The majority of entrepreneurs and small business owners are intimidated by SEO. There’s a lot to learn and it all appears to be technical yet vague and impenetrable. But getting a grasp on it might be a lot easier than you think and the benefits of knowing how to utilize it effectively are enormous.
The plethora of discovery calls with possible new clients who have found me as a consequence of a Google search (in my case, they’re generally seeking a copywriter or someone to help them find their niche or articulate their message) is the huge advantage of working on my business SEO.
So, aside from getting ready for a steady stream of new clients, what else should you know about SEO?
Here are the top five things to remember about SEO that will help you get in front of your ideal client:
1. Optimize Your Main Web Pages
Increase your site’s domain authority by aiming to get more backlinks through media coverage and guest posting. With SEO, you can keep on adding to the library of content you’ve already created or compose a blog series to drive traffic based on a particular keyword.
Ultimately, if you set up your core web pages so that they’re optimized for search, you can sit back and relax knowing that Google is doing most of the heavy lifting( even while you sleep) to serve up your site to people who are actively looking for the exact service you provide. Pretty cool, huh?
Google is the holy grail of marketing, you can set it and forget it!
2. Pair SEO Marketing and Referral Marketing
You can break free from the social media hamster wheel, especially if you combine SEO efforts with a solid referral campaign. Having an all-in-one CRM like HoneyBook at your fingertips will help you manage your client relationships and provide stellar customer service, which leads to more referrals and glowing testimonials. This SEO marketing and referral marketing pairing can result in a fully booked-out business.
3. Keyword Research is Your Friend
We’ve all seen those sites where keywords have been awkwardly stuffed into the content so that the page reads like it’s been written by a robot. Keywords (or more often, keyword phrases) are your window into the minds of your target audience. These phrases reveal what’s keeping them up at night and what their biggest struggles are which is fabulous information for content-planning purposes.
Pro Tip: Use free keyword research tools (like Ubersuggest.io) to gain insight into your ideal client’s mind by seeing how many people are searching for information on each keyword per month.
Keyword research leads you to a goldmine of content ideas for blogs, newsletters and social media posts. Now that you know what’s on people’s minds, you can write about it. You can generate your whole content marketing calendar by working out which keywords you want to target and when you want to write about them.
Search engines have changed and they now seek out the same qualities that your ideal clients do: well-written, interesting and useful content. A longer piece of content with internal links to other relevant pages or articles on your site, as well as connections out to one or two high authority sites elsewhere on the web, can get you higher rankings from Google.
Google is also searching for material that will keep readers on the page. Try keeping your readers interested by using narrative, empathy and other writing strategies that don’t use keyword stuffing, all of which will enhance your search rankings. The more engaging and organically written your material is, the more it will appeal to your readers and audience as well as Google’s search bots.
4. Don’t Make SEO Writing an Extra Chore
Of course, if the keyword research you’re conducting generates a lot of blog post ideas, don’t feel like you have to perform twice as much effort as before. Don’t put keyword-driven material on top of your other content marketing efforts. Instead, use your keyword knowledge to support your content marketing strategies. Repurpose your material as a blog post, social media post, newsletter, etc.
Depending on your style and preference, you can write longer SEO-focused blog posts and then break them up and repurpose them as Instagram captions, Facebook or LinkedIn posts. This same content can also be the basis for your newsletter, discussion prompts in a community that you run or you can use these topics to help you plan the content strategy for your podcast.
However you do it, make sure you make full use of the market research that your keywords have provided you with. Repurposing content in a clever way will ensure that you’re working smarter, not harder and will help you to avoid content creation burnout.
5. No One Can be an Expert in all the Possible Facets of Running a Successful Business
If you feel that your time could be better spent doing something other than getting a grip on your SEO, but you like the sound of getting Google to help you generate business leads on autopilot, then there are various ways you can get help from an expert.
You can hire an SEO consultant to create your SEO strategy going forward or you can work with an SEO-focused copywriter. The copywriter can help write your web copy and blog posts so that you simultaneously sound like yourself, engage your ideal clients and start climbing Google’s rankings.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore SEO entirely. SEO is a long game and results could take anywhere from three months to a year to appear. But you’ll be happy you focused on SEO when the results start rolling in – when you wake up in the morning to find that strangers were booking discovery calls with you while you were sleeping because they discovered you on Google. It’s the gift that keeps on giving and how often can you say that of a marketing strategy?
