1.2 What Is SEO? Why Is It Important?

Photo by Tiffany Davidson; Taken while on a hundred-mile sea voyage through the San Juan Islands, Washington

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

When I ask clients if they know of any keywords they want to rank for, sometimes I am met with responses such as “happiness” or “weddings.”

Responses such as these show a complete lack of understanding about what SEO even is. This is no fault of theirs (or yours if you don’t yet know) because it isn’t their specialty or industry to know.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It is optimizing a website via a plethora of techniques I’m going to explain throughout this course, so that your website can be found by the people out there who want to find it.

The foundation of good SEO is being able to discover those magic keywords your target audience might type into Google, and then preemptively responding by including those keywords in your sitemap and creating blog posts around them.

It is this all-important step that seems to be most misunderstood, causing many SEO efforts to not be effective.

Have you ever searched Google for the keyword “happiness?” Doubtful. But perhaps you have searched something like “books about happiness” or “happiness quotes” or even “meditations for happiness.”

What about “weddings”— have you ever searched for the keyword “weddings” on Google? Odds are you would search for something more specific like “big sur california weddings” or “rustic barn wedding” or even something slightly less specific such as “wedding inspiration” or “wedding decor ideas.”

In order to discover keywords, we have to research and use our imagination. what is your target audience typing into google?

Keyword research is a bit like detective work. We have to be able to step inside the mind of our target audience and imagine what they might be searching for on Google, word for word.

After we’ve developed a list of these keyword phrases, the next step is to inject those keywords throughout our sitemap.

A sitemap is essentially what Google robots read in order to index and rank your site. You can go visit your sitemap by going to the homepage of your site and then adding /sitemap.xml to the end. For example, if you go to the homepage of my website, then in the address bar, simply add /sitemap.xml to the end of the URL, hit Enter. You’ll see my sitemap!

In this sitemap, you’ll find a bunch of keywords that I’ve been adding over time to basically communicate with Google robots, letting them know what kind of content is on my site, and anticipating what my target audience is searching for on Google.

The two keywords I have really been targeting for this site are “squarespace web designer” and “squarespace seo expert” because those would be the keywords that my target audience would be searching for on Google, and I would want them to find my website on Google Page 1 since those are the two primary services I specialize in.

When you go to Google and type in “squarespace” into the search bar, you’ll see a list of suggested keywords that are some of the most popular searches. Right now, this list shows: squarespace login, squarespace promo code, squarespace pricing, squarespace customer service, squarespace templates, and so on. Despite being popular keywords, these aren’t keywords I would want to target for. Why? Because the person on the other end typing in the above keywords is not my target audience. Again, my audience are people who want Squarespace websites or SEO services. I put most of my effort into that specific target audience, and this has caused my website to rank on Google Page 1 for both of the services I offer, growing my business exponentially.

Making sense so far? If not, don’t despair, we’ll be delving deep into the world of keyword research in an upcoming lesson.

Here’s a summary video, discussing things a little bit more:

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Tiffany Davidson Squarespace SEO Expert Course

Welcome to Squarespace SEO Expert! In this course I'm going to teach you the exact process I use to rank Squarespace websites on Google Page 1, using no paid advertising, only organic SEO techniques. If at any point you have questions, please use the comment feature at the bottom of the particular lesson you have a question about. I'm happy to help!