What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of improving your website so that it attracts more visitors, and the right visitors, from search engines. You want to attract strangers looking for content relevant to your business to your site so that you can move them along the buyer’s journey.
How do Search Engines determine which sites to display?
To ensure their users are happy, Search Engines must prioritize the most relevant, useful, and trustworthy information. To determine what takes priority they send out web-crawlers to analyze your site and figure out what it’s all about. The more consistent, clear, and properly formatted your site is it will show these crawlers that you are a reliable source.
How do you show the Search Engine what your site is about?
To make it clear to a Search Engine what your site is about you need to create consistent, clear, and properly formatted content. Implement topics and keywords that you would like your site to be associated with and in time you will rank for those subjects.
How do I brainstorm Keywords?
This is similar to the content strategy where you will want to identify what questions your audience is asking and more specifically which things they are searching for. Ask yourself…
Who is the person? What are they searching?
What solutions does your company provide?
What are common industry questions?
After you’ve come up with a large list of numbers categorize each into which stage of the buyer’s journey they fall into…
Awareness
Problem Based Keywords
Consideration
Solution Keywords
Decision
Branded Keywords
To expand on your list, keep these strategies in mind:
Mind any jargon, slang, or language nuances.
Search the keyword and see what results appear under the web, images, and videos. What other words are coming up?
Utilizing 3rd party tools like Wordstream’s Keyword Niche Finder or Google’s Web Master Tools are extremely helpful
Determine which keywords people are using to find your site. Some search engines encrypt data but you can gain some insight through Google Analytics or Hubspot Sources
The most imperative step of this whole process is to decide which words you can actually rank for. For example; if you want to come up #1 on Google for “Wealth Management” - good luck… there are too many people trying to do this and chances are they’ve started far before you. To avoid these pitfalls expand on this “short” or “broad’ keyword. You would want to try to rank for something like “Wealth Management Newport Beach” or “Wealth Management for Millennials”. The more specific that you are, the more likely you are to rank and you have the benefit of ranking for the “broad” keyword as well.
The second most imperative step is to understand that ranking is not easy. It will take time, diligence, and analyzing your efforts.
Go for high volume, low competition keywords
Blog 3 times a week
Optimize your page for the web-crawlers
How do I optimize my site for the Web Crawlers?
First off, you need to create useful content that utilizes these keywords. Not only will this build authority and trust with your visitors, it will also do so with the search engines. See the content strategy blogs for help on this or hire me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then…
Update the page description so that it matches the appropriate keywords; broad and specific.
Add your broad keyword to the page title and put the page title and company name into the URL, separating with dashes.
Add Keywords to body, headers and image alt- text. Do this naturally, if you stuff words in there- your readers will not enjoy the information and search engines will realize what you are doing.
Add Keywords to the Meta description (<160 words)
Include links to reputable websites in your content. This could be linking to your sources, other people in your industry that fulfill a need you don’t, a video, etc…
Include links to pages through out your site. This could be referencing other blog posts, members of your team, your services… anything. Get creative.
When linking use industry specific, non branded primary keywords of the pages it is linking back to. Do not use “click here” and utilize anchor text.
Optimize your site for mobile - 80% of searches come from mobile.
Gain popularity on social media sites and set them up to direct to your site. ie: put it in the bio on your twitter. This really comes down to posting regularly which can be automated with something like HootSuite. Repurpose your content, engage with your users, and once again be consistent.
Get links from reputable sites to yours. Just as you might link to a provider of a service you don’t provide- ask those individuals to do the same thing for you. If you don’t want to help one another, cause ya know, sometimes it really do be like that, find external sources. The best way to do this is with resources like MozLink Explorer. Keep in mind, you want to have links from reputable sites- so only link with industry leaders, reputable publications etc.
LInk Ideas:
Ask the website owner of a word you want to rank for, that is already ranking high, to write a blog and link to your site.
Interview an industry thought leader (hopefully they’ve got a website) and share that post on your site, link to theirs, hopefully they link to you
Have a Press Release be written on your company, like inc.com, they’ll link to you.
Set pages on local directories
Lastly, make the site easy to navigate and visually appealing. If it looks bad, people are going to leave and you’re going to be sad.