Beginners SEO Training 2025

To understand Google, you need to know what their mission is. What drives them (apart from earning money) to do what they are doing?

The three parts of a Search Result Snippet in Google Search: Title, Description and URL

When Google not only shows regular Search Results, but also images ...

What do other people ask related to the topic you just searched for?

When a search query is about a topic that gets featured in News all around the globe (or your country) Google will see your search intent might be about reding News.

Is the topic just searched for relevant for users interested in watching videos? Google will display videos in the SERP.

If the probability is high that a search query might be of local search intent, Google will display a local onebox.

Position Zero. The featured snipppet is like the Queen of search results. It draws a lot of the searchers intention, being placed just above the regular search results. The King's discipline is to not only get featured in this position, but also to get the user click on it to make him become a visitor of your website.

Simple answers Google will display from their own databases without the need of displaying a source.

The way Google earns its money is from Ads.

Another form of ads is the product ads.

When Google implements new services it is often not that good for other businesses that used to be in that topic before. To know your own USPs (or to develop new USPs) will be the way to recover and survive.

Whenever a search query can be seen as an entity (like people, places, companies, brands) Google will know a lot of accompanying information on them. The Knowledge Graph is the place they display them.

Last but not least in the very end of a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) Google will give hints on other search queries other people might have used in relation to the just searched phrase.

Here is the link mentioned in the video:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en

Google Search offers so many cool features to customize your searches. No need to go with only keywords - go with keywords + parameters.

It is important that you know what is possible. It is not important to learn all these parameters by heart. You will automatically memorize those, you use over and over again. The others you will look up whenever you need them.

Analyzing what is happening in the Google Search URL is highly interesting. If you know a few of these URL Parameters, you can easily create astonishing results.

All people are at some kind of a customer journey. You need to understand that in order to decide at which point of the customer journey you want to address them.

You may have heard about short head and long tail keywords. Learn what they really are in this lecture.

Besides if many or less people are searching for a keyword, you can also look at the intent of them from the customer journey perspective.

Short head keywords are often not really distinguishable as "informational" or "transactional". But the more you go into mid or  long tail, you can often quite clearly combine it with the user intent.

The user intent is not only in keywords themselves. Also the different part of a website do have different intent they can serve. Honestly, I am not really proud of this video. I will probably exchange it with another one very soon, which explains that better.

The very first step is using your brain by doing a proper brainstorming.

For the next step you will be needing "Seeding Keywords". What these are, you will find out in this lecture.

A really great keyword research tool provided for free by Google themselves, without the need for creating an account is: Google Suggest.

Even more keywords will be scraped for free for you by free keyword suggest scrapimng tools like keywordtool.io

One of the greatest keyword research tools (in my opinion) is "Keyword Discovery" of Searchmetrics (paid tool)

Using Searchmetrics to find more keyword by looking up what very topic specific websites (like shoes.com) rank for.

"Content Experience" by Searchmetrics (paid tool) helps you easily classifying if a keyword is navigational, informational or transactional.

If you don't have the money paying for Searchmetrics (or other toos) or you simply do not want to pay money for them - you can always find FREE aternatives - like I am introducing in this video: How to define search imntent of a keyword for free.

Foreign language keywords should best be researched by native speakers of the target language. Even if you do speak a foreign language fluently - a native speaker might still pick much better fitting keywords for your SEO strategy.

But if you have no other chance than resaerching keywords by yourself in a language you do not speak - you can go with this following approach.

The easiest way to research for foreign keywords is looking at the rankings of a website in your Niche that has already done the keyword research (for you).

Using translation tools like Google Translate, Bing Translate, Yandex Translate, Baidu Translate or Deepl can help getting some seeding keywords for the further process of your keyword research.

If you do not know the language you are researching keywords for, you might want to double-check if the seeding words you found are going into the direction you were looking for. Here is a good technique for doing this - without translation tools.

One way to grow your foreign keyword list - still without native speaker's help.

A second way to grow your foreign keyword list - still without native speaker's help.

A third way to grow your foreign keyword list - still without native speaker's help.

Evaluating which words from the list you might want to dump.

Let's plan a website, build a (broad) informational architecture.

If you want to build a website, a webshop, that is meant to grow and drive sales, you want to build a brand for it.

It's easier to earn rankings for informational content than for transactional content. That's why you definitely want to build a bigger informational section on your website.

But what get's you direct sales is visitors from transactional search queries. So even, if it will take time to rank for these, you want to target them.

Here is an example how I would build the brand for "my" chocolate store.

What kind of ecommerce keywords would I want to target? We look into Product Detail Page content - because this will be more of a longtail kind of keywords - easier to rank for.

Since informational content is the easier to rank for content - here is an example of topics I would want to target for "my" chocolates website.

Too many similar pages - like those of extremely similar product detail pages, are giving search engines a hard time to decide which page to rank. These pages are cannibalizing each other.

But there is a way solving this problem - if the pages cannibalizing each other are just varieties of the same product.

A product detail page is a kind of page you really want to rank, because it is very close to the purchasing intent of a visitor. In order to give your product detail pages a better chance for rankings, you want to make it more relevant for a topic. To achieve this, it helps including words in your content that help making it "complete" for a topic.

Just for demonstration here is another example on a different product type.

And how this would look like in the layout of a product detail page.

Although the first tool I am showing you here is a payed tool - please still watch this video. It is not about urging you to buy this tool. It is about you understanding what I do look at.

Free insights using the free accessible information on Similar Web

Some free insights from Google about domains not your own - if you know how to interpret them.

Putting all the gathered information together and comparing free with paid methods: Spoiler - you will need the free tools only (for now).

Most importantly look at the titles the competitors are using to find out if it will be hard to target the keywords. Your objective will be to use your main keyword exact match in the front of your titles.

The Search Engines Result Page (SERP) can tell you much more about what you need to invest in your content - how to build your content - in order to win rankings.

What many SEOs miss - but actually is a no-brainer - is to check your competitors sites directly. What are they using in content elements? What are they writing about? Do the same and make it better!

Google Updates are not evil - they are necessary. Learn why this is the case.

An idea of Domain based Ranking Factors - just an introduction - only help you getting an idea what that could mean.

An idea of OnPage based Ranking Factors - just an introduction - only help you getting an idea what that could mean.

An idea of OffPage based Ranking Factors - just an introduction - only help you getting an idea what that could mean.

An idea of Technical based Ranking Factors - just an introduction - only help you getting an idea what that could mean.

An idea of User Signals based Ranking Factors - just an introduction - only help you getting an idea what that could mean.

An idea of Search Behaviour Changes based Ranking Factors - just an introduction - only help you getting an idea what that could mean.

What is a Black Hat SEO and what is a White Hat SEO explained on the example of building backlinks.

One of Googles approaches fighting Black Hat SEO on the content side of the medal.

One of Googles approaches fighting Black Hat SEO on the backlinks side of the medal.

Get a fast-forward view on which Google Updates happened from 2010 to 2020. For students wanting to get a deeper look into this topic - you will find three links to ressources on Moz.com, SearchEngineJournal.com and Searchmetrics.com

Google's very own advice how to find out if your website is high quality enough in order to get better chances for ranking well.