Introduction to SEO

8.55 BILLION searches happen on the internet everyday. To put that into perspective, by the time you’ve read till here: 

I’ll let the numbers speak about how important web search is -

Hence, getting this channel right for your business is extremely important!

You already have organic traffic on your website -

You don’t have organic traffic as of yet -

Learning is tough. It takes effort. Lots of it. It's not easy to pull the brakes on your work or life and sit down to learn when you have the option to spend your time in a million other ways.

But now that you've taken this step for yourself, let's do it right

Don't think of this guide as just another piece of content to read and learn from. Instead, take it as a step-by-step process, which if you follow will help you achieve the above outcomes. If you find yourself dozing off - take a break, stretch and come back. Take notes, read, re-read, process, practice and apply. 

Set up your work desk and sit there (I know, the temptation to be on your bed is real)

Put your phone on silent, switch it off for the next hour if possible. 

Grab your favourite cup of tea or coffee and settle in. 

Doing this typical GrowthX style, here's the outline for this guide on Whimsical - 

SEO Basics

Imagine you are driving back from office and it suddenly starts raining. Your car get’s all dirty by the time you reach home. To get it cleaned, you search “car washers near me”. Google serves you the locations of car washers near you with details like distance, rating, phone numbers etc. You call the one with higest rating, and get your car washed!

You searched Google for car washers near you. 

Google understood the intent and prioritised location over other results like tutorials on how to wash a car etc. 

Google searched though all the indexed car wash pages that have a location near yours and served that most appropriate webpage!

SEO is nothing but a bridge between a web page and user. It involves optimising your website so that search engines like Google can understand it better, which helps users find the information they need.

The browser and the user are the two stakeholders for you when it comes to SEO. You need to make the experience better for both these stakeholders to achieve your desired results.

Your JTBD with SEO is only 2 things, and it’s quite simple -

But don't worry, it's not that hard either. We'll get there. 

To begin with, let’s try to understand what Google is trying to do and it’s algorithms!

Before we dive deep into the specifics of SEO, let’s try to understand searches on the internet. 

Searches are fairly technical and the algorithms used are proprietary, but we need to have a base level understanding of how do these searches happen, what does a search funnel look like & what do search engines optimise for in order to make better strategies for SEO.

How does the ideal search process/flow look like? It’s a 7 step process -

To optimise for this ideal process, there are 4 factors that need to be worked upon: 

In the entire process of SEO, it is important to understand how Google optimizes for both stakeholders.

We’ll discuss each of these things in depth in upcoming sections but the point here is to get a broad level understanding of what needs to be done right to nail your SEO strategy.

Search engines have 3 jobs when it comes to serving a user query -

For search engines to be able to do this, search engines need to ensure that the webpage is easily crawled and indexed, and SERPs are relevant and authoritative. 

Now that we have a fair understanding of how how search engines work, let’s dive deep into how can we optimise the search funnel mentioned above. We’ll cover this in 4 parts -

 that a user makes. The ideal user journey for a search is a simple 3 step process where -

For this ideal user journey to happen, search engines need to focus on for 2 things:

This is the most important thing to focus on. User intent essentially means understanding what is the user searching for. 

Try searching these two keywords on google - “backlink checker” and “best backlink checker”. 

Backlink checker serves you with tools that can help you with checking backlinks. 

Best backlink checker gives you informational articles

This happens because the intent behind searching these two terms are different. First one is looking for tools to help with backlinks → transactional intent. Second one is looking for information for the best backlink checker → informational intent. 

We'll understand intent in depth later on in the module

 This is a 2 part step where user feels satisfied that their query is resolved -

Now we'll start with keywords. Let's go! 

The Search Funnel

Before diving deep into SEO, let's understand searches!

Keywords

Keywords act as a compass for your Google search, guiding search engines to understand the topic of your content and match it with user queries. Keywords are the terms that when searched on a browser delivers your webpages. If you don’t include the keywords that your ICPs are searching for, you will never rank in browser search.

To pick up the right keywords, you need to follow these steps -

Let’s get started! We'll cover this section in 4 parts. Let's start with THE most important thing: 

Introduction to Keywords

This is probably the most important part of SEO. At the core, the entire purpose on SEO is to satisfy user intent. Hence, understand the buying funnel and intent at different points is very important. 

Searches on the internet are cateogorised based on the buying funnel. The buying funnel consists of 5 intents: 

User is trying to gather information about the topic. These keywords are broad, will drive traffic but would be difficult to rank on.

For eg. “can I train an AI chatbot on internal documents?”, How to run ML models on internal documents”

User is trying to investigate about different options to fulfil their motive. These keywords are a little specific.

For eg. Best AI chatbot, AI chatbots for SaaS, AI chatbots for internal documents

User now has an idea of what they want and the options, now they’re trying to compare their options.

