We are less than 60 days away from this upcoming holiday season in being in full swing. Heck, Hobby Lobby had Christmas decor out in July. So, what does this actually mean for your small business with a drastically smaller marketing budget, website, and team? One of the best investments you can make is optimizing your website for holiday season 2017 now versus two days before Black Friday. Waiting until the last minute will not yield you the results you want for your pageviews, sales, and customer acquisition plans.
In recent months, more and more of my audience is coming from Google. Most service based companies will say their audience is coming from Pinterest. Yes, Pinterest is its search engine, but they aren’t Google. SEO has always been part of my company plans to help establish a global reach. One of the best things is hearing from people in other regions of the world such as Netherlands, Auckland or even Nigeria saying they found your website through Google. Then I become weird and be like “girl what were you searching” or “do you remember the phrases you were using”.
It’s that time of year where everyone is excited to shop, eat, travel, and experience life. As a business owner, this is one of the busiest seasons of the year for you. Last year, my digital products from ICB Consults brought in thousands of dollars between November and December. I’m getting my business ready to triple sales numbers from last year. That means optimizing my website for the holiday season.
I’m in a few private Facebook groups for business owners. One of the recurring questions in the groups is about advice, insight, and resources on SEO for WordPress websites. When I first launched my business, I was obsessed with understanding how SEO worked for websites. Then I learned, it wasn’t 90% of the stuff people write about or those people email you about. I’m going to give you a rather simple SEO strategy for WordPress websites that you can implement today.
Have you ever wondered, how images appeared in search engines? For the longest time I never paid attention to it nor knew how until launching a business. The answer to how is people took the time to make sure that the images they uploaded to their websites are SEO rich in keywords. Making sure you create SEO friendly photos for your website is a great way for future customers or clients to discover you.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is everyone’s favorite subject matter to talk about {says sarcastically}. However, if you search on pinterest or join a group chat on twitter, it’s the topic of choice. Experts realize this increases their site views. Brilliant in a sense. SEO can however be really confusing — especially when you are new to small business. Algorithms are constantly changing and the top companies who are the gatekeepers on the subject are tight lipped about it.
With our SEO basics series, we’re picking up where we left off last week. Last time, we talked about popularity–a part of SEO that is based on your social media status. For the second part of SEO, we will focus on your content. Ways to buff up your content are really based on your niche, so if you have any questions, let us know. This is how to improve your relevancy for the creative start up. Let’s get to it.
SEO popularity is one of the major factors that help search engines rank your website. The greater your site’s popularity, the higher your site will rank on search engines. It may seem hard to play a vital role in gaining popularity. However, if done properly, popularity can be earned. Some people will say that you should join a directory or pay for social media likes and views, but there is actually an easy way to gain popularity without using any black-hat techniques.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is defined as the process of naturally affecting the visibility or ranking of a website or web page on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. With the new age of SEO, it is beginning to mean a lot more. SEO is used for content development, and ranked according to how informative a website or blog article is. SEO is used in product descriptions, blog articles, product titles, tags, social media and more.
A lot of new business owners do not use SEO correctly or at all. For creative start-ups especially, SEO is extremely important. Perhaps you have experienced these scenarios:
Along with the important information about author bios that I wrote about in my last post, Karyna Mcglynn also talked about the importance of fonts. Tasha does this to in her post Pretty Little Fonts. I guess this is a part of SEO that people don’t really talk about. Or perhaps, since it is so image driven it belongs in Web Design and not in SEO. However, since SEO is so heavily dictated on people reacting to your blog, website, or social media outlet, font would really be crucial in making that first impression.
All SEO specialists are mourning the death of Google’s keyword tool, and I am definitely one of them. For those of you unfamiliar to Google’s keyword tool, it was a simple place to check the competition and amount of searches of your selected keywords. With this useful tool, you could build a keyword list that was guaranteed to bring people onto your site page.