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Okay, today let’s talk about SEO for your business.

SEO stands for search engine optimization and this is something that can be really scary for a lot of business owners, because it feels like what the hell is it? How do I do it?

It's super complicated or it's very hard to know what is right to do what is wrong to do what should I be doing. So I wanted to do a little introduction into SEO for small businesses at Sam DiNicola Digital Marketing Agency, we work with a lot of small and medium sized businesses on their SEO.

Intro to SEO

Let's just start with what is SEO. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is anything that's coming up if you Google something, all of those results that are coming up, that's search engine results. The O is optimization which is optimizing your site to help ensure that it is coming up in those search results. So I'm not talking about the results that come up in the first few slots after you Google stuff. You'll see next to those that says ad and those are Google ads. Those are display ads, those are, you know, people are paying to come up in that first, second, or third result. Anything below that, or if no one is running ads for that, then no ads will come up, but anything else that's coming up, those are organically coming up in your search engine results, that means Google looks at the entire internet, any page or any website that has been submitted to their Google.

They do what's called crawling a website and they look at your whole website, and they decide based on what this user is searching for, they want to give in the search results, the all the sites all the content that is most likely to closely aligned with what that user is searching for. Google wants their users to have a good user experience so they want to make sure if I'm googling “best vegan recipes for the instapot”, Google wants to make sure I'm seeing content that's coming up that's related to vegan recipes for instapot. They want to make sure I'm not getting results for meat based and subpar recipes right because that's not relevant to me and so I don't want as a user to have to parse through irrelevant information. So Google will crawl through your website, and using all the information on your website and different things that we're going to talk about in a minute, they will decide okay what is this website about what's the content of this website about, and then that is how you come up in those search engine results.

So doing an actual SEO focus project to improve your SEO and improve how often you're coming up in search rankings. Not only does that get you coming up on Google, on that first page, or even that second page of Google search results. We all know you're typically not going to leave that first page of Google search results. You're going to look at maybe the first three to five search results max after you Google something. So focusing on your SEO can help you come up in the rankings so that you're getting on to that first page of those Google search results for your relevant keywords, getting close to the top right that first result. Not only is it going to get you more organic traffic to your website because the closer you are to the top, the more people are going to click on your link after they've googled that thing, but it's also going to get you higher quality traffic.

Again, you don't want people coming onto your website that are looking for grilling recipes, if your website is all about vegan recipes for the instapot because those people are not going to buy from you. They are not really relevant traffic so it's twofold it's getting more traffic and higher quality traffic for your website, and really focusing on your SEO, just as you create new content as you're building your website but also doing kind of an SEO audit and an SEO focus project that can help you to get more traffic and better quality traffic for years to come. At the agency we have clients that we did a SEO project for years ago, and they are still seeing that high level of traffic and they're still ranking for those keywords, even today, and it can be so impactful and that's where SEO differs from ads. With ads, you can get coming up in those top search results immediately right you just have to pay for it, SEO, it takes a little bit more time for you to organically come up in the search engine rankings. But once you turn those ads off, you're not going to appear at the top anymore. But if you're organically ranking number one for that keyword. You'll continue to come up number one for that keyword until someone else takes your place or if you're continuing to work on it you'll stay right at that top point.

So that's really also a good example of the difference and benefits of ads versus SEO, they're both great. They can both help your business and we have a lot of clients who do both ads and SEO, right. But ads are gonna get you there, really quick SEO, it takes a little bit longer, but it also lasts longer. So a couple things that you can look at for SEO in your business is really looking at. Is your website mobile friendly and responsive? Does it look good and function correctly on people's phones? Google really really cares about this.

So if you are a business who built your website a long time ago and your website is not mobile friendly, that's going to be a big one for you. That's going to hurt. Load speed for your business is another one. So how fast your website is loading, we are used to websites loading in under a second as users now. So, if your website is taking 234 seconds to load, that's a problem because it's more likely that indicates to the user that your website isn't functioning properly, and they're more likely to leave your website, and that's a bounce. So if I come to your website and I leave very, very quickly, Google registers that as a balance which hurts your rankings because that means either your website isn't functioning properly, or it was irrelevant, and so they and so that will hurt you because that tells Google, oh it might have been irrelevant to that keyword term, right, in that in those results. So those are two big things to look out for your website.

