SEO For Beginners (How to Get Started The Right Way)

If you're a beginner looking to get started with SEO, then welcome... 

This guide will help steer you in the right direction - all coming from someone that's ranked in some of the most competitive niches as well as helping businesses with reputation management. 

Inside, you'll see all the inner workings and where to put your focus. 

Search Engine Optimization - What Is It?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and it's the process of ranking webpages or websites in the search engines. 

SEO traffic is considered the holy grail of all traffic sources. 

The reason?

You're able to get in front of people that are looking for your solution at the very time they need it. 

Making it an easier sell than having to build complex funnels plus there's a certain credibility already given for ranking in Google. 

How to Make Money From SEO As a Beginner

There are 4 primary ways to make money from Search Engine Optimization. 

Affiliate SEO

For me, my preferred method is to use SEO to make money as an affiliate.

I can simply focus on creating a site that ranks, provide value, and get paid a commission without having to worry about creating a product, without worrying about support, and without having to focus on complex funnels. 

Most get started thinking they need all of these complex items before they get into money getting mode. 

The thing about affiliate marketing with SEO is you can start today. 

It doesn't matter your age, location, or your previous experience. 

Learn the craft and provide what the user is looking for to make massive amounts of commission. 

My Outlook For Building Sites

Early on, I decided to venture into the SEO world and I launched a lot of sites focusing on ranking for 1-2 keywords for the entire site using an exact match domain strategy. 

At the time, it worked. 

However, it was a management nightmare. 

Nowadays, it's more manageable because I'm building out more complete sites. 

Instead of focusing on an entire site to ranking for a handful of keywords, now I allocate single pieces of content and build them out on a single domain using more of an authority approach. 

Take this site as an example. 

I've got content on a variety of topics around the digital marketing niche. 

It's much easier to manage plus it's building up more authority and trust in the eyes of the search engines.  

It's what I refer to as... 

The Apartment Strategy

I often reference real estate because that's my first exposure to the business world when I was flipping houses and buying rentals. 

I was buying single family houses and the minute that someone moved out, my income went to ZERO. 

Meaning I only had 1 income stream per property. 

It was tough when this would happen because I was starting all over again often with negative cash flow. 

However, imagine I'd had a 64 unit apartment. 

If I had a vacancy, I'd still have 63 others potential income streams. 

I treat my websites the same way. 

That means, a single page of content can create passive income for now, months, and years to come. 

For example, we've built a review of all the Best Webinar platforms on the market.  You can find that post here. 

That's just 1 income opportunity of several all under one roof. 

The more I build, the more I rewarded because I'm giving the search engines more quality content.  

The great thing is there'll be new people searching for this kind of information this month, next month, and next year. 

Allowing me to build a passive income stream all from a single page. 

Another benefit to building out these digital apartment buildings as opposed to buying a piece of property is there's no restrictions. 

I can get started for little, build it up as big and wide as I want. 

If you'd like to know more, then I highly encourage you to jump inside my training program.  Click here to watch the video to get started. 

SEO Agency

Running a digital marketing agency that provides SEO as a service can be very lucrative. 

This can be done for those looking to benefit from gaining new customers from search or cleaning up the client's reputation. 

What I love about this strategy is you can get paid up front, then do the work. 

That means you can have a contract in hand before you lift a finger. 

Now, of course, I say that with the expectation that you know you'll need to provide what you promise. 

But it's very lucrative because there are countless business people looking for hard working SEO's that understand the business and willing to put in the work. 

The downside?

It can be extremely stressful with a lot of demands from clients. 

In order to start a digital agency, you'll need a structure in place to prevent clients from making endless demands. 

While the money is good, this is the one complaint I hear over and over again from those that are running digital agencies. 

Consulting

Outside of affiliate SEO, consulting is one of my favorites. 

Here, you're simply pointing out flaws and telling the company what to do. 

You're not conducting any of the work, you're simply auditing their current SEO status to see what needs improving. 