Eg. Hubspot vs Zoho, Which AI chatbot is better?

Users have compared their options and have shortlisted a few. They now want to take an action. This could be trying a tool, getting in touch with an agency etc.

In the end, user is looking to go to a specific website, and complete the desired action.

Let's try to understand this by an example. I'll give you 2 scenarios, think about what the search intent could be ther: 

In the first case, the user is not sure of using your service, because they don't have trust in you. You need to first build trust, and then go about selling your product. Hence, in the first case taking a top-down approach might be beneficial. 

In the second case, the user is looking to buy shoes immediately. There's buying intent involved. Hence, in the second case you need to take the bottom up approach. 

To understand what type of intent keywords you should go for, think about 

"Where does SEO fit in your user journey?"

Would users discover your brand via search, or would they search to visit your website and make a purchase, or would they search to gain more information on you before making a decision

Eventually, you'll have to cover the entire funnel, but you need start off with the part that matches with your user intent.

We understood the user intent, but let's forget about it for the moment. Where do you think it would be the easiest to rank in the funnel?

As you move down the funnel, keywords start getting specific and easy to rank on. Hence, you should always try to start from the bottom of the funnel. Starting from the bottom of the funnel ensures that: 

But this is second priority, the first priority would always be understanding user intent. 

How to pick bottom of the funnel keywords?

In the upcoming modules, we'll look at how to brainstorm and come up with relevant keywords. Basis that, gauge where that keyword lies in the funnel. BOFU keywords are generally Job-to-be-done type keywords, where either the user - Searches for a very specific use case

That's all about user intent. You'll understand this more when we speak about how to find keyword opportunities. But before that, let's try to understand the type of keywords! 

Understanding User Intent

These are one word broad keywords that have a high search volume. For eg. “AI Chatbots”

Try searching for AI Chatbot. What can you make of the intent while searching for it?

The first result is an ad that’s selling an AI chatbot, second and third are comparing chatbots, fourth is information about what an AI chatbot is. The intent here is not clear. This combined with high search volumes makes it a bad type of keywords to focus on because of-

 → difficult to rank for unless you have authority

SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) volatility

 → since the intent is not clear, google will keep experimenting with different intent results to see which one work best

These are longer keywords that are much more specific. For eg. “AI Chatbots to train internal documents for SaaS”

This result has a clear transactional intent. Long tail keywords have a higher conversion rate and low competition → they are easy to rank.Also notice how these keywords are bottom of the funnel keywords.

This doesn’t mean that you only pick up long-tail keywords. You can focus more on long-tail keywords, but try to rank for some head keywords as well to get more traction and volume. A good split here would be 90 long-tail, 10 head keyword.

With that we're halfway through this section. Consider this a V1 and if you have any recommendations, resources, or information you’d like to contribute, 

Alternatively, you could also email us on learn@growthx.club

Types of Keywords

Before we get into this, let’s make one thing clear. This section doesn’t give you a final list of keywords to act on. This section just gives you a framework to pick a set of keywords that you should take up first.

There are 3 ways to find good keyword opportunities -

To start with this, you need to check if you have existing organic traffic or not.

If you have an existing traffic, pick the keywords that are working for you and double down on those to improve your rankings. 

Ranking on the first page get 90% more clicks as compared to others

if you have existing keywords, you can categorise them into 3 buckets based on the priority in which you should pick them -

These are the keywords that are in 2-20 positions. Double down on these to improve positions. Improving positions will build authority, which will help rank the lower pages as well. We'll speak about how to actually do this later in the module

These keywords rank from 20-50 positions. If you can get your pages to rank higher in a way that it starts appearing on the first result page, it can get you more clicks

These keywords rank below 50. You’ll find clusters of keywords here that are not working, majorly because they are not targeted enough, i.e not answering what the user is searching for. These keywords should be your least priority

Pick a head keyword in your domain. For us, let’s pick chatbots.

Use chatbots as a seed keyword to find other long-tail keywords that are easy to rank to.

The point is to start ranking on relevant keywords to build authority, which would help you rank better on other keywords

The main idea with brainstorming is to understand the user intent. You need to be able to understand what your ICP would search about, how they think about a certain topic, some ways to do this is -

Let's take the example of "AI Chatbot for customer service". How will you brainstorm on these?

Look at related searches on google to get an idea of where the volume lies. Out of those, pick low competition keywords

Search which keywords are you competitors ranking for. Pick the ones that are missing from your website. Choose the low hanging fruits, i.e ones that are easy to rank on

Keyword authority is very important in determining which keyword will work for you. In simple terms, the more users trust you with a particular topic, more authority you have. Building authority is a long game. We'll discuss more about authority in the upcoming sections, but the best strategy to build authority is to start ranking on low competition keywords, irrespective of volume and then move to higher competition keywords. 

