Do you ever wish you had even an inkling about what search engine optimization is and how you can use it to make your website get you more business? Yeah, me, too. Today’s guest post by my recently acquired Baltimore friend, Adam Singer, should give you a leg up on this topic. So, sit back, relax, pop open a nice beverage and enjoy ….
How to Use Your Website to Generate Leads and Customers:
There are three steps do use your website to generate leads and customers:
- Get Found
- Offer Content of Value in exchange for an opt-in
- Deliver value and continue delivering value
This article will focus on step 1: How to get found online. In other words, how to get Google to deliver traffic to your website.
For the sake of this article, I am going to divide the three tasks into 11 parts (10 + 1). For a really great overview of how to do SEO I recommend the free ebooks on Moz.com (https://moz.com/learn/seo).
- Website Analytics
What cannot be measured, cannot be managed or improved (adaptation of a quote from Peter Drucker, Management Guru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker)
You cannot understand or begin to optimize your website for search results until you have a way to measure how much traffic and/or authority your website has. Google offers a free product call Google Analytics to measure traffic and lots of other stuff for your website. You can get it http://analytics.google.com . If you are not very technical, you’ll probably need some help adding the code to your site. You should be able to find someone to do this for you on http://fiverr.com for about $5.
Google analytics will show you how much traffic goes to your site, but it won’t show how your website compares with the websites of other companies offering similar services. I recommend http://Moz.com or http://Spyfu.com for tools to understand how your website compares to your competitors. Both Moz and Spyfu have free and paid versions of their products. I have used the free and paid versions of both companies and can say that the free versions have value, but the paid versions are well worth the investment.
However, if you are not planning to spend at least 2 hours or more of work on your SEO per month, you are probably better off staying with the free version and using the difference to hire someone to do the work for you. In other words, don’t pay for the software if you’re not planning to spend the time to use it and follow the recommendations it generates. Stay with Google Analytics.
- Keyword Research
“Keywords” are the terms people type into Google when they want to find the services you are offering. There are lots of ways to research these terms. My favorite free way is here: https://moz.com/products/pro/keyword-explorer. It is the Moz keyword explorer. You type in the word(s) you think describe your business. Moz will respond with a long list of terms people are using on Google to find business like yours. The list will also include an estimate of how many times each term is entered into Google per month.
You’ll want to choose somewhere between 10 and 1,000 keyword terms. I know that’s a big range, but it really depends on how much time/money have to put into this project. If you have less than 10, you’re not focused enough. If you have more than 1,000 you will need to put a lot of work into making use of those all of those terms.
- Competitor Analysis
No need to reinvent the wheel. You should have a good working understanding of what terms your competition is targeting. Spyfu (http://spyfu.com) enables you to have some understanding of what keywords are delivering traffic to your competition and what factors may be contributing to their success in ranking for those terms (usually backlinks; see #10)
- On Page Website Optimization
Once you know what keywords are most important for your business you will need to make sure that they are present in pages on your website. They should appear in the title https://blog.insideview.com/2010/08/19/what-is-a-title-tag/, meta description https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description , url https://kb.iu.edu/d/adnz, header tags http://pearanalytics.com/blog/2014/how-to-write-a-header-tag-h1-for-seo/, and body (regular text) of your website. There is a hyperlink to each of these terms to give your more information about each of these things.
- Social Media Integration
Company pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are free. To set them up you will need 2 good images (one for your profile, one for your cover). Once you have those it should take about 15 minutes to setup each page. It’s good for SEO, and it’s a way for you to share helpful content online. I also recommend using paid boosts and other promotions on Facebook. You can often get a lot of exposure on Facebook for just $10 or $15.
- Blog
If you have a business, you know more about something than your clients do. Maybe you know more about how to use your product, why to use your product. Whatever it is, use your knowledge to help people before, during, and after they purchase from you. Your blog is a great place to do this. Teach people and they will share your information and help you get more business.
- Press Releases
Have an eye out for what is newsworthy in your business: a new hire, an important new project, new development in your company. Share your news with the media outlets in your area and your industry. This encourages traffic to your site and invites links from important media websites in your area.
- Article Submission
Share useful information on other people’s websites. This improves your reputation and increases links to your website.
- Directory Submission
Google uses information from many, many, many other websites to get information about your website and your business. Directories are places on the web that store and organize large amounts of information about businesses and organizations. Your area chamber of commerce is an example of this, but there are many many more (thousands? Millions? Lots!) . There are services from http://yext.com and http://moz.com that help with these submitting your information to these directories. You can do it yourself, but it can be very time consuming. You can check how well you are listed in directories by submitting your business information on my website here: http://www.ajsingerstudios.com/free-seo-tool
This will also generate links that will enable you to update your information on 70+ of the most important directories.
- Quality Link Building
Create good content that helps people and is valuable to them for its own sake. Share it on social media. Make real connections to with real people who have the same goals as you and similar clients. Encourage and invite them to mention your articles on their website.
Historically, Google has considered has given preference to websites that are referenced by other websites (allow me to explain). You may have heard of the term “link” or “hyperlink” (I’ll call them links here). Links are most often in bright blue, though they can be any color. When you click on a link on webpage, you will be taken to a different webpage. A link from someone else’s website to your website is called a “backlink”. Generally speaking, a site with more backlinks is more authoritative than one with less backlinks. In other words, if lots of websites are sending their visitors to your website (through links), Google is likely interpret this to mean that lots of websites think well of your website.
HOWEVER, not all links are equal and some can be harmful to your website’s rank on Google. Google is VERY touchy about what it calls “web spam”. “Web spam” is when websites try to get authority they don’t deserve. Often this comes from getting links from websites that were setup only for the purpose of linking to other websites. It sounds confusing, and it is. Suffice it to say, spend your time creating good content they helps people and is valuable to them for its own sake, share it on social media, and make real connections to with real people who have the same mission and you will not have to worry about link spam.
- Monthly Report
As stated in the beginning, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. For SEO, the main key performance indicator is “organic traffic”. Organic traffic means how many people came to your website because they found it through a search on Google or similar search engine. Google Analytics, Moz, and Spyfu will all generate reports on your website traffic. Google Analytics is probably the best for this, and it’s free.
In addition to “organic traffic”, you will probably also want to know how your ranks are getting better or worse for your targeted keywords. Moz and Spyfu are pretty much the only options when it comes to knowing how you rank for particular keywords. Google Analytics has pretty much stopped sharing this information and running Google searches on these terms can be inaccurate and incredibly time consuming. The searches are inaccurate because Google constantly tries to deliver personalized search results that reflect your location and past searches. So the ranks you see on your device may be different than the results your consumers see.
One Last Thing
If you do nothing else but this, I think it will make a big difference in your site’s success online: Go to https://www.google.com/business/ and fill out your information. Then ask satisfied customers to Google your business name and leave a review. It makes a BIG difference. Good Luck!
About Me
Adam Singer is the CEO of Ability SEO Inc. (http://www.abilityseo.com) Most clients working with Ability SEO see an increase in web traffic of 400% or more in the first 12 months of service. Adam has been online since the 1980s and has been running his own web/SEO companies since 2011. You can follow his blog at AbilitySEO.com and download a free eBook 25 Website Must Haves (http://www.ajsingerstudios.com/25-things-every-new-websites-must-have) Follow him on twitter @AbilitySEO.