Most of what entrepreneurs do to garner sales has to do with trying to get the attention of their ideal clients. What if I told you that there is a way that when a person ideal for your service needs you, they can find you? Back in the day, they would use the Yellow Pages book and thumb through to find the type of service they needed. To rise to the top of the list of all the businesses under that service, businesses used “ABC”, “Acme”, and “AAA” to be first in the alphabetical results. These days, the key is to be search engine optimized. Check out 4 questions with answers on search engine optimization (S.E.O.) useful to be found online by ideal clients looking for your service.
Where are the engines? Simply put, a search engine is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user. It is used especially for finding particular sites online.
Google is the #1 search engine in the world. Other search engines include Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage, Qwant, Mojeek, Searx, and Swisscows. A few you may have heard of and others you probably did not know existed. However, Google is the top dog, and if you made sure your online presence was optimized to rank there you’d be just fine.
Let’s talk about YouTube. It is not a search engine in the traditional sense, but it is a search engine in how people use it. If we were to add it to the ranking, it would be the #2 search engine in the world. The platform ranks videos for relevant keywords. When a user searches for a keyword, YouTube will display videos that are relevant to the search query. To hit gold, choose subject matter that your ideal clients are looking for and title your videos in a way that answers the questions they are asking when they look for your expertise or service.
How do I rank? Now that you know where the engines are, let’s talk about the strategies to get ranked. You may think that having a website is overrated. So many people are using landing page platforms, funnel platforms, and shared marketplaces, so why have an independent website?
First, you don’t own others’ platforms and you will always be subject to their rules and control. But second, when you do the work to rank with SEO on their platforms, they get the SEO “credit”. Instead, you should build your own website and optimize it using relevant keywords throughout your website.
One way some business owners leave SEO on the table is by not using links on their websites from other high-quality websites. Known as backlink building, and it can help to improve your ranking in search results.
Use social media to promote their website and content. This can help to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to their website.
What is the “key” to it all? The key to great SEO is the use of keywords. Pun intended. Add keywords in titles, headers, descriptions, and content. Use keywords in the metadata in the general information of your website, on pages, and on pictures. Yes, I know what your next question is… Where can you get some of these keywords? Lucky for you I have more than a few resources for you. You can perform a keyword Search using NeilPatel.com/ubersuggest, Semrush.com, or Infinitesuggest.com.
You can also do research by asking questions that give you more insight on what words to use.
To question answering platforms include JustAnswer.com, AnswerThePublic.com, AnswerSocrates.com, OpenAI.com (ChatGPT), Bard.Google.com, and WolframAlpha.com.
To get in the know of the trends and what your ideal client is talking about online, try these platforms: Trends.Google.com/trends, BuzzSumo.com, MeetGlimpse.com/trends, ExplodingTopics.com, and Viralfindr.com.
Another great strategy is to go where your ideal client is discussing their problems, likes, dislikes, etc… to peek in on the language they are using and the questions they are asking. Both Reddit.com and Quora.com are useful for that.
Who can help? As you can tell by now, SEO isn’t for the faint at heart. But no worries, there are people that can help you to be successful with it. Here is a general breakdown of who those people are and what they do (these results came from BARD, listed above as a research platform).
An SEO consultant can help you to improve your website’s ranking in search results by optimizing your website for relevant keywords, creating high-quality content, and getting backlinks to your website.
A virtual assistant can optimize your SEO by researching and identifying relevant keywords, creating and optimizing content for those keywords, managing social media accounts to share your content on social media regularly engaging with your followers to drive traffic to your website, and monitoring and keeping the numbers of basic SEO performance.
A web designer can create a website that is SEO optimized by using the right keywords and phrases throughout the site, including in the title tag, meta descriptions, and content. But in a deeper dive, they can optimize the website’s code and structure to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
A marketing consultant can give strategies that are tailored to your specific business and goals, oversee the implementation of the SEO strategy to ensure that it is effective, then measure and report on the results of your SEO efforts to track your progress and make necessary adjustments.
A content writer can help you to create high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience and that will help to improve your website’s ranking in search results.
If you need support with how best to apply SEO to reach your first 6 figures in revenue, let’s talk. It’s FREE. ShaCannon.info/talk