In today’s digital age, having a website for your online small business is no longer an option – it’s a necessity. But just having a website is not enough. To truly succeed in the online marketplace, it’s crucial to have a strong online presence, and that’s where the Ultimate SEO Guide comes in.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. By following the right SEO strategies, your small business website can gain more visibility, drive more traffic, and ultimately, grow your business.
Table of Contents
- How does search engine optimization affect your online small business?
- Ultimate SEO Guide: Key steps to improve website traffic
- Conclusion
How does search engine optimization affect your online small business?
The goal of SEO is to increase the visibility of a website and drive more traffic to it. The number one thing that all online businesses need is: traffic. But you don’t just want traffic, you want targeted traffic. Online content is the only content that can be tracked to the point where you can specifically target your audience based on their actions online. When you create content for a searcher’s intent, you’re connecting with your audience on a deeper level and you’ll instantly resonate with them.
But what are the necessary steps to optimize your website, so you can get more targeted traffic that solves the searcher’s intent? Let’s dive into the Ultimate SEO Guide to find out.
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Ultimate SEO Guide: Key steps to improve website traffic
These are the seven basic steps to follow, to ensure your website is setup to attract your ideal target buyers who are ready to buy.
1. Nail Down Your Ideal Buyer Persona
First, make sure you know your audience inside and out. Targeted traffic means you’re creating content specifically for one audience, your ideal buyer persona. You’re targeting their pain points, interests, and where they are in the online buyer’s journey.
Every successful marketing campaign or sales funnel begins with a specific customer persona. Without nailing down your targeted customer persona, you’ll miss out on easy wins.
And this takes more than a five minute persona or client avatar brainstorm. It requires market research and data tracking, and if you want to learn more check out my Market Research Guide and Workbook.
2. Research Keywords
The goal of keyword research should be a master list of keywords at your fingertips. You want to sit down to create your content and know exactly what to create because you already created your Content Strategy.
And search engine optimization and keyword research should be a part of that strategy.
By planning and researching ahead of time, you’ll know exactly what needs created and what keywords or phrases to target with each new piece of content you create. You also want to use your data from Google Search Console to know what to create next. This way you aren’t just creating blindly and in six months time realize it isn’t work.
Your data will tell you what’s working and what isn’t, so you can adjust as you go. And it’ll help you capitalize on the keywords that are working really well. And those keywords that got you on say page two of search results. You can target those phrases to try and bump yourself up to page one, or even just higher on page one.
Best Keyword Research Tools:
- Google Keyword Planner – a free tool to see how often keywords are searched for and if they’re trending upward or declining in searches. Important to know if you want to put your time and effort into a keyword or not.
- KeySearch – SEO Tool – offering less tools than SEMrush and Ahrefs, but at a much lower price point. Perfect for Solopreneurs trying to research keywords to get more website traffic. Fewer tools, so you only have what you need to rank. Offers a much lower learning curve, so you can hit the ground running. Includes SEO tools like: keyword research, YouTube research, site audit, rank tracking, and more.
- Keywords Everywhere – A very affordable keyword research tool and Chrome extension for looking at domain authority, search volume, trends, and SEO difficulty. It’s best used with an SEO tool like KeySearch if you’re looking to really grow your website traffic or blog traffic with organic content.
- Answer the Public – Great for finding keywords and phrases that are popular searches. Uses the 5W’s: Who, What, Where, When, and Why, plus a few others. The free version is all you need, and it helps you see what keywords are being searched as questions. Great for topic research.
- A regular Google search (looking at people also search for). Helps you see what others are searching for using similar keywords or phrases. It’s free and comes up on regular Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
- SEMrush – All in one SEO tool offering: keyword research, link building, competitor research, rank tracking, site audits, social media management, and so much more. Free and paid options or 7 day free trial of the pro and guru plans. A great overall tool, but a much higher learning curve than KeySearch and costs more as well.
- Ahrefs – Get a free website audit with weekly emails on things you can improve. No subscription or payment necessary. I did this when I got started, and I still use it today.
My recommendation: I prefer to use Keysearch along with Keywords Everywhere for an easy to learn SEO tool combination. And add in Google Search Console and Google Analytics for a comprehensive search engine optimization plan for my own business.
3. Optimize Website Content
As I mentioned above, follow the data from your past content. What’s working? What isn’t?
When you use Google Search Console, go to:
- Performance
- Check the boxes for total clicks, total impressions, and average position
- Filter lowest to highest for your each column by clicking above that column (clicks, impressions, and position)
Look for lots of impressions, but low clicks. Do a regular Google search for that keyword phrase while in incognito mode. On a Mac, go to File, New Incognito Mode or Press ⌘ + Shift + n. Don’t have a Mac? Press Ctrl + Shift + n.
