TIL: SEMRush SEO Fundamentals or Don’t Be A Robot

Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash

Google just wants you to act like a helpful human.

That was my main takeaway from the SEMRush SEO Fundamentals course. While I have no intention of becoming an SEO expert, I know the value of organic search in getting helpful information in front of the people who need it. So I took advantage of SEMRush’s free course to learn a little more. 

Taking this course through the content lens, it really all comes down to giving your audience clear and helpful content, whether you are working on a linking strategy or looking at keywords.

Links: When it comes to content, you want to create information that people find valuable. When they find it valuable, they will link to it from their sites. Having a mix of exact keyword match links (personalized note cards), branded links (Rifle Paper Co.), and generic links (read more) is important because Google is getting smart enough to know that a bunch of links with the same exact keyword match probably isn’t organic.

While some of the link building strategy is passive -- create interesting content that people find, write about, include in lists, etc. -- you can take an active role in this through guest blogging, PR outreach, and contributing to other sites. The course gives a number of methods to avoid while link building (hello paid links), but one suggestion was to find broken links on pages with high domain authority and suggest (helpful, educational) content you have to fill that link. This could take a little time, but it can also help build relationships with those companies as well.

An interesting point from moderator Greg Gifford is that social media shares don’t officially count toward link building. But if you create content that people engage with on social media, chances are people will link to it in articles and blog posts. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but good content usually means sharable content.

Keywords: In short, write for humans, not algorithms. Google has been brushing up on semantics and psychology -- it wants to answer the question the searcher meant to ask, and not just provide lists that match the actual words typed in the search bar. So keywords are important, and they can provide a good idea of what your audience wants to know. But write your content to answer the question, and don’t repeat the same term five times. As Mr. Gifford suggested in the course, ask yourself, “Would you say this to a customer?”

While I haven’t had the opportunity to work with a company focused on local search, the course did spend some time on how getting in front of your neighbors is different than reaching people across the country. For local searches, Google is looking for knowledge about the specific location, so having a page or periodic blog posts about local events, interesting people in your community, and other location-specific information is good for those targeted search results, and for your audience.

The SEO Fundamentals course from SEMRush was a good overview and covered a lot of the basic terms that I’ve seen in articles and conversations, such as the different error pages (301 vs. 404) and tools to help you understand your link profile. The course also provided a basic understanding of how SEO fits into your broader marketing strategy. I am far from qualified to do a full SEO analysis, but I have a solid grasp of how content marketing and SEO work together. 

The course is 31 individual videos, and each one rarely went over five minutes. It says it’s four hours, and I broke it up into three sessions. 

Proof that I answered the questions correctly (and took good notes)