Other things that you can really look at in terms of the content on your website is, do you have meta title? Meta tags? That's when you Google something, those are the things that are coming up right below your URL. It's like a description, alt tags for your images and Google can't see images, so it will read what your alt tag is on your image and that's really really important there. So make sure when you're adding and uploading images to your website, the files are named appropriately, and you are adding that old information that all text to your images. Other things are, when you are putting in your content on like a blog post or on a landing page or anything like that makes, make sure you're using headers like your h1 tag your h2 tag or h3 tag, right. And what that does is that indicates to Google this is the most important thing, h1. This is the biggest, this is the most important thing. H2, this is the slightly less important. And so that's how Google reads that information and understands okay this is the most important and this most important thing has this keyword.

You also really want to look at the keywords that you, that people are using right because it doesn't really matter what words you use to describe your business. It matters what words, the users use, right? So if your whole website is focused on search engine optimization, and users aren't searching for the word search engine optimization, they're searching for search engine rankings. You need to make sure you're hitting on that, but that that word, those set of words in your content, right, or else there's going to be a disconnect there. So you can do keyword research for free online. You can look at your Google Analytics and see your traffic that's coming in what keywords that traffic is coming in for and definitely set up Google Search Console for your website as well it's free. That's going to give you a lot of information when it comes to your keywords and keyword search terms and then you can also look at, okay, here's a keyword I want to rank for SEO.

What are other related keywords or longtail keywords which would be more words because obviously it's hard to rank for the words SEO or Search Engine Optimization right, so are there any longtail keywords that you can focus on ranking for there while you're still working on those other words, and so these are all things that you can do on your own website and so this is called on page SEO and there's also off page SEO, so off page SEO is anything that's happening not on your website.

So what do I mean by that. Anytime you are sharing, say a new blog post or a link to your lead magnet on any of your social media channels, that's off page SEO, because that link is not happening on your website right It's on facebook.com It's on Facebook's website, it's linking back to your website. Anytime you are sharing a link to your website or your content on like Reddit or Quora or any sort of forum or commenting on someone else's blog post about why have this really great other resource here and linking to that. That's backlinking, and that's off page SEO. Now, you still see this sometimes but it was a bigger deal back in the day, there's kind of blackhat seo that happens, where basically you can hire businesses in other countries to just give you a ton of backlinks for your business. So they basically have websites that exists solely to link back to others websites, and you do not want to do that. I repeat do not want to do that. If you have a blog that has comments available people can comment on it now, for any of your clients or for yourself or anything like that, you might see people commenting and, and including a link to a completely irrelevant thing in the comment on your blog, That's an example of that. Okay. And the reason why you do not want to do that is because Google will actually view that website and they'll look at that website because they've crawled that website, and they say that website has nothing to do with your website.

There's no home nowadays between that except that that website is linking to your website, and it will actually say, this is a bad link, and it can penalize you for that. What you want is Google to be saying, Oh, that website is really in line with your website and we definitely see commonalities between them. So that's good, right, like that's information during so an example of this would be like if you were guest blogging on someone else's website who you have some nice cohesiveness between your ideal audience, your ideal client, and everything. You guest blog and you know on that blog you link back to some relevant content on your own site, that's a great strong backlink because Google is going to look at that and say wow that's quality stuff. We love it. Right, so be really careful about that and you can use tools online like Google Search Console to see where and what other sites are linking to your site because this is just a little bit of like SEO hygiene here.

