SEO Basics

From:

SISTRIX Content Team

Editor: Steve Paine

Modified: 08.11.2021

The best starting point is always the SEO beginners guide which moves through important topics such as crawling, intent, ranking factors and the quality auditors guidelines. It includes 6 good reasons to practice SEO and a breakdown of the structure of the Google SERP. There’s a useful glossary of SEO terms at the end of the article.

In 2021 we introduced our free SISTRIX Academy which gives you simple explainers in video form, from experts. Test your knowledge and the end and get a certificate.

How long does it take to learn SEO?

Not long. In fact you might be doing it already without realising it. Given a technically sound website (mobile friendly, crawlable and well-organised) one of the simplest tasks is to write high-quality content that matches your customers requirements. Take a look at our detailed articles about content marketing to learn more .

Be aware of the common SEO mistakes too. They’re easy to make, but easy to remember.

SEO can get complex though, and if you’re running large sites across multiple countries and languages serving different customer desires, you’ll need some experience.

Technically sound, mobile friendly, crawlable – What?

Yes, you’ll need to do some learning and research there, unless you have external SEO help, but in most cases, the Google Search Console (GSC) is the tool that will tell you everything you need to know. Get started with GSC as soon as you can. For more information on crawling, we have a series of articles here.

Start SEO with checklists and simple strategies

SEO can bring traffic, and customers but many businesses will need to prove it before they will invest. To that end, we’ve created a number of getting-started guides and strategies. Take a look at these, for example.

• Getting started with SEO in a small business
• Regular SEO Tasks for Small Businesses
• 5 Steps to Understanding Your Audience and Identifying Your Niche

Start measuring SEO progress from day 1

Understanding how to measure SEO success and what KPIs mean is important for your first day of SEO. Be prepared to understand the difference between search visibility and search traffic and make sure you understand who your SEO competitors are and how they are progressing. Ranking distribution is also a great way to see the current status in a single graphic.

Ask SISTRIX. High quality informative content

Ask SISTRIX is a reference library of high quality SEO information focused purely on helping you learn SEO. We use a journalistic process to create and edit articles which are regularly re-checked by our in-house team, and external auditors.

We try to stay independent of our products in Ask SISTRIX but if you are using our products then please be aware that we have a handbook library with walk-through videos, and a set of tutorials. We write about case studies and data studies on our blog and our occasional newsletter will keep you informed of important news, product developments and new studies.

Frequently asked questions