opportunity to educate these potential leads and customers and encourage them to continue engaging with your brand. This relationship entices people to pay attention to what you have to say and consider what you have to offer when they prepare to buy.

What can you learn from an attribution model?

The problem many brands run into is that they need a way to tell how successful their various strategies are. They need to be able to track which strategies work well, what needs improvement, and how their various changes and updates impact lead generation and conversion. This is where the importance of attribution theory comes into play.

By using attribution strategies, organizations can better determine what touchpoints customers interacted with as they got closer to conversion. You will have a better understanding of what content and platforms impact customers the most before they convert. You can then use this information to better allocate budget and resources to improve your buyer’s journey and your ability to engage with prospects.