Building a successful business today requires an online presence that potential customers can find when needed. Thismeans building a website and blog that will appear in Google search results. The ultimate is to make it onto the first page, which is the first ten listings for a keyword combination.
Understanding SEO Optimization
Advice: A one-word keyword shouldn’t be used because it’s too broad and may have multiple meanings, which can be misinterpreted.
This means that you need an online marketing strategy. A way for you to broadcast your available services online to get as much visibility as possible. This visibility will then increase the likelihood of some visitors to your site becoming customers or clients. The longevity of a business’s presence online is to be continually discovered by new and existing clients.
As a new business owner starting this technical writing website, blog, and business, I had the opportunity to attend a [SCORE](https://www.score.org/) live webinar on SEO Optimization led by Brandon at [SEO Optimizers](https://seooptimizers.com). These are my edited notes from that session.
To that end, let’s dive in by first looking at what SEO is.
What is SEO
- The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search results. The goal is to increase the relevant, high-quality traffic a website receives from search engines. The workshop was about Google search optimization.
- Google ranks webpages websites with its search engine. The more pages you have, the higher your website will berank. The higher your website ranking, the more visitors you’ll get.
- There are different types of searches. There are keyword searches that consist of two or more words. Then there are direct questions. Finally, there are search suggestions Google makes when you type keywords into the search field.
- The goal of your business is to get onto the first page of search results. There are usually ten of them on the first page. These are organic listings and not ads. The sponsored section of the search results will indicate ads.
- Complete a Google business profile so potential customers can easily find your business details.
The benefits of an SEO strategy include:
- Increased visibility and brand awareness
- Boosted credibility and trust
- Drives quality traffic to the website
- Provides measurable results
- Is cost-effective compared to running a pay-per-click ad
The steps to implement an SEO strategy are:
- Initial analysis
- Keyword research analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Sitemap + RSS feed inclusion
- Search engine + Directory submission
- Social bookmarking
- Blog + Press release creation
- Articles submission
- Link popularity
- Search Engine Results Page SERP Report
How Google ranks websites
Quick Tip: put text at the bottom of a page so that Google can rank it properly while visitors will see the graphics and images at the top.
- Google Search is fully automated and uses crawlers, sometimes called spiders and robots, to scan and discover websites automatically (aka Googlebot). Then, it assigns each page a value and determines the website’s relevancy. Google only sees the code and text of a page, not the images and graphics. To see what Google’s spiders see, right-click any page and select ‘View Page Source’.
- This means that the more text you add to a page, the easier it is for Google to read and rank your pages. Include descriptive names for images, too.
- The recommendation is to have at least 400 words on each page, including the home page.
Keyword research
- To understand what keywords you should use, try asking questions a customer would ask.
- Start by writing down a list of keywords and questions customers would ask.
- Then, use Google search for each set of keywords and notice the suggestions for instant search, autocomplete, and related searches.
- Be sure to use singular and plural forms of words.
How to do keyword research
- After using Google Search to identify a list of keywords, use this information to define what to write about in your blog. It’s a good source of topic ideas.
- In the search results, look at competitor websites for their SEO title tags.
- Also, notice the title keywords they’re using. The title link is only about 60 characters long, so ensure your title tags don’t exceed this length. Anything beyond 60 characters is truncated into an ellipsis.
Tools
- The Google Ads Keyword Planner is a good enough tool to help determine the relevance and search frequency of specific keywords. You need a [Google Ads](https://ads.google.com/home/) account to use the keyword planner. You can use it for SEO research without creating ads.
- The Keyword Planner will also provide the cost-per-click of each keyword, but SEO is cheaper than Google ads. Keywords should get more than 100 searches, but newer keywords will have fewer or zero searches.
- When you find a keyword you may want to use, right-click to search for it to observe competitors’ title tags and keywords. If the search results return ads at the top, it’s already competitive, and it may better serve your business to avoid using it.
- Search is available by country, and you can change your location to investigate keywords in other countries or languages.
- It’s also good to have targeted keywords representing searches by potential customers who are ready to buy versus a generic keyword. These keywords would be specific and targeted to help identify a particular product or service.
- You can combine keywords to create new ones. The keywords suggested by Google don’t have to be used as is. Modify them for your needs or to make one that combines the best words.
Mobile friendly
- Ensure your website looks good on all devices because over half of Google traffic now comes from mobile devices. You should test the site’s appearance on different browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
- Find tools that let you test viewing on all types of devices. The tests must be repeated, especially when new devices are released.
Backlinks
Choose quality over quantity.
- Backlinks are when other websites mention your site with a clickable link. The focus should be on quality, not quantity. You will have to reach out to other bloggers to get quality backlinks.
- To find them, try a Google search with “inurl: ‘write for us’ + a keyword”. The search results will return for pages containing the phrase ‘write for us’. They should provide guidelines for how to ask to write for them.
- Find authoritative and trustworthy websites to create backlinks. Bigger sites mean a more significant SEO value.
Competitor analysis
- Google competition is different from offline competition. Because another business is physically close to yours, they aren’t a Google competition if they aren’t on the first page of search results.
- Make a list of competitors and look at their backlinks. Paid tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz provide this information to view backlinks. If you can see their backlinks, reach out to the website that backlinked your competition and ask them to add yours.
- It will take effort and persistence, but it should be worth it.
Google analytics tracking
- Use Google Analytics for free to understand how your pages are performing. This information can help you make statistically informed decisions. For example, it will give you the bounce rate for your pages. If a page has a bounce rate, that means a visitor left the page immediately. Knowing this might help you update the page to see what will reduce the bounce rate.
- Some CMS services like WordPress allow you to install Google Analytics. This data is invaluable to helping grow your business online.
Other advice
- Add questions and answers to your website. An FAQ is a good place to start. Try to target questions customers have or will ask so that your site will appear in the results if they search for an answer to that question again.
- Always negotiate backlinks when possible. Sometimes, the site you want a backlink from will have additional terms.
- Look for forums to participate in to help create backlinks and grow your presence naturally online.