What do those articles have that you don’t? What can you can you add to that blog post or your website page? Find ways to improve your current content. This will help you move up in search results and get more clicks.
This is just one way to increase your SEO exposure. For more ways, sign up for a content strategy session with me. In one hour, we can create a plan of action to start improving your site. If you need more time, I offer 6 week options to my current strategy hour customers.
Above all else, make sure your content is high-quality and provides value to your visitors.
Google’s main goal as a search engine is to provide searchers with the best possible results. If your content is good quality, your website visitors will stay on your site longer, view more pages, and click through more links. This means you’re answering their questions and giving helpful information, rather than just trying to create content to get noticed by the algorithm.
All of this leads to more sales for you, and it tells Google that your site and your content are relevant and helpful content.
4. Build Your Link Profile
There are two types of links: internal links and backlinks.
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your website, the higher your website will rank in search engine results pages. This is known as your domain authority, and it’s a number between 0-100. The higher your number, the higher your authority.
Never buy backlinks. Let me type that again because it’s very critical to you success online. NEVER BUY BACKLINKS. If you have someone offer backlinks for sale or build them for you, politely decline. Backlinks or links back to your website need to come from reputable sources. If they don’t, it could negatively affect your website’s domain authority.
Internal links are the links within your own website. An example would be linking from your homepage to a specific blog post, or linking between blog posts.
You can get quality backlinks from HARO, which stands for Help a Reporter Out.
It’s an online resource for journalist where they can request expert commentary for their articles. It’s usually very competitive, so it may take some time for you to get picked up and noticed. But once you do, you’ll have great links back to your website giving you a boost in your domain authority.
To join, you simply open a free account, then join the HARO mailing lists that best fit your business. You can join multiple lists if you find multiple niches that fit your business. Also, there are a variety of niches and they’re really broad, so if you don’t see your exact niche you can still follow lists that are close. I’m sure you’ll end up finding requests that fit your business.
5. Use Meta Descriptions
Use your own meta descriptions to provide information about your website to search engines and can help improve your website’s visibility in search results.
When you search online, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) shows many options with blue titles and text below. The text below the title is your meta description.
If you don’t give Google meta descriptions, they’ll come up with their own, but it most likely won’t explain your page the way you want. So make sure you have your meta descriptions created to explain and highlight the main points of each page on your website.
As a side note, there are times where it makes sense to let Google come up with its own meta description, so if you have a page ranking well already and you didn’t create the meta description for it I wouldn’t make any changes. An example of a page that it’s okay to let Google create its own meta description would be your disclaimers or privacy policy pages.
Meta descriptions should be 150-160 characters long and include keywords or phrases without overdoing it. On mobile only around 130 characters will show, so if your audience is mostly on mobile keep that in mind. You can check your character count using WordCounter.
Above all else, just make sure it sounds natural when you read it out loud and it doesn’t sound like you forced as many keywords in as you could. A great tool to read your text aloud to you is TTS Reader. No downloads necessary, just copy and paste your text.
6. Optimize Website Structure
Make sure your website is well-structured, with a clear hierarchy and easy-to-understand navigation. This will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website. This is where internal links come in. You want to take your website visitors on a journey through your website with each visit. You want them to spend as much time on your website and consume as much content as they can.
Links between pages or blogs posts are exactly what you’re trying to do. This is where pillar pages come in handy. A pillar page is like a home base for a topic. It’s the general overview of the topic and should link out to multiple different pages or blog posts within your website to explain each subtopic in more detail. By creating this type of website architecture, you’re also signaling to Google that you’re an expert in this area. You have multiple pages on the topic.
7. Track Your Progress
Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website’s traffic and search engine rankings, and make adjustments to your SEO strategy as needed. Not sure what Google Analytics or Google Search Console are or why they’re important? Check out the Market Research Guide & Workbook to research your ideal buyers, create a guide to follow for future content creation, and data tracking.
When you follow the data, you’ll be able to let Google and your audience tell you exactly what type of content to create next. Find what’s working and continue creating more content like that.
Find what’s at the bottom of page one or on page two and make some small changes to see how it affects your ranking. Some content just won’t work well, and it’s okay to delete those pieces that you feel just won’t produce results or bring in more website visitors. There are times where content can negatively impact your site.
These are the basic steps to optimize your website and blog, but SEO is an ongoing process and requires continuous improvements. It isn’t a set it and forget it type of thing. It’s on going and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have data to tell you where to go next with your content strategy.
Conclusion
In conclusion, SEO is an essential aspect of any female entrepreneur’s website, as it helps to increase visibility online, drive more website traffic, and ultimately grow your business. By researching keywords, optimizing content, building a link profile, using meta descriptions properly, and tracking your progress as you go, you can improve your website’s SEO and achieve better search engine rankings. Keep these tips in mind and you’ll be on your way to a more successful online business.
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