The main agenda should be to maximise reach in lowest competition. When you do this, you start ranking for a couple of keywords which increases your topical & site authority. Hence, if you have a high authority, it would be easier for you to rank in high competition keywords.

With this, we're done with understanding how to brainstorm keywords. But is that all? Do you start writing content once you have the relevant keywords? 

You need to cluster these keywords in order to rank. Let's see how! 

Finding right keyword opportunities 

 in the knowledge graph that allows it to organize and intelligently show the subtopics relevant to a current search. This advancement highlights the the importance of adopting a topical approach to improve your chances of appearing in search.

Clustering keywords essentially means thinking in topics rather than keywords.

Topics are central ideas or subjects that form the basis of a piece of content. They are nothing but a group of similar keywords. Search for your top keywords on the browser, and look at the results. If your SERP is similar, that means the keywords can be clubbed into one topic.

Both of them rank similar pages on the top. Hence, having different pages targeting these two keywords doesn’t make sense. This also leads to keyword cannibalisation.

Keyword cannibalisation happens when your website has different pages targeting keywords that solve a similar purpose/intent. When this happens, the overall ranking of your pages and website falls down.

When a site is optimized around topics, the content naturally includes various related keywords, synonyms, and phrases that a searcher might use. This strategy, known as topic clustering, helps improve your site's visibility in search results and makes it easier for users to navigate your site and find relevant information.

. Keywords belong in the same cluster if the intent behind them is identical or very similar.

Based on this data, creating content targeting "send money abroad" as your primary keyword makes sense. Related keywords like "how to send money abroad without fees" and "how long does it take to send money abroad" are less popular but still relevant, so they should be secondary/tertiary.

For you to find the right keyword opportunities, follow these steps - 

Once you have a list of potential keywords you could pick up: basis your authority, figure out which keywords would be easy for you to rank on. If you have high authority - pick keywords with high volume. If you have low authority, pick keywords with low competition. 

That's about it. This is how you think about keywords. For a quick recap: 

Now we'll learn how to write content that ranks! 

Clustering Keywords

The Content

Now that we have the keywords set, let’s look at how to create content that actually ranks. 

You can think of making content in 2 ways -

While writing content for SEO, you should pick the 2nd approach, i.e studying the competitors and doing a little better than them.

To start off, study your competitors deeply. Study competitors in 2 broad arenas: 

These are the metrics that you can track. For example: no. of visitors, no. of backlinks, authority etc

This mainly includes the type of content they write, does it include images, examples, it the content structured properly, URL structure of the website etc. Study your competitiors, figure out the gaps in user experience and content, and try to make it better. 

To understand what content to make, you need to understand what purpose does the serve?

But as a general rule, it’s better to go 80-20 on these, i.e 80% time and energy on fulfilling user intent and 20% on building authority via clickbaity content

Introduction to content

In this section, we'll try to understand the pointers you need to keep in mind while writing the content: 

Headlines are crucial for grabbing attention and should include top keywords. There are 2 reasons why you should do this:

The content should be easy to read and consume.

The content piece should be engaging enough to keep users hooked to the page. Increase page engagement by including multimedia like images, vidoes etc

With every article that you write, try to build trust. This can be done in two ways -

Optimize images, use caching, and leverage Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve page speed. This also helps with google with crawling your websites better. We’ll discuss more about this later.

Include clear and compelling calls to action (CTAs) to guide users towards desired actions.

Why do you think investment related websites include a return calculator? One reason is to solve for user trust and it acts as a tool to move to bottom of the funnel. Well the second reason is SEO. Wherever you can, try to include interactive elements like calculators, drag-and-drop, map view etc. Something that users can interact with. This increases engagement and improves trust

Keyword stuffing, the practice of cramming as many keywords as possible into your content, is considered a black-hat SEO tactic that can hurt your search rankings.

There is no single "ideal" keyword density, but generally, a keyword density between 0.5% to 2.5% is considered optimal.

In addition to your target keywords, focus on using semantically related terms, synonyms, and topically relevant phrases throughout your content.

By following these guidelines, you can optimize your content's keyword density without resorting to keyword stuffing tactics that can harm your SEO performance. The key is to create high-quality, user-focused content that naturally incorporates your target keywords and related terms.

By focusing on these editorial aspects, you can create high-quality, keyword-optimized content that resonates with your audience and ranks well in search engine results. For example, a SaaS company offering an AI chatbot should produce detailed content on how their chatbot can be trained on company documents to effectively answer user queries, using targeted keywords and a clear, engaging format to attract and retain visitors.

How to write great content?

Content audit ends up in 3 major actions - 

We'll discuss the conditions under which you should take these actions - 

If the URL has several keywords ranking in the top 100, it indicates that there is potential for improvement. By updating the content, you can aim to boost these rankings into the top 10 or top 3. 

