SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single…

Note: This one of one of the chapters of Secret Sauce: A step-by-step growth hacking guide . Secret Sauce breaks down every channel just like this one, so if you think this is valuable check it out. It’s for sale now.

SEO In One Day

SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms.
Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants who actually don’t know what they’re doing.
SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do.

How Google Works

In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google.

The Early Days of Google

The idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them.
They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them.

Google Today

Google works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from the New York Times is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority.
At the end of the day the purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar.
All this means is we need to make it clear to google what our page is about, and then make it clear that we’re popular. If we do that we win. In order to do that, we’ll follow a very simple process that works every single time with less effort than you probably think is required.

Gaming the System

Google is a very smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms.
If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scrapebox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.
Some of that stuff works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things.
Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. So if you see some highly-paid SEO consultant telling you to use software and spun content to generate links, or when you see some blackhatter beating the system, just know that it’s not worth it. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future.

On-Page SEO

The first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about.
For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t our brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused.

Keyword Research

The first thing we need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular our site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty we’ll get from this effort may vary.

The Long Tail

There’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.”
If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the X axis, we’d get something like a power law graph:
There are some big hits that get the majority of attention, and after a few hits the graph falls sharply. The long-tail theory says that as we become more diverse as a society the yellow end of the above graph will stretch forever and get taller.
Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail .
In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords — very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way to the left.
Our site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific we can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort.
The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.”

Finding the Long Tail

In order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free.
The process looks like this:

1. Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords
2. Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level
3. Search for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty

Don’t be intimidated — it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this book (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months).

Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword Generating

In this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process.
So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit:
Growth hacking
Growth marketing
Internet marketing
Growth hacking guide
Growth hacking book
Book about growth hacking
What is growth hacking
Growth hacking instructions
That’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out keywordshitter.com . If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with.
Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest . When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results.
Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list.
Go through that process with each keyword you came up with.
Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500.

Step 2: Traffic Estimating

Now that we have a pretty good list of keywords. Our next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth our while.
You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels.
Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track.
You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past.
Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.”
Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data.
Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead we’re going to export our data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there.
Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after.
This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank.
Go to SEMrush.com and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column:
As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after.
Number of Backlinks
Maximum Difficulty
< 30:<40
<100:40–50
<1000:50–70
1000+:70+
Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows.

Exact Match

One important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “ exact match ” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword we will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall.
Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit.
Here are mine:
growth hacking strategies
growth hacking techniques
growth hacking 101
growth hacking instagram
growth hacking twitter
Mine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case.

Keyword Trends

Unfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic.
First, let’s use Google Trends to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. For my keywords it looks like this:
The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.”
Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords.

Manual Keyword Difficulty Analysis

In order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list.
This process gets a lot easier if you download the SEOQuake Chrome extension . Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes.
With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result.
We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following:
Now when you search, you’ll see something like this
SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom:
The Google Index: This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexed
Page Links : The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples)
URL Links : The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URL
Age: The first time the page was indexed by the Internet Archive
Traffic : A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URL
Looking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions.
You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes.
If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both.
Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this exact keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle.
Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.”
Entrepreneur.com is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page.
(By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for entrepreneur.com — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article).
Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while.
Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton.
But the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.”
Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page.
17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily.
So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links.

On-Page SEO

Now that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you.
Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized.

On-Page SEO Checklist

☐ Your keyword is in the