If you’re an online business owner, chances are you’ve struggled with social media at some point or another. It’s a common problem—you know you need to be on social media to generate leads, but having to show up on social media constantly can lead to burnout and unpredictable revenue. Social media can be a great supplement to your marketing strategy, but if you are looking for a long-term, stress-free way to create content for your business that doesn’t disappear every 24 hours, SEO is the perfect strategy for you.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is how you make sure that your website appears as the top result of a search when potential customers search for keywords related to your business. An SEO strategy means your content is shown as a result to people searching for a solution to their problem or answer to their question on Search Engines like Google.
Search engines determine which content provides the best information based on Keywords. Keywords are words that are used to categorize and rank your content in search engines that correlate with what people are searching for.
Here’s are some quick stats that show why an SEO strategy is so important for your business*:
- The top 3 organic results on Google (#1, #2, #3) capture 61% of clicks
- Organic listings receive 90% of overall clicks (versus paid listings)
- Less than 10% of people advance to Page 2 of Google Search results
*Stats from protofuse.com
SEO can feel super tech heavy at first, but you can start simple and build upon your strategy over time. You don’t need to be an expert, but a few small steps to optimize your website for SEO can go a LONG WAY.
Pro Tip: This blog post focuses on SEO for your Website, so you’ll need a website in order to implement these tips. You can also have SEO strategies for YouTube and Pinterest.
SEO is really the key to driving long-term organic traffic to your website. And the good news is, it’s not nearly as time-consuming as social media. Here are 5 tips and tricks to help you get started:
1. Do your keyword research
Keywords are the words or phrases that people use when they’re searching for something online. By including relevant keywords in your website content, you can increase your chances of showing up in search results.
This is seriously the most important thing you can do for your website. Without keywords, you won’t be able to rank in Google, and you won’t get any organic traffic. But don’t just pick any old keyword—pick ones that are relevant to your niche and that have a decent amount of monthly searches (you can use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to find this out).
Pro Tip: Install Google Analytics so that you can use Google search console. Use this to see which of your pages is ranking for which keywords on google. Very helpful tool to track what’s working or where you need improvement. You might rank for a keyword that you haven’t even really targeted so you can also get ideas from google search console to write more focussed blog posts.
Here are some common Keyword Planner Tools:
- Google Keyword planner
- Keywords everywhere
- Answer the public (paired with keywords everywhere)
- Ubersuggest
- Moz keyword planner
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
2. Include Keywords Strategically Throughout Your Website
One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is including relevant keywords throughout your content—but beware of keyword stuffing! In addition to including keywords in places like your title tag, header tags, and meta descriptions, you should also sprinkle them throughout the body of your content in a way that sounds natural and flows well. A good rule of thumb is to include one keyword for every 100 words of content.
By including relevant keywords in your website content, you can increase your chances of showing up in search results.
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3. Optimize Your Images
First, it’s important to optimize your images so that the file size is appropriate for your website. This helps your website load faster and makes your website more attractive for Google to surface in search results. Unoptimized images can penalize your website by making it load slowly, causing Google to rank it lower in search results. A good rule of thumb is for images not to exceed 1000px in length or width and to use an image optimizer like tinypng.com to compress the file size without losing image quality. It’s best for each image to be 100KB or under.
Whenever you upload a photo or graphic to your website, make sure you’re including keywords in the file name and filled in the” alternate text” field with a brief, keyword-rich description of the image. This not only helps improve your website’s SEO but also helps make sure that people with visual impairments can still access your content.
4. Build Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your website. Having high-quality backlinks is important because it helps improve your website’s authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines. To get quality backlinks, reach out to other websites in your industry and offer to guest blog, guest podcast or write a testimonial for them. By taking these steps, you can help build more backlinks to your website – which will ultimately improve its ranking in search engine results pages.
Pro Tip: Make sure that links you are getting are relevant to your website. Avoid Bad Backlinks – links from low quality sites or sites with duplicate content. Links from Reddit, blog comments, and social media are not necessarily Bad Backlinks, but they will not build your domain authority with Google the same way as a link from a legitimate website that solves problems for its readers.
5. Measure your results & adjust accordingly.
The final step is probably the most important one: measure your results and adjust accordingly. Just because something worked for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you. Test different strategies and see what works best for YOUR business. Install Google Analytics on your website and track metrics on which blog posts and website pages rank highest and which pages on your website people spend the most time on. Use this data to determine how you can improve other pages and write additional blog posts your audience wants to see.
So there you have it—5 tips and tricks for improving your website’s SEO . If you follow these steps, you should start seeing more organic traffic coming to your website.
Unlike social media, SEO has a cumulative effect and the more quality content you post, the higher your website will rank. Popular posts from years ago will continue to bring you traffic and sales.
Pro Tip: An SEO strategy is a long-term marketing strategy that takes time to build. Most people start to see results after 3-6 months of taking consistent SEO action. Be consistent and patient!
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