07 Mar From Zero Experience to SEO Expert: My Story in Search Engine Optimization

When something happens naturally it’s almost as if it was meant to be –it’s out of your hands, organically manifested by a higher power. It feels like fate since you happen to find it, and so you welcome it.

But in the inverse, when something is forced it doesn’t feel right. It feels like you’ve been taken advantage of; like you’ve been had, or baited into some false front. This illustrates the difference between finding content through organic and paid search.

Organic results by the way, are eight times more likely to be clicked on than paid.

When you Google or Bing the word “cars,” you’ll notice two types of results. Paid results appear at the top, usually with “ad” displayed next to them, and organic results appear below. You don’t want your business relying on paid search advertisements to get people to your content, you want them to come organically.

In order to achieve these organic clicks  you need Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO.

Great SEO lands your content on Google’s front page, but what is great SEO and how do you earn it?

Zero Experience

A little over a year ago, I started interning for a company called CFO Publishing LLC, a leading publication in corporate finance and B2B journalism with close to half of their web traffic coming from organic search.

Before graduation I needed experience, and through the mentorship program at Streetwise Partners I was connected with the director of audience development at CFO (as a side note, if you live in Washington, D.C. or New York City, I highly recommend checking them out).

CFO took me on to complete a 500-article SEO project that had been put on the back burner. I was to quickly learn WordPress, Scribe, and Yoast, then go through each of the 500 articles and optimize. I eagerly got to work and accomplished a three-month project in under three weeks.

Once I fell into the rhythm of SEO I couldn’t stop. I optimized the top 500 articles and 500 more in less than two months. By the time I finished, CFO’s organic traffic jumped from 43% to 48%, with an overall increase in traffic of 5%. With hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, and over 20K articles in circulation, my efforts were making an impact on traffic.

Learning SEO

It got to the point where I was leading the company’s SEO efforts, and I was learning more every day. I became almost maniacal with the optimization of articles. I started going into every new article and optimizing them.

I would change meta descriptions, slugs, SEO titles. I would add images to otherwise imageless stories, insert outbound links, and add subheadings with keywords between paragraphs. I did all I could. Then, to truly test my optimization skills, I was given another SEO project: content curation.

You see curated content all the time, they are sometimes known in the marketing world as listicles. The easiest way to describe a listicle is a piece of content that houses other content with a common theme. These themed stories are comprised of multiple articles about the same topic. For instance, “5 Signs Your Finance Team Rocks,” or “CFO Strategy and C-Suite Success.”

Listicles are a good way to link users to other content on your site. They elongate avg. session duration, increase page views, and help overall website SEO. As of today, out of over 600 contributors to the site over the last seven years, and after publishing hundreds of listicles, I have the lowest bounce rate at the company and the highest avg. session duration.

Application & Tools

My experiences cover the entire SEO spectrum. There are numerous opportunities for optimization that I was unable to utilize, yet I learned them anyway. For instance, backlinking is a method of getting other websites to link to your content.

Backlinking

This can be done in different ways. Contacting blogs with similar content to see if they will link back to your website. Another way is to find broken links online, and to contact the webmasters of those sites, pitching them the idea of replacing those broken links with your content. You can host guest blogging, or guest blog on someone else’s site.

Google Webmaster

One of the best SEO tools online is Google Webmaster. It searches your website for broken URLs, duplicate meta descriptions, HTML improvements, missing title tags, et cetera. Apply Google Analytics to your website to measure your progress.

Webmaster will also show your website’s page load speed. The faster your pages render, the better it is for SEO. Site speed is a significant factor in search engine results.

More SEO Tools

Scribe and Yoast are fantastic plugins if you are using WordPress. They give you point-by-point analysis of your content’s SEO and readability.

Look at SpyFu, which shows your organic and paid keywords and lets you compare directly with competitors. You can see which keywords you rank highest for and what keywords on your site are popular for search. This will allow you to focus on growing your cornerstone content, improving your SEO.

You can further these efforts by finding long-tail keywords and applying them in your content. A long-tail keyword is a phrase that houses your focus keyword: “where to buy computers” for example houses the keywords buy and computer. They allow your content to appear in search whether both of those words are searched, or a combination of them.

A secret to finding long-tail keywords is to search a keyword on Google, then look at the bottom of the page at the “Searches Related to” section. It will offer a list of popular long-tail keywords that house your focus keyword. Or, you can use websites like Long Tail Finder and Green Hat Long Tail.

What Next?

This story is meant to show that SEO is a major part of any organization’s marketing efforts. Everything from the subject line to the landing page should be optimized for the best results. This means testing. Play around with new ideas, research keywords, subscribe to an SEO blog, look at your cornerstone content to see where you can expand. Search engine optimization is a continual engagement on your part for improving content and organic traffic. Make it a part of your marketing mix and keep it in the forefront of your efforts.

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