Your How-To Guide to SEO Marketing

In digital marketing, there’s no doubt that having websites for your brands and businesses is crucial. With no digital space or platform, your business is unlikely to get very far. But, of course, if no one is actually finding your websites, there’s not much of a point in even having one. So, how can you actually make sure your websites are showing up in search results when people look for services you offer (ex: painting, voice acting, clothes selling, etc?). One of the most crucial aspects of an effective website is effective search engine optimization (SEO). SEO building is the practice of including specific SEO keywords and phrases in your web pages that make your content more attractive to search engines and more likely to appear in search results. SEO marketing also involves making your websites look appealing. SEO can involve including certain terms your audience is likely to be searching for, optimizing your website's performance and appearance, and including external and internal links to your website (Handley 2024).

All that might seem like a lot and/or complicated, but I promise it’s not. In this how-to guide, I’m going to walk you through how to do SEO effectively, using some of my own experiences as a background/as examples.

1. Figure out what tool(s) you want to use to measure your website’s SEO performance.

If you want to have effective SEO building, the first thing you’ve got to do is figure out what tools you want to use to track your website’s performance and how effective your search engine optimization is. Me personally, I have the most experience with Google Analytics, having used that in an SEO internship during college. Google Analytics is highly useful, as it lets you see what Google traffic your website is getting, if traffic is increasing or decreasing, what pages on your website are bringing in the most traffic, as well as other useful metrics such as how much time people spend on your page. Google Search Console is an incredible companion tool to Google Analytics (and both are free), as Google Search Console allows you to track specific SEO keywords (McKenzie 2025).

You can read more information about setting up Google Analytics and Google search Console here and here.

2. Perform an audit on the current effectiveness of your website’s SEO and figure out what your KPIs are.

Before diving deeper into SEO marketing, it’s probably useful to figure out where you are now in terms of how SEO-effective your website is. Some basic things to do to ensure your website has basic optimization is:

• Making sure your website runs quickly. You can measure how fast your website loads/runs with tools such as PageSpeed Insights.

  
  

• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

  
  

• Make sure that your website’s layout is consistent. Don’t have different fonts, text sizes, or colors that make your website look disjointed and inconsistent.

  
  

• Make sure your website is updated and looks modern. Websites that look like they haven’t been updated since 2009 do not inspire confidence in visitors!

  
  

• Ensure hyperlinks within your website works. Broken links will also be detrimental to visitors’ confidence and trust in your authority.

  
  

For more detailed information on how to perform SEO audits, Semrush has an excellent guide you can read here for more information.

And of course, you’re going to want to know what your KPIs—key performance indicators—are. KPIs are measurable goals that you set as part of your SEO marketing campaign (Twin 2025), such as “increase website traffic by 15% within six months.” Think of SMART goals, something I’m sure you’ve heard of before.

3. Research the keywords your competitors use, as well as the keywords your desired customers are searching for.

Knowing the environment you’re operating in is crucial to understanding how to get a leg up over your competition. Luckily, with just a free Semrush account, there’s a lot you can do to understand the playing field you’re in, such as understanding what your customers are searching for and the popularity of said keywords, what SEO keywords your competitors use, pointing out website flaws, and more (Willoby 2025). You can sign up for a free Semrush account here.

One simple way to find common search results your customers are looking for is by typing a common word or phrase associated with the service you offer into Google. For example, when I worked LIFT Auto Repair Marketing (marketing for auto repair shops around the country), a way I could’ve figured out what key phrases were commonly being searched by our clients' customers would be to type “car not” in the Google search bar and see what comes up. I did so here:

As you can see, a myriad of common search results came up, showing car problems people are searching for. One thing that my coworkers and I did were write and publish articles on our clients’ websites addressing car problems and how to fix them, and the smart thing to do would be include these phrases as needed in relevant articles on our clients' sites to increase the likelihood of our search results appearing on Google’s pages.

This is just one simple way to gather (and sort) keywords. Other keyword cultivation can be utilized with tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Trends (Shaffer 2025). You can find specific instructions on how to use each separate keyword tool here.

