The last time I tried to do any SEO was in the late 2000s, when the Web was a very different place. My partner is now asking for help to improve ranking for her online business, and I am starting work on some bootstrapped side projects that I plan to launch over the winter, and I don't want either to rely on advertising to support.
Thinking it through as an engineer I want to work backwards from an end goal (high quality traffic of people interested in a particular product or service), to the actions I need to drive that traffic. Searching around all I'm seeing is quite vague guidance like "write some content to get backlinks", or "write good product descriptions". I think I'm after more detailed guides or tools to help me understand the bricks a bit more. I don't mind paid, per se, but obviously prefer free in no small part because this sector seems to be the most spammy, scammy and hard to trust sector I've encountered, ever.
What are the key resources I should look to use today? What are the best books, online guides or videos to absorb? Are there high signal-to-noise forums, podcasts or other resources I can dig into? I'm also particularly interested in software to track impact, and help me improve product pages.
TIA.
I don't believe SEO has changed as much in the last 15 years as many people would say. There is more an emphasis on "social media optimization" because you can observe how much traffic a social media post brings in whereas in the end you don't really know what ranking signal (a keyword, a link, the domain name you are on, the length of the page, + thousands of other things) is responsible for. It's a fair guess that, for a population of thousands of links, the ranking value of links are proportional to the amount of traffic you get from those links.
It is a bigger job than you might think. If you don't believe me I suggest you turn on broadcast television and see how many ads you see for the same personal injury lawyer and for the same cleaning product brand like Dawn or Tide. If you imagine how much work it is going to take and then think it is going to be 10x more than that and then another 10x more than that I hate to break it to you that it could be another 10x more than that.
Specifically, every web page you make is a ticket to the ranking lottery. If you buy a lot more tickets it becomes more likely than you can win. This is true in terms of "link juice" which spreads to the rest of the site, it is also true in terms of keywords: it might not be realistic to rank #1 for the most competitive keywords but it is very realistic to get great rankings for a large number of less competitive keywords.
There's only so much you can do to make individual pages attractive, but you can take control of your fate by making more pages.
Thus the blog is the king of online marketing. If a real estate agent, just to pick some average boring business that has a marketing budget, puts up a "business card" page for herself this accomplishes very little. Who cares? If she commits to writing (or paying someone to write) two blog posts a week about her city, real estate in her city, neighborhoods in her city, housing in her city, etc on the other hand each blog post has the possibility of showing up in a search, being shared on social media, forwarded to someone else in an email, etc. Such a blog can also develop followers on social media, RSS subscribers, email subscribers and other things that sustain traffic other than search rankings.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-s...
What is the business and what is her audience?
The strategy for a local business that has a storefront is wildly different from an e-commerce business shipping to customers all around the country/world.