What is SEO? (+ some basic strategies to improve yours)
SEO has become more of a buzzword for business owners in the past few years, but what exactly is SEO? And how the heck does it work for your site? Let’s break it down!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization” (but we all know “search engine” just means Google), and it’s the practice of increasing your website traffic through organic search. Basically, it’s just making your site easier for Google (and potential clients) to understand so they know what to rank you for!
Google will “crawl” and index sites to rank them in order of importance from over 200 ranking metrics, including things like the quality of content, how much traffic is being sent to the site, how long people are staying on the site, the authoritativeness of the site, etc.
I know that’s some techy jargon, so why should you care about SEO?
SEO is what helps potential clients find YOU when they are ready to spend money on your services. You may have lots of Instagram followers, but they may just like your content and not be particularly interested in paying for your services. But when someone is really ready and they're searching in Google for your services, they're more likely to be ready to spend the money! (And I'm not hating on Instagram- I love it, but it can be super time-consuming as a means to grow a business.)
I get leads directly from Google all the time, and I help my clients get more traffic and reach more clients by optimizing their sites. It’s not as hard as you may think! Let’s go through some basic SEO strategies so you can start reaching more clients on Google, too.
Research keywords
Keywords, also known as “search queries,” are words or phrases that tell search engines what your content is about, and they are what people enter into search engines to find the content they are looking for.
Keyword research is important because it helps you see what people are searching for to find your services, and it helps you find keywords that aren’t super competitive that you can actually rank for if you apply them to your site.
There are SO many ways to search for keywords, some free and some you have to pay for. You can simply type phrases in the Google search bar or on Pinterest to see what other people are searching for on the topic, or you can get more high tech with some other options. If you want more keyword research tools, I have a blog post on different tools and methods!
Set up title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are one of the most underused SEO strategies I see with my clients!
Title tags and meta descriptions are SUPER important not only to help you rank well on Google, but to drive traffic to your site when someone sees it on Google. They are the first impression you make when someone sees your site.
You could rank well and see that you’re getting tons of impressions on Google in Google Search Console, but if you’re not getting actual traffic from Google, your title tags and meta descriptions could be the culprit. If you don’t fill them in, Google can fill them in with whatever they feel like, and I see them filled with gibberish all the time! This looks spammy to potential clients, and it could greatly affect how much traffic you get from Google.
If you want to learn more about how to write and optimize them, check out my title tag and meta description guide!
Speed up your site
Along with title tags and meta descriptions, site speed is another widely overlooked strategy!
Faster sites rank higher in Google for several reasons:
A slow site means that Google can crawl fewer pages within their allocated crawl budget. The faster your site, the more pages and posts Google will crawl, which means the more opportunities you have to rank in Google.
Slow site speed means people will visit fewer pages. If a site isn't loading quickly, how long do you wait before you leave? 50% of visitors will leave a site after only two seconds! If people are leaving quickly or are too impatient for your site to load, it will lead to a higher bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing one page) and Google will think your site isn’t valuable to people.
Fast site speed is good for user experience, and Google is all about great user experience.
So test your site speed in a free tool like PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix and see what’s slowing down your site!
Those are just a few basic SEO strategies to get you started, but there are many other ways to optimize your site! If you want to learn more foundational strategies to improve your rankings on Google and convert more site visitors to clients, check out my Seeds for SEO Success course launching in April!
Julia is an SEO and Pinterest Consultant for creative small businesses at Julia Renee Consulting and recently became the first SEO professor at Drexel University. Her goal is to make SEO and Pinterest strategies approachable and easy to implement for all small businesses so they can reach their ideal clients organically. She lives in Philadelphia with her Siberian Husky sidekick and her husband, and on the side, she runs a travel photography site and experiments with spicy recipes in the kitchen.