4. Create new content for SEO.

You will want to build blogs and website content based on the different groups of SEO keywords you have found—but an important thing to note: do NOT engage in keyword stuffing! Keyword stuffing is when you force keywords into your blogs unnaturally, such including a string of keywords in white text on a website, or continuously repeating the same words within the same paragraph or page. Doing so will make your content look spammy, robotic, or AI-generated, and will not only look unprofessional, but also will affect search rankings within Google (Handley 2023).

5. Build backlinks and authority.

Backlinks are hyperlinks that link to your websites from other web pages. They are vital in SEO building, and are a great way to build authority within Google’s search rankings. However, it is important that you do not engage in shady link-building practices that violate Google’s policies, otherwise your website could get de-listed, something that will annihilate your marketing and SEO campaigns. Shady things that can put you at risk of de-listing include paying people to link to your web pages or stuffing links excessively within your own pages. A much more ethical way to build backlinks outside of your own domains is, for example, creating and sharing something with others that they may share and link themselves (Straight North).

You can read about Google’s rules about linking spamming here to ensure you do not do anything that would kill your SEO marketing efforts.

6. Continuously track and analyze your progress.

As you continue to build your SEO content, you can use your selected tools to continue to track your campaign metrics and successes with your website. You won’t see results right away, SEO does take time to build up results to, but with time and patience, you will be able to see increased website traffic as you build SEO-optimized pages.

You got this!

References

“7 Steps to Create a Successful SEO Strategy.” SEO.Com, 16 Sept. 2025, www.seo.com/blog/seo-strategy/.

Handley, Rachel. “Keyword Stuffing in SEO: What It Is & How to Avoid It.” Semrush Blog, www.semrush.com/blog/keyword-stuffing/?g_network=x&g_adtype=none&g_keyword=&g_campaign=WW_SRCH_PMAX_Social_Toolkit_EN&g_keywordid=&g_adid=&g_campaignid=22915427214&g_acctid=851-605-1869&g_adgroupid=&kw=&cmp=WW_SRCH_PMAX_Social_Toolkit_EN&label=Social_Toolkit&Network=x&Device=c&utm_content=&kwid=&cmpid=22915427214&agpid=&BU=Social_Toolkit&extid=&adpos=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22921200188&gclid=CjwKCAiAoNbIBhB5EiwAZFbYGPPVCjSQxcY_Z_m4tuoQDDbG7UzQl4aF17X8-3MwyLWszYosbDfZmhoCUq4QAvD_BwE.

Handley, Rachel. “What Is SEO? An Intro to Search Engine Optimization.” Semrush Blog, www.semrush.com/blog/what-is-seo/?g_acctid=851-605-1869&g_adid=736624713330&g_adgroupid=168155429261&g_network=g&g_adtype=search&g_campaign=US_SRCH_DSA_Blog_EN&g_keyword=&g_keywordid=dsa-2263819780519&g_campaignid=21962554712&kw=&cmp=US_SRCH_DSA_Blog_EN&label=dsa_pagefeed&Network=g&Device=c&utm_content=736624713330&kwid=dsa-2263819780519&cmpid=21962554712&agpid=168155429261&BU=Core&extid=279846924977&adpos=&matchtype=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21962554712&gclid=CjwKCAiAoNbIBhB5EiwAZFbYGHrumBatM5UfKm9tPqCHicoUkBV7jlmbNX6bNowo7KfSq22fTIq1dhoCf_oQAvD_BwE.

McKenzie, Leigh. “The Complete SEO Checklist.” Backlinko, 27 Aug. 2025, backlinko.com/seo-checklist.

Shaffer, Dan. “ 11 Top Keyword Research Tools for SEO in 2025.” SEO.Com, 30 Jan. 2025, www.seo.com/tools/keyword-research/.

Twin, Alexandra. “Kpis: What Are Key Performance Indicators? Types and Examples.” Investopedia, www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kpi.asp.

“What Are Backlinks And Why Are They Important?” Straight North, www.straightnorth.com/faq/what-are-backlinks/?type=pmax&ppc_keyword=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21804002076&gclid=CjwKCAiAoNbIBhB5EiwAZFbYGPw2nvv_wxc_2UwDocRBzG9DcPmA4Vb33VIkf0EfAIyPgGDDOr5R8RoCm_MQAvD_BwE.

Willoby, Shannon. “7 Powerful Semrush Free Account Features (We Tested It).” Backlinko, 30 Oct. 2025, backlinko.com/free-semrush-account.