Some of the common pitfalls you'll be advising on as a consulting role revolves around the following:

Most of these issues can be found by running audits from places like Ahrefs or Surfer (see our review here).

Freelancing

Freelancers work for themselves but take on contract jobs for companies. 

I've done my share of freelancing over the years that ranged from reputation management to building sites to building out links. 

Once the job is complete, you move on to the next task. 

This is a great way to get your foot in the door with other companies. 

For example, you can go to sites like Upwork and take on a small freelancing gig that's low risk to you and the client. 

Provide an amazing experience, then offer more long term projects like you would as an agency with ongoing maintenance. 

Your Plan of Attack

Regardless of your SEO approach, it's important you begin building something that's yours right away. 

Take the money you make from your freelancing or agency and build out affiliate sites for more passive income streams.

The goal here is to be able to liberate yourself from the client work so you can only take on the clients that aren't going to be a pain in the ass. 

I explain how to build these affiliate sites in my training you can find here. 

For now, let's discuss what you'll be looking at with SEO.  

SEO is all about outdoing your competition with these elements. 

3 Components For Search Engine Optimization

There are several moving parts and we'll dive into the 3 components for being able to master SEO. 

Technical SEO

The technical side of SEO involves looking after the tech side of things. 

These include the following:

Think of this as the building blocks to your overall business. 

If you're building out content on a flawed site, it's never going to take you far. 

I'd recommend getting a reliable host to setup and using WordPress to get started. 

In addition, I use WP Rocket to get the site blazing fast. 

OnPage SEO

On-page SEO revolves around anything related to that's on the page. 

That's your content as well as how your content is organized - internal linking and the actual words you include on the page, the markup and the structure. 

The advantage for SEO professionals now is the sheer number of tools at your fingertips that show you exactly what to look for. 

For the onpage, we use a tool called Surfer SEO that shows you the word count, number of items on the page, and even tells you the common keywords that's being used on the page. 

Tools We Recommend

Surfer also allows you to plan your content as well as auditing your pages or client pages. 

You can see our full Surfer review by going here: https://thinktanklab.com/surfer-seo-review/

Or if you're ready to see what your competition is doing, then I'd recommend grabbing Surfer by going here. 

The key here is to analyze what's already working in the top 10, then work to replicated it and outdo what's already there. 

Off Page SEO

Off Page SEO refers to the link building aspects to your sites as well as your pages. 

Back when I began, the person who had the most links would win. 

Nowadays, you have to be more strategic than that. 

You'll need to focus on quality of links, your internal linking, anchor text linking to you and the neighborhoods those links are coming from. 

One of the first links we build is something I call Brand Stacks. 

These are 100% free links you can obtain from 3rd party sites like WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Twitter. 

The way we set these up is so it frees up your time so you can focus on 1-2 points of creating content. 

The process is automated and 100% safe to use. 

Grab a spot inside the members area by going here. 

These are our first links we use as a base. 

In order to get your site pushed to the top for competitive niches, you'll need to deploy additional link building campaigns. 

With our Off Page strategy, we approach it with a similar fashion as before by looking at what your competition is doing. 

Fire up your favorite backlink checker like Ahrefs or SEMrush then work to outdo them. 

Focus on quality over quantity. 

Wrapping Up

There are several moving parts to the overall SEO process. 

It's very lucrative, yet can sometimes be challenging whenever facing an algorithm update. 

Going at it alone without a road map can be a bit daunting. 

That's why I've put together some of my tactics inside a program to help you get the most from your SEO results. 

It's called SOAR and the goal is to help you start and grown your affiliate marketing through SEO. 

Click here to get on the inside of my SOAR program.

Regardless of your approach at some point I recommend that you start building out affiliate sites preferably around something you believe in and enjoy. 

At the end of the day, it'll make the process much simpler. 

It's passive and can pay you for months and years to come. 

Once you have a track record, you can sit on the cash flow or sell it for a nice chunk of change.