We all want to search by relevant keywords and see our site right there at the top. But is that realistic? How do we accomplish that?
Recognize that you want to accomplish four things:
- you want search engines to find your content,
- you want search engines to like your content,
- you want to be viewed as an expert or highly relevant source within your area, and
- you want your social media information to enable users to find you.
To ensure search engines can find your site, I incorporate the Yoast SEO plug-in. The free version of this application enables us to put in keywords (words that users might search by when looking for content like ours) for each page, and it creates a sitemap (an index of our site used by crawlers, or search engines). I load your site into Google Search Console, identifying it to Google and specifying your sitemap.
You should also add your business to Google Business. When users look for a service/product in their area, you want to appear on the list. In addition to Google Business, consider adding your site to Yelp, Houzz, Angie’s List, or other specialized referral sites where potential customers are looking for services or products similar to those you provide. Keep the information on these sites current (hours, phone number, etc.), setting up a calendar event once a month to validate everything is still correct.
To create high-quality content, we create meaningful, concise, actionable text on each page. The site should be cohesive, aligning keywords, taglines, titles, images, and content. The book Building a Story Brand can help you become razor-focused on what you are providing your customers. You can further optimize your SEO with a stream of high-quality new content. Commit to creating a new post every two weeks to ensure your site is active. Using Grammarly, or another editing tool will help you create clean text.
For a higher SEO ranking, it is helpful to have links to and from your site. When content is valuable, people share it. Work to get other sites to link to your content and do the same on yours. Search engines love websites that interconnect with other websites. I’ll also work to ensure you have internal site links, which also improves SEO.
For more hits on your site, ensure you are active on the social media platforms that best align with your business and its target customers. I use Blog2Social to make your life easy, enabling you to post on your site and then push it to your social media platforms. Remember – all roads should lead back to your site and provide an action for the customer.
There is a lot more SEO information we can discuss, but this is a good set of starter tips. I also highly recommend the free SEO Training Course: Building Sustainable Traffic for Business Growth on HubSpot and the many Yoast tutorials. The HubSpot course was very influential in the content of this post.