How To Do SEO in 2024 – Getting Started

July 31, 2024 2:16 pm Published by admin

Calling all new (and seasoned) SEO specialists, digital marketers, and website owners! Welcome to WordwrightWeb’s comprehensive, unsponsored guide to Search Engine Optimization.

What do I mean by “unsponsored”? I mean that this post is written by the people, for the people. We aren’t getting paid to promote any specific SEO tools or software. Our recommendations come authentically from our experience working in the SEO industry.

This 2024 SEO guide is meant for all who own or manage websites and SEO projects. Whether you’re new to the field, need a refresher, or just looking for a comprehensive guide, this one’s for you!

This blog post is broken out into different sections and mentions paid and free versions of our favorite SEO tools. I will do my best to explain as I go, but if you get confused by any of the SEO jargon, check out this digital marketing glossary.

For your one-stop 2024 SEO guide, keep reading.

Getting Started

There are some integral steps you really need to check off before delving any further into your SEO efforts. Even as an SEO specialist, I always make sure to start with the foundational things I’m going to outline below.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that might just be your new SEO bestie. GSC is your window into Google’s view of your SEO performance.

Rather than going through a third party software or tool, GSC indicates exactly what Google sees regarding your website. This tool allows you to monitor your website’s performance and troubleshoot any issues that arise. It also allows you to look at and compare performance from different time frames.

With Google Search Console, you can see:

How many people click on your website.
How many people see your website on Google (impressions).
How many people click onto your website from Google (click-through-rate).
The average position your website ranks for any keywords.
Which keywords people are searching for when they find your website.
Which pages on your website receive the most traffic.
If you’ve submitted a sitemap (What the heck is a sitemap!? I’ll get to that soon).
If all of the correct pages are being crawled & indexed by Google.

If you don’t know what indexing is, here is my best attempt to explain with a metaphor:

Think of Google as a genius librarian, and every single page of every website as a book in its master library. First, Google “crawls” your website. You can think of this as Google taking inventory of the books (webpages) it already has and discovering all the new books that are constantly being published.

Then, Google “indexes” your website. Indexing is essentially Google organizing and shelving all of the webpages in its library. Once they’re stored in the right spot, Google can deliver those books when a user asks for them through relevant search terms (keywords).

If your website or important pages on your site are not being crawled and indexed by Google, Bing, etc., they will not be shown in search results.

Your website host or developers should be able to help you get GSC set up as you need to access your server to verify ownership.

Once you have GSC set up and verified, I also suggest setting up Bing Webmaster Tools.

This is Bing’s equivalent to Google Search Console. It is also free. I recommend setting GSC up first because you can import your website and data from GSC. On the home screen, click “Get Started.” Then, you have a couple of options to sign in with Google, Microsoft, or Facebook. Next, you can import your project from Google Search Console, or manually add your website.

Importing from GSC is the quickest and easiest way to get Bing’s Webmaster Tools up and running. The Bing dashboard will look like this:

Here you can monitor your website’s performance through the eyes of Bing.

Google Analytics 4

Like Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 is another free tool offered by Google to understand your website’s analytics. It begins tracking data once it has been set up. Once it has been running long enough, you can look at or even compare various time frames.

**Please note, Google recently finalized the transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. As of July 1, 2024, Universal Analytics accounts no longer exist. If you had a Universal Analytics account for your website, you must now create a new account through GA4.

If you do not have a GA4 or Universal Analytics account, your web host or developers should be able to get that set up when they configure your Google Search Console account.

GA4 really dives into how users interact with your website. It provides data on:

The amount of traffic you receive (in total and per webpage).
Where that traffic is coming from (organic, paid ads, a link on another website).
What those users do when they arrive at your website (how long they spend on your site, what pages or links they click on, etc).

If you’re a little lost on the difference between GSC and GA4, think of it like this:

Google Search Console provides data on how users organically (not ads) find your website. Google Analytics 4 provides data on where users arrive from (organic, ads, links on other sites) and what users do after they arrive on your website.

Once you have GA4 and GSC configured, you can actually link your GSC and GA4 properties. This allows you to get more detailed data about your website’s organic search performance beyond what GSC does by default.

Track your Search Engine Optimization progress with the checklist below!

Generate a Sitemap and Submit it to GSC

Back to this whole sitemap thing. What is it? A sitemap is a file that provides information about the structure of a website, helping search engines index the proper pages. Think of a sitemap as a literal map to your website. It tells search engines the pages/files that are significant on your site and gives important information about those pages/files.

If you’re using a newer version of WordPress (5.5 and up), your website’s sitemap will be automatically generated. You can find this sitemap by going to [website domain name]/wp-sitemap.xml. For example, wordwrightweb.com/wp-sitemap.xml. When I enter that into my search bar, I am taken to my sitemap. It looks like this:

If your website isn’t on a newer version of WordPress, there are a few easy ways that you can generate a sitemap.

Option One is to use a free online sitemap generator. This is the first site that pops up for the query “free sitemap generator.” I have used this one before and it worked great, but there are plenty to choose from.

Option Two (my recommendation) is to use the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin is only offered for WordPress websites. This plugin does a lot of other great things besides generating sitemaps, so I recommend downloading it regardless for your WordPress website. I’ll go through some of the awesome features of the Yoast SEO plugin later in this article. If you don’t have a WordPress website, I suggest using the online sitemap generator.

Once you have a sitemap generated, open Google Search Console, click on the “Sitemap” setting on the left-hand side, and enter the URL to your sitemap. GSC can take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks to process the sitemap, so check back to ensure the status says “success” like in the photo below.

Create a Robots.txt File

Robots.txt files direct search engines to the appropriate pages on your website. They are important to SEO because they tell search engines your preference on which pages to index and which pages you don’t want indexed. This is different from the sitemap, which acts as a blueprint to your website but doesn’t provide directions on which pages to crawl and index.

Think of your website like an amusement park. The sitemap tells you where all of the rides, games, and concessions are. Meanwhile, the robots.txt file marks off areas of the park that are under construction or only for employees.

Without this file, search engines will crawl and index your entire website. However, there are likely plenty of pages that you wouldn’t want indexed. Some examples include administrative/login pages, shopping cart/checkout pages, and pages with no content or very similar content to another page on your website.

You should be very careful when making any changes to your robots.txt file. This file has the potential to break your website and harm any SEO success. Your website developer most likely has already created a robots.txt file for your website. If you want to make updates to this file, I recommend telling your developer the changes you want to make, and letting them actually execute those changes.

Check for Manual Actions in GSC

Once Google Search Console has been configured, is processing data, and you’ve submitted your sitemap, make sure there are no manual actions that you need to tend to.

You can find the Manual actions under “Security & Manual Actions” on the left-side menu.

Any issues that appear in the manual actions report will prevent some or all of your website from appearing in search results. Manual actions are issues raised by Google’s human reviewers. These are penalties for any websites that have spammy/harmful content, don’t follow Google’s guidelines, or attempt to trick Google’s ranking algorithms.

Most likely, your website won’t have any manual actions to fix. But if you’re in an explicit industry or have engaged in “black hat” SEO, you might have raised some flags here. Either way, you should take a look at this before putting additional effort into other SEO components.