Keyword Research
Keywords are what people type into Google when they are searching for something. Keyword research is tailoring your website to match what people are looking up so that they get recommended you on the search engine. They make tools to help you rank better by giving you keywords people may use and how hard they would be to get to the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) based on how often the keywords are looked up. You can also use Google Search Console (more about that here) to see what keywords your website is already ranking for! You can also use tools to see what your competitors top keywords are and how much traffic they get.
There are also different kinds of keywords such as matching terms, related terms, keyword clusters and keyword intents.
Matching Terms
Matching terms are keywords that match the words exactly with your seed keywords. There are "Terms match" and "Phrase match".
"Terms match" shows keyword ideas that contain the whole term you use with other words in between. If my seed keyword is "SEO Blog" it may give me the following ideas: "SEO beginner Blog", "Become a master with my SEO Blog", "A Blog to become a better SEO content creator".
"Phrase match" shows keyword ideas that contain the whole term in the exact order with nothing in between, just before and after. "SEO Blog" would give you ideas such as "SEO Blog for beginners" and "An intermediate SEO Blog".
Related Terms
Related Terms are keyword ideas related to you seed keywords but do not actually contain the seed keyword. There are two modes of related terms "Also rank for" and "Also talk about". "Also rank for" shows you what websites are top ranking for your seed keyword and what else they are top ranking for. "Also talk about" shows you the words and phrases that are also talked about on the top ranking pages for your seed keyword.
Keyword Clusters
Keyword Clusters are subtopics for the main keyword search. The example Ahrefs.com shows us how searching for "whipped coffee recipe" also shows "whipped coffee" results because they are an identical term. Ranking for both keywords while focusing on one is a keyword cluster.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor Analysis is finding out what your competitors do and solve the problem better for your customers. Using the search engine, look up what you would if you needed to go to your store. Then see what other websites come up before yours and see why they are doing better. Maybe they offer services that people may not know you do and if you start to show that you offer them as well, more people that go to your site will stay there. You can also see what keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. When seeing how much traffic your competitors are getting, find out what kind of content is on these links such as long posts, short posts, videos, or a store page with a popular product.
On the technical side, you can see the meta tags to see how they structure the site making them a higher rank as well as the h1 tags and url structure. There are many SEO competitor tools such as programs that do it for you and templates to fill in and analyze yourself.
Link Building
Link building is getting other websites to link to your website and establish authority as an important site to the search engine. Building links comes from adding links on other sites to bring people there manually such as posting it on Reddit/Twitter/Instagram etc. and people click on it to get to your site. Asking for links with emails or texts to owners of relevant sites is another option although some people may only do it for money as compensation so that they get something out of it as well. The last way is to earn links by having happy viewers that send the link to friends.
Building links can be actions such as creating a social profile, submitting your link in directories, reviewing listings for the website, and posting on forums and other community boards. Although those options do not really have value to Google as anyone can do it, it gets your site seen. Some stronger ways to get links are guest posting for a more popular site and linking your own, Create a better post that many links go to and have them pick you instead, finding broken links and asking to put yourself in its place, and many other ways to get on other pages. Getting backlinks for free may seem impossible without having a good interaction with the owner before.
Buying Links
Buying links is the easiest way but Google considers it manipulation and could ban your site from the results page. Many websites buy links and from researching your competitors you could see if many go to the same place, they probably pay for their links.
Earning Backlinks
Earning backlinks is the final way to build your links up. It is the hardest one to do but if you have content that someone really likes enough to put on their site, they will post it on their website. Some examples that have a better chance of earning a link is results of research, surveys that other companies can use the data of, being the first to post an important news article, and your companies data that others could use such as digital marketing company metrics.