If you haven't paid someone to link to your site, you haven't paid a business to do that. It can still, you know, that sites that are not relevant to you can still link to your site right like you can't really prevent that for the most part, and that can hurt you, even if you didn't ask them to and you don't want them to, right. So that is something to definitely just like a little bit of hygiene to keep an eye on because you don't want those really low quality backlinks happening. But on your social media on, you know relevant posts or forums or blog posts, anything like that, that's all really great, off page SEO that can really help your search rankings. Google is just looking at at everything and saying, oh okay this is relevant to this. Pinterest is really great for this right and so I know I know a lot of people I hear a lot of people talking about SEO as it relates to Pinterest, because Pinterest basically functions as a search engine. So the way a lot of people use Pinterest is they go to Pinterest and they search in the search bar, how to do something or where to get something, or whatever, right, if they're looking into anything. And the pins that come up are the results right, are those search engine results. And so a lot of this SEO that you would do for your website. It crosses over really well with Pinterest, because they function in very much the same way, right. So if you're on Pinterest, you can use a lot of these same strategies to help you succeed on Pinterest, right. So that would be like making sure that all of your pins have titles and descriptions and are linking to a relevant page on your website with that same content that that pin is talking about.

You don't want someone to click on a link in Google or on Pinterest because they think it's, Oh, going to give me these vegan Instant Pot recipes and then it brings them to a different page on my site that has nothing to do with that, because what are they gonna do, they're gonna bounce, and then Google's gonna say oh that's not relevant and gonna say oh that's not a relevant link, right. I'm on Pinterest, you can also use those alt words that all text for images that help it to understand what is this image saying what if, what information is on this image, all of that good stuff, you can really apply a lot of SEO strategies that you would be using to come up and Google, you can use that on Pinterest.

Some other examples of off page SEO, when it comes to Google would be like making sure you have Google My Business Listings up or Yelp listings or if you have been business listings any of those business listings. Those are really relevant and that's going to help people to find the most relevant information that they're searching for the most easily. So those are super important right now some people will go into Google Maps, and search for a thing right so instead of going into google.com and in the search bar, searching for a coffee shop near them. They might go into Google Maps, a lot of us do this. And in Google Maps they search, a coffee shop, right, so that is why it's really important to make sure you have your Google My Business setup so that you come up. Right, so that your business comes up if anybody is searching in Google Maps for your business. And so these local business listings become super important and making sure in your Local Business Listing it's full and it's completed and has images and description and your hours and all these things. And so a lot of times we think these are separate, but they're all playing into the overall SEO package right, and Google is always changing, how it crawls your site and how way it's different, these different elements so there's no way to school and be like, This is how I get, you know, this is how I rank number one in 10 days right that doesn't exist because Google doesn't want you gaming the system, but there are still best practices that can help you to do that, right.

And if you're really interested in learning more about SEO and thinking about how could SEO help my business in the long run and get us more traffic and quality traffic. This is really where our SEO audit becomes super helpful so we can really look at where at where you're currently ranking and identify some areas for improvement. And, you know, kind of give you a walkthrough of here's what you could really easily do you or your team to improve your SEO. And here's what you should be doing kind of ongoing personal hygiene for SEO, right, and then here's the other things that are going to be a little bit more specific a little bit more project based but they will also really positively impact your SEO. So an SEO audit becomes super powerful there because you can start to look at for your team making sure things are set up the way that they should be set up and getting on your website, the way they should be, you know, getting on your website, right, and then you can also look at these are some of the more time consuming more complicated things is it worth it for us to try and do it ourselves. Does it make sense to outsource our SEO strategy for a few months?

Definitely! When you're doing SEO don't forget it takes a little bit of time it's not a magic bullet. So when you start to really focus on your SEO. Make sure you're really giving it a minimum of three months before you're expecting to see big changes, right, but really I recommend the four to six month mark, you can look at okay where are we going, how's our rankings doing all of that, because it usually does take that four to six month mark, but we've had plenty of clients double, triple their organic traffic and it's high quality traffic in that four to six month range so it's definitely doable but don't expect to see those results within a week or two, because it's just not going to happen. You'll you will feel that it's not impactful and then you'll stop doing it before you actually get to see those results. So I hope that's been really, really helpful if you.