I was just chatting earlier today with a fellow parent who was picking up their kid from an outdoor educational program, Nashville Nature Explorers is you’re in the area are AMAZING.
He told me that he was into converting vans into living spaces, and was talking for the first time about going beyond word of mouth and actually setting up a website.
I was of course nerding out instantly, telling him about how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that can work wonders in helping you grow your presence online with people who are just picking up a phone and tapping in a search or two about van conversions.
Put simply, when your online presence grows, your business grows with it.
A Basic Definition of SEO
SEO is a method of structuring and building your business website so it generates traffic through organic search results. To put it simply, SEO means getting your website to the top of the Google search results. And yes, it’s pretty much all about Google as they have over 90% market share. For all intents and purposes, SEO is really all about Google optimization.
The difference between views from the 1st page on Google to the 10th is huge, so you want it as high as possible but it’s easier said than done.
(We take this organic click through rate into account in our SEO forecasts, because just seeing a “monthly volume” number in most keyword research tools can be deceptive.)
Create content that is relatable to your target market
One of the ways to really succeed with SEO is to understand who your customer is and create content on your website that is of great interest and usefulness to them. If you don’t know who your customers are, it is almost impossible to understand the things that they like to search for.
Say your business is all about converting vans, you should be able to identify the main premise and idea for your web content. But think about WHO is going to do this. Go and live in a van? Who DOES that?
Age could be a factor, as well as a person’s health. Targeting your demographic will generate more traffic than generic content. Do they want to live “off grid”? Do they have a certain worldview about wealth, happiness and prosperity? Are they low budget DIYers or upper income folk looking for a unique lifestyle?
Create a Usable, high-quality website
Google’s algorithms are extremely complex and scarily good at finding poor content. It used to be that a badly written blog could rank highly in search results but that is no longer the case.
Not only does Google ‘crawl’ through your pages and index all of the words to understand your site’s relevance, it will take other factors into consideration like SSL usage, site speed, mobile friendliness. Also be sure to avoid the common pitfalls for small businesses that turn a website into a bad joke.
Creating a logo (for free), using a modern template for your site, and using high-quality images with the likes of Unsplash as well as plenty of your own images will also make your website more appealing. Make sure to take some steps to optimize your site-speed like using a Caching plugin or image optimization plugin.
Using the right keywords and making a keyword research
Keywords are extremely important in your content and one important tip is to mention your keyword at least once at the very top of your content. Google puts more weight on words that appear at the beginning or the top of a webpage.
You should also think about what people will search for. There are a few great free keyword research tools out there such as Word Stream which can help you to understand what you should be doing.
Build Online Visibility
96% of sites in Google’s top 10 positions have 1,000+ links from unique domains
Only 0.3% of websites ranking in the top 10 had less than 100 backlinks and none had 50 links or less
Danny Goodwin via Search Engine Land
Sorry folks. But you have to build links. Build links even if your business is boring. Build links even if it’s hard. Build INTERNAL LINKS TOO.
Tracking and monitoring results
The whole purpose of having an online presence for your business is to attract as much attention and traffic to your website as possible. Once you start gaining traffic you want to monitor the progress of your content’s traffic and keyword optimization.
Thankfully, Google does all the hard work for you with their Google Analytics. This allows you to closely monitor what works and what doesn’t. If you see that a particular SEO strategy is working then you can refine it to get great results.
Another great free tool from Google is their Search Console which helps you to monitor your performance in search results. These tools from Google are incredible and are a must-use for anyone looking to maximize website traffic.