If traffic has been steadily declining, it’s a sign that the content may no longer be relevant or engaging. Updating it can help recapture interest.

A high number of impressions but a low click-through rate (CTR) suggests that the content may not be compelling enough. Enhancing the content can improve its appeal.

: With a low word count (~500 or less), there is ample opportunity to add more valuable information, which can improve rankings and user engagement.

Add relevant information, images, or videos to enrich the content.

Follow the pointers listed in the previous module

Include keywords naturally, improve meta descriptions, and ensure headings are optimized.

Use engaging language and calls to action to encourage clicks.

If the content was recently updated or published, it may need more time to gather data and show its performance.

If the content is already performing well (e.g., high traffic, good engagement), the risk of altering it may outweigh potential benefits.

Keep an eye on metrics like traffic, CTR, and user engagement for a few more weeks or months.

Schedule a future date to reassess the content’s performance.

If the content has backlinks but low traffic, redirecting can help retain some link equity.

Content that is outdated but still has some value can be redirected to relevant new content.

If the content is not expected to generate significant traffic, a redirect can help consolidate authority to a more valuable page.

Ensure the redirect points to a page that is relevant to the original content to maintain user experience.

Make sure to update any internal links pointing to the old content to reflect the new URL.

Consider whether the content can be repurposed or if similar topics can be covered in new content.

If there’s a chance to redirect traffic from this content to a more relevant page, consider doing so.

Next we'll look at Content Templates to follow while writing content for SEO

Content Audit

SEO content can broadly be categorised into 6 categories. Let’s understand these categories and some key elements to include in each of these:

Expanded list posts are comprehensive guides that cover various aspects of a particular topic. These posts provide a wealth of information and actionable insights. Some key elements to include in an expanded list post:

Example: "10 Best AI Chatbots for SaaS Companies: Boost Customer Engagement and Streamline Support"

Ultimate guides are comprehensive, in-depth resources that provide detailed information on a specific subject. These guides are designed to be the go-to resource for your audience on that particular topic. Key elements to include in an ultimate guide:

Example: "The Ultimate Guide to Implementing AI Chatbots for Document Training: Streamline Your Workflow and Improve Accuracy"

Tools of the Trade posts are curated lists of tools and resources that can help your audience solve their problems. These posts can be divided into two main categories:

Tool roundup posts provide a comprehensive list of tools that address a specific need or challenge. Key elements to include:

Example: "Top Tools for Training AI Chatbots on Documents: Streamline Your Document Processing Workflow"

Tool recommendation posts focus on highlighting a specific tool or solution and explaining how it can help your audience. Key elements to include:

Example: "Streamline Your Document Training with Perplexity AI: The Ultimate AI Chatbot Solution"

Case studies are in-depth examinations of how your product or service has helped a specific customer or client. These content pieces showcase real-world examples of your solutions in action. Key elements to include:

Example: "How Perplexity AI Helped XYZ Company Streamline Their Document Training Process and Improve Accuracy"

Industry trend reports provide an in-depth analysis of the current state of your industry, including emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities. These content pieces position you as a thought leader and help your audience stay informed. Key elements to include:

Example: "The Future of AI Chatbots in SaaS: 2024 Industry Trend Report"

Expert interviews allow you to tap into the knowledge and experience of industry leaders, providing your audience with valuable insights and perspectives. These content pieces can help build your authority and credibility. Key elements to include:

Example: "Mastering AI Chatbot Document Training: An Interview with Jane Doe, CEO of Perplexity AI"

Now, let's try to understand everything to do with the technical side of SEO! 

With that we're done with this section. Consider this a V1 and if you have any recommendations, resources, or information you’d like to contribute, 

Content Templates

Technical SEO

Now that you have your webpages up and running, it’s important to tell google that you’re there. Any web browser goes through 3 processes to serve your webpages as results -

Optimising for each of these things will get you your desired results. Let's see how. 

Introduction to Technical SEO

Crawling is the process by which search engines send out robots, also known as spiders or crawlers, to discover new and updated content on the web. These crawlers follow links from one page to another, scanning and collecting information about each webpage they visit.

How to check if your webpage is being crawled or not?

Temporarily disable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload your webpage. If all the content loads properly, it indicates that search engines can crawl your page.

In the search bar of a search engine like Google, type 

site:yourdomain.com "excerpt from your website"

. If your website appears in the search results, it means it has been crawled.

Use your SEO tools like Semrush/Ahref to find which pages are being crawled

Open the webpage → click on “view page source” → search for noindex. If noindex is present that means your page is not crawlable

Indexing is the process of storing and organising the content found during crawling. Once a page is indexed, it's eligible to appear in search engine results for relevant queries.

How to check if your pages are getting indexed?

: Use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to check the index status of specific pages.

In the search bar of a search engine, type 