SEO for Beginners: Easy Wins for Your Website

Welcome to day 3 and chapter 3 of your amazing Itty Bitty Visibility book, 15 Chapters to Marketing Made Easy. And today we are going to talk about basic search engine optimization. Business owners think that search engine optimization, often known as SEO, is complicated and expensive, and it can be, but there are two sides of SEO. The highly technical side, which we're not going to go into here and which you would want to pay a professional for, and the simpler strategies that anybody can do. So today I'm going to go over some of those simple strategies. Number 1, everything you do on the internet will help your SEO if you link it to your website. And we sort of talked about that yesterday. Everything gets linked to your website, literally everything. Your website needs to become your central hub, and that is the only way that having external sites or external assets will help your SEO. It'll help boost your website by linking it. Reviews count for SEO. We will go over this more in Chapter 6, so on day 6, come back and we'll talk about reviews. Reviews are more than just the review on your website. There's a reason for Google reviews, and that's because you have to sign in and you are a verified person leaving that review. And that's the same for any external review site. UpCity was a great one. There's other great sites that you can leave reviews on, even Facebook or LinkedIn recommendations. All of those count for your SEO and they show up independently of your website. In— if someone's searching for your name or your business with the word reviews on there. There's way more validity because everybody knows and every search engine knows that if you have a review on your website, it could be manipulated. It could even be completely made up because you're in control of the website. On these review platforms where you have to log in, to leave a review, that fear is taken away. On number 3, your Google Business Profile can greatly boost your ranking. And we will cover this extensively, uh, in chapter 5. But let me give you an example. I'm a website designer and over the years I've tried various things. Some have been wonderful and helped my SEO tremendously. And others have tanked my SEO and bombed. For the most part, I'm organically ranked in my local area here or on the first page for web designer, anything similar to that. However, if I try something and it doesn't work, I have gone from page 1 to page 10 or under overnight. It's, and it's that dramatic. And when that has happened, obviously I'm not getting calls from organic ranking. Like, have you ever called anybody on page 10 or under, um, in, in a search result for anything you've been looking for? No, you don't do that. But Maps uses an entirely different ranking system, an entirely different index, entirely different database. Everything's different. And because my Google Business account was number one and has pretty much always been in my area, number one for web design, website design, all those variants, my phone still rang. Even though I was technically nowhere else on the internet, as far as Google was concerned, my phone still rang and it was from Google Maps. So it is so important that you have, one, a Google Maps listing, and two, you're using it. So that it will help your SEO. And again, we'll cover that more in a few days. Videos can boost your SEO. There is a reason why Google bought YouTube all those years ago. If you're— think about the last time you did a, a web search for anything, there was a high chance that a video showed up in that search and it was a YouTube video. It wasn't from Vimeo. It wasn't something on Facebook. It was a YouTube video, and that is how YouTube will help your SEO. You, you might even embed that video on your website, but it's likely not the page on your website with that video that showed up. It's likely the video that's in YouTube that showed up. Oh, and did you link your YouTube channel to your website so that it makes that connection? If you didn't, please go back and do that. Social media affects your SEO, and we're gonna go over this more on day 10. In Chapter 10. So how does social media affect your SEO? A lot of social media is public. A lot of LinkedIn posts are actually being pulled for AI overviews, and LinkedIn profiles are being referenced in AI overviews now. LinkedIn is really important for AI overviews if you didn't hear that. Facebook, I have my Facebook profile set to a professional profile and it's open to the public. So all the posts that I do on Facebook are eligible to be indexed in the search engines. And some of them do show up depending on what you're looking for. Oh yeah. And did you link your social media profiles to your website? If you haven't, you might want to go back and do that. Number 6 is backlinks. And we're going to go over that in Chapter 4, Day 4, which is tomorrow. So backlinks are still important. They've been important since search engines came around. And all a backlink is, is somebody else's website linking to your website. It's like a vote of confidence saying, hey, this website is really cool. Check it out. So backlinks are important, and tomorrow we'll go over how to get those. Blogging. Are you blogging? Well, you probably had someone tell you a long time ago you need to blog, and you thought, I'm not really going to do that. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort to write. I'm not a writer. I mean, I've heard all the excuses in the world, and with AI now, Writing should no longer be an excuse for you. If you haven't figured that out, contact me. I can help you out on that. But as far as SEO and blogs go, I want you to think back to when you created your website. Whether you did it or you had an agency do it, or you had a friend do it, they probably asked you or should have asked you, what do you want to be ranked for? Give me a list of words. And I've been doing this for 20 years. I've never received a list over 20. I'm lucky to get a list that's about 10 words. 20 is doing really good. I can't think of one instance where I got more than 20 keywords from a business owner. And if you think about it, it's really hard. It's like, how will everybody think? They all think differently and they use different keywords. So how are they going to search for you? You got to show up for all those searches. How are you going to do that? Well, it's not gonna be on the basic pages of your website. It's gonna be with your blog. Here's a very good example. I looked in my analytics and I noticed that people were using the word website builder to find me, and I really wasn't ranking for the term website builder because to me, a website builder is not a person. It is like the platform. So WordPress. Will build websites, Wix, Squarespace, the GoDaddy platform, all of these, like, what you see, what you get kind of editors that will build a website. To me, that's what a website builder is. So why would I have that term on my website anywhere? I don't do that. But I realized that other people reference a website designer as a website builder, as a person. So I went out and I created 2 or 3 different blog posts that use the term website builder, and I started intersprinkling website builder instead of website designer in various places, linked all of this stuff together, and bam, I show up for website builder now. I would have never known that had I not looked at analytics, but then it's weird to put that on my main website, so I created blog posts around it. That is how you get more keywords into your website is by using blog posts. It's a phenomenal technique. It has worked since search engine optimization has been around, and it is not going to quit working. So everything you do online affects your SEO in one way or another. Hopefully it's positive, but it could very well be negative. And I want to make sure you understand this concept, concept that everything you do online should link back to your website, which is your hub. So make sure every online profile— I've mentioned a few in this video— are linked back to your website. If you leave a review for another company, like you send them a review that they're going to put on their website, have them link either your name or your business name to your website. If you participate in online forums, link the profiles to your website. You think online forums, that's like a thing of the 2000s. They're, they do still exist. And I have, if you look up my backlink profile, I've got links from 20+ years ago going to my website, and those are well-seasoned, trusted links, and they're all from forums. If you write an article for an article database or another website, maybe you're a guest blog post. Make sure that they link to your website. If you participate in online networks, make sure those profiles link to your website. So for example, I'm a member of the Holistic Chamber of Commerce and I have a page on their website that links to my website. So you want to make sure that all of those things that you're already doing, already participating in, are linking to your website. So that's it for basic SEO. There's a ton of things that you can do in the topic of SEO, but the ones I've covered today are things any business owner can do. You don't need technical expertise. You don't need to even understand what SEO is. You just need to do the do, so to speak. And tomorrow we are checking back in for backlinks. We're going to go over all the different places that you can get backlinks. So come back tomorrow and learn a little bit more about backlinks.