The Complete Guide to SEO Marketing

Published: 2026-03-17 · SEO · Ricky Bandelin

SEO is built on three pillars: content quality, technical performance, and authority through backlinks
Search engines prioritize the user experience above all else — content that genuinely answers searcher intent outranks content optimized only for keywords
Local SEO for businesses in Metro Vancouver requires Google Business Profile optimization, local citations, and geo-targeted content
Technical SEO issues silently undermine even the best content strategies — site speed, crawlability, and structured data all matter
SEO is a long-term investment with compounding returns — rankings built over time continue to deliver traffic without ongoing ad spend

Find questions people have about your topic. Use websites like Answer the Public, Quora, Reddit, and Facebook Groups to understand what your customers are talking about.
Flush out keywords in each topic that cover the main ideas
Use tools to help you find the best keywords — Google's free Keyword Planner can help you get started. In the planner add your new keywords and Google will show you how many people are searching for each word, and other words like it.
Find keywords that you can rank for — It's important to find your sweet spot, keywords with large search traffic are often very competitive and hard to rank for. Long tail keywords will have more room to rank higher because they are searched less and tend to be more focused. You are looking for words that have search traffic but aren't too difficult that you will have a tough time beating out the top spot. Ubersuggest is a free tool that tells you how difficult the competition for your chosen keywords will be.

Make your site mobile friendly – over 50% of users are now on mobile and it is no longer acceptable to have a site that isn't responsive to any screen size.
Site speed – people give up after 3 seconds, if your page didn't load they have moved on. Google puts a great emphasis on site speed and you can use the free Google speed checker to make sure your site is performing properly.
Site Security – You may have noticed that most sites now start with https instead of just http. This is because of an SSL certificate which is a safety feature that encrypts customer information to the server the website lives on giving an extra protective layer to your customers data. As the internet grows security becomes more important and search engines like Google will no longer rank sites they deem to be unsafe.
Write for people not just for the search engine. Do not stuff your article with your keywords!
Make it easy for readers to share your content on social (social sharing can help you reach more eyeballs).
Make your content scannable. Not everyone will read your article so make it easy for them to understand what is going on without reading the whole thing.
Image text matters on your page. Your images can also come up on an image search (which is often less crowded) and give credit to what is written on your page. Don't skip over your images, take the time to label them properly with your chosen keywords.