In today’s industry, the majority of businesses spend thousands of dollars on digital marketing, ensuring that their brands, services, and products appear at the top of search engine results.
Let’s face it, not all of us have that much money to spend on advertising efforts.
Here’s where organic search comes into play. Organic search refers to search engine results that are naturally generated without commercial efforts. You should appear at least on the first page of suggestions when someone searches for a service or good that your company provides.
SEO doesn’t have to be an elephant that you cannot tackle. Let’s break it down into three smaller pieces.
Content & Keyword Optimization
Great content, information, and stories will get found if they are listed on the Internet. They will, however, be easier to find if you follow these brief instructions.
You can read the long article at https://yoast.com/complete-guide-seo-copywriting/, But if you are pressed for time, some quick takeaways are:
- Research your keywords. Use google trends, semrush, keyword planners, etc. But don’t fail to actually type your keyword into Google yourself. More insight can be found at https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
- We suggest a minimum of 300 words on each page of your website. Too little content does not give much of a context for Google to crawl.
- Including your keyword or phrase only about twice in a three hundred-word article makes the article very readable and doesn’t make it seem like you are trying too hard to trick Google.
- Each page of your site should have its own unique keyword/phrase. Dedicate each page to an individual keyword/phrase.
- Include headers as you are creating the structure of the article. One of those headers should have your keyword phrase included.
- When you include images in the article, caption them and if you are already familiar with the title and alt tags, fill those out and try and use the keyword phrase.
Please also make sure that the readability of the article does not suffer because of placing these keyword phrases. If you absolutely can’t add those keywords to a title, then it is better not to include them and rather include them elsewhere. So you make up for not having that keyword in a critical area.
Onsite Optimization
The goal here is to allow the search engine to consume and digest the site structure under the hood readily. Search engines just need to “get it” without crunching too many numbers. You should have your keywords, meta descriptions, etc prepared for this step. To execute this, you need to lift open the hood of your website and peek into the code. No way around it. Give this task to a programmer, and they will show you some hidden issues. Focus them on H1s, H2s, Meta Descriptions, Image Alt tags, and the first paragraph of the page. Once the programmer has it all set up (including page speediness), then if you are using WordPress, you can use some very friendly tools to tweak your keywords, page titles, and content very easily.
Off-site Optimization
You have to get other websites mentioning your website. These “backlinks” will help to increase your website’s authority.
Guest posting, social media syndication, and influencer marketing are all tactics you can use to get your content in front of more people and widen your authoritative reach–but remember, it all starts with good content.
This should motivate you to begin your research and optimize your website appropriately and purposefully rather than wasting your money. This should be one of your top priorities if you aren’t one of the top 15.