So, you’ve launched your business! Or you have an existing business that looks the goods. Great branding that looks a million bucks, a website that looks equally as pro and it has all the right buttons and words in the right place to make people want to click and make a sale or enquiry.
And then you type your product or service in Google and you are buried on page 19,786 where nobody will ever find you.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if people who were in trouble right now, needing your services, could google their words and have you pop up right at the top there so they can find you in all your amazing customer focussed, million-dollar branding and website glory?
If only they could see your website to know you existed, then they’d be impressed for sure!
And you’d get more work, more leads, and more revenue.
Yes, there is more that you can do to increase your favour with the Google Gods, and I’m going to show you how we embark on an SEO project with clients and how we can start to move them up the ladder of listings on search engines to the holy grail that is “PAGE ONE”.
I’m just letting you know – it is simple but not easy, anything worthwhile takes work right? Roll up your sleeves and let’s dive right in…
SEO VS SEM – what the heck do they mean?
SEO is increasing the amount of website visitors by getting the site to appear high on results returned by a search engine – this is through non-paid methods that you can pay someone to do, or do them yourself, I include a list for you to get started on below.
SEM is considered internet marketing that increases a site’s visibility through organic search engines results (SEO as described above PLUS paid advertising such as Google AdWords).
An important distinction is to note that SEO work is an ongoing behind the scenes effort to improve your content to make you a #boss in your industry, and sprinkling links to your site all over the internet to make you appear #popular. These are things Google looks for when deciding who to put at the top of their list. Once you stop working on SEO, all your previous efforts are still there, and your rank will still apply.
Google AdWords is where you pay Google to put you right at the top of the list for when people type in certain search terms that you dictate. While you are paying, Google puts you at the top, when you stop paying, you are dead to them.
So therefore a mix of the two is the best (in my opinion) to make sure you are getting the best of both worlds, even if you are starting out on a shoestring budget, you can still achieve both.
TIPS to DIY your SEO
Let’s look at the things Google (and other search engines) favour so you can implement yourself:
Activity on the interwebs
- Upload regular blogs and website content – at least once a month
- Have an active social media (linkedin, facebook, instagram) account – Google sees this too and often shows your facebook page in search results
Keywords and good content
- Make sure the content you write in your blogs is good quality information, using a lot of the keywords you think people might use to search for answers.
- Add valuable content to your social media channels also
Links
So, you want lots of links out there on the internet back to your website (backlinks). You can do this by:
- Find local and national online business directories and submit your business details to be listed – Google online business directories + your business niche to find a bunch
- Offer to write guest posts for other people’s websites – with a credit to you and a link back to your website (a ‘backlink’).
They also like to see links out from your webpages so you can:
- Add links from one webpage on your site to other webpages
- Add links out to other websites (edu or gov websites have good standing) the better the website you link to, the better you look in google’s eyes!
- Mixup how you add links, some could be pictures hyperlinked, other times it could be words.
- Do not ever link to spammy or dodgey sites, this will not make you look good.
- Any broken links on your site will penalise your search ranking too, so make sure all your links work, and if you delete a webpage, anyone else in the internet that has linked to it now has a broken link, so add in a redirection.
