Things Every Business Owner Should Know About SEO

 

SEO is an extremely powerful tool. But if it were easy everyone would have a top ranking website. Here are a few things I wish all my clients knew before embarking on this internet journey. 

 

1. It takes time. No matter how awesome your website is and how well the SEO was done it takes time for Google to get to know your site and then trust it. Usually 6-18 months. The more you give people what they are actually searching for (which is NOT usually what you think they are searching for) the sooner Google will trust your site.

2. It takes content. ALOT of content. Even more if you have a competitive niche. If you aren’t a writer, we may need to outsource. Even if you are a writer, we may need to outsource to someone who is familiar with writing site specific content.

3. The subject of the content is determined by what people are searching for when they type a phrase into google, NOT by what you’d like to write about or what services you have to offer. If you have chosen to do the writing for your website, the keywords (page titles) will be provided to you and you will have to write the same page sometimes 5 different ways, which can be challenging- see number 2…..

4. Your site needs to geared towards a few RELATED keywords. If you fly helicopters and teach yoga you need two different websites. Even if your niches are more closely related like psychology and hormone balancing, if you want to be found in a search for a keyword like psychologist southern California AND another search about hormone balancing, you will need two different websites or you will need to pick one niche, stick to it on your website and let the other ones go. If you veer off your keywords, Google will veer off your website. You can still list all your services on your website but your site MUST be focused with the majority of content on a few related keywords. 

5. Don’t pay for SEO services through a builder, it’s a waste of money and it will not help you. Trust me, that’s how learned what not to do many many years ago. UGH. 

6. Original content, found absolutely nowhere else on the internet, is the only content I use. This means anything on your website can NOT come from your social media, other blog posts, photos, videos. This isn’t necessarily a legal thing, it's a google thing. Google penalizes duplicate content and you can’t dupe google. Many have tried, succeeded for a time until Google figures out what they’re doing and bam, no more traffic = no more business.

7. There are alot of people building websites who know absolutely nothing about SEO. Do your research and don’t hire anyone, including me, until you’ve talked to at least three developers. If they are a “coder”, they can do crazy cool things with your site but it's unlikely they actually know how to do SEO well. Most SEO’ers hire coders if they need something fancy, mostly because websites that have great SEO are typically very simple websites and don’t need anything fancy. For other developers know this: If they use Wix, Go Daddy, Weebly or other cheapo builders RUN. It’s a long story but someone using cheap builders, doesn’t understand SEO. The two best builders I know of for great SEO are: Wordpress and EditorX. I use EditorX because I don’t like Wordpress. Wordpress is too difficult to use and there is very little control over design. I’ve built a few websites with Wordpress and it does work for SEO but after 3 websites and 2 years in, I still needed to call for help every 5 mins because I’m picky. I’m done with Wordpress and happier for it. And I love EditorX. 

8. SEO takes maintenance. Ok so your website is done, you’ve stopped building pages, you’re getting traffic but after a time the traffic starts decrease. Thats because your competitors are still building content and growing their link building profiles, while your website has become stagnant. If you still want to rank at the top of a Google search you need to continue growing your website. Google doesn’t like idle websites, it needs updates and fresh content. Some businesses choose at this point that’s it’s perfectly fine to NOT rank at the top of a google search and grow their business in other ways. Great! Mission accomplished. But if you want to continue to rank you need to continue to crank out GREAT content. There is no other way around it. 

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