Talk Digi To Me - An intro to Search Engine Optimisation

SEO, my favourite thing! In this episode Carlie defines SEO, and explains some of the key aspects that you need to include in your search engine optimisation strategy. These are keyword research, on-page and off-page optimisation, google business management and content marketing. 

Transcript

Hi, I'm Carlie Robinson, and this is Talk Digi To Me.

So what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is like this mythical unicorn that we try to explain. Some people kind of get the tip of the iceberg on it. Some people have no clue. So I'm going to try to explain it for you. Search engine optimization is the process of having your website rank highly in search engine results. So when you open up Google, you type in something because you're looking for it, all the results that come up, if you have good SEO for your website, that means that you'll come up in the top of the search results on Google. 

So why would a business want to invest their time, and of course, their money in SEO? Well, you want your website to rank highly because you want to be found above your competitors. Let's face it, there's always that competitive edge. You want to make sure that you're found and ranked higher than your competitors. And if you are a new business, you'll want to make sure that your website is even discoverable online for people who are looking for your products and services. 

Good SEO can also promote trust and build credibility with new and potential customers. Search engine optimization is all about driving organic and unpaid traffic to your site. So it's something that if you put the time and effort into doing it right, it can really save you money in your digital ad budget in the long run. 

So what are some of the things that you need to include in your SEO strategy? Well, number one, you've got to start with keyword research. This is like the foundation that will affect all the other parts of your strategy. Number two, your on page optimization. These are the aspects of metadata that go into your website, things like the content on every web page, the URLs, the title tags, the headers, all that back end stuff that gets a little technical, but is also affected by your keyword research. Number three, you've got your content marketing strategy, believe it or not, what you're putting on social media, the content that you're producing for your website, this will definitely help you generate good SEO your site health. So it's kind of like getting a doctor's checkup, but for your website, a measure of how healthy your site is, this determines how crawlable it is by Google. It determines the usability. Is the user experience good or bad, believe it or not, that also affects your SEO, and finally, your Google My Business Profile Management. This is something that's usually overlooked, but it's really easy to do. It's like having a digital white pages listing on the internet. You can start spending time on Google My Business, on local listings, on forums and that kind of thing, and that helps your boost your SEO as well. 

So the very first part of any SEO strategy is going to be your keyword research, and that's basically identifying what are the keywords and the families of keywords that you want to be using all across your website to help you rank for those specific things that best describe not only your business, but also the terms that people are using when they search for your business. So for example, if you have an Italian restaurant, you might want to identify the keywords and family of keywords around things like pizza or Italian restaurant near me or best fine dining Italian restaurant. Essentially, you'll be conducting your keyword research to show what's the volume of search around those keywords. So if you have a lot of people using the word pizza, but you don't have a lot of people using the word pasta, for example, you might want to develop a lot of content around pizza to show for that. So this step is really critical, because it helps you to develop your content marketing strategy as well using the keywords that you've identified that you want to use, it also helps you identify what you need to put into your on page optimization. So for example, if we've identified we want to talk about pizza, your URLs need to have in the word pizza, your on page content that's like the body that people read that has to have the word pizza over and over. Because if you don't have the word pizza on your website, you will not rank for it at all. You need to include the word pizza in your meta descriptions, in your title tags and your headers. Those are all the metadata that fall into your on page optimization. So making sure you get the keyword research done from the get go is really important. 

Okay, so another really important indicator of SEO is your site health. It's not the only indicator, but it can definitely affect your rankings on Google. So good site health to aim for is about 85% the top 10% of websites tend to be in that 90% and over region that requires a lot of ongoing maintenance. Site health is like, you know. Your overall health. You go to a doctor, you get a checkup, and you get a measure of how healthy you are. That's sort of like what happens in a website as well. If your site is difficult for Google's little spiders to crawl, meaning it has a poor user experience. Pages don't load very quickly. Maybe your images and your videos are too big. Maybe you have broken links. You have 404, redirects going on. This can affect your site health, and if it affects your site health, it means it's more difficult for Google to examine the content of your website, and if Google can't read it, it can't rank it. So just because you have a brand new website, or you have a fairly small website does not mean that your site is healthy. You still do need to get this assessed, and with the work of a developer, you can get it up to that 85-90% marker. So on page optimization is one of the aspects of SEO that some people are quite familiar with. This is to do with the actual content of the pages of your website, both what you can see, which would be what you would read on the web pages, but also the pieces that you can't see, that would be the meta descriptions, the title tags, the headers, which are essentially the headlines on the pages, as well as the URLs. So this is where keyword research also becomes very important, because if you've done your keyword research, you know what those specific words and phrases are that you need to appear in all of the above. So for example, if you have an Italian restaurant and you want to talk about pizza, the content on your web pages should have pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza. Your URL should have pizza. Your meta descriptions, which are formatted to tell Google what is the content of the page that also needs to have your keywords in it. Now you may also be surprised to know that websites don't just automatically come with all of this SEO content input. If you've just launched a brand new website, you will still need the help of an SEO copywriter to put in your keywords, correct your URLs and input your metadata. This is something that we do on a regular basis. 

Okay, let's talk about your content marketing strategy and how this can be combined with good SEO practice. So you have a website, you have social media pages, and you want to be producing content that talks about your products, your services, that you can put on your website. You've got articles, videos, podcasts, you've got all kinds of stuff that you're creating. So the keywords that you identified in your keyword research need to appear in all of the content that you're publishing. The more frequently and consistently you publish content to your website, the better chance you have of ranking for the keywords that you're looking for. So the way that you're consistently publishing content to your social media, you need to be thinking about doing the same for your website. And on the topic of social media, it actually affects your SEO. So if you're using your keywords and your social media posts, that's great. You can also direct traffic from your social media onto your website, so your CTA for your social media posts, if you're not doing one right now, a really good start for SEO is to start including URLs to your site in your social media posts. This will drive traffic to your site and can help boost your SEO ranking. 

Okay, so let's talk about your content strategy the same way you're posting and publishing on social media, you should be doing this for your website as well, because numbers of visitors to your site can help affect and improve your Google ranking. So if you're creating articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, all kinds of material for your website, you should be publishing this on a consistent basis to try to drive more traffic. Another really good way of driving traffic to your website is by including the URL to your site in your social media posts. So you're posting on social media, you really should be including a CTA or a call to action getting users to do something maybe like your posts. Yeah, you love that. But if you include your URL to your website in your social media posts, it will, in the long run, drive more traffic to your website, and this can really boost your SEO rankings without too much additional effort. Activity on social media does actually help affect your Google rankings. So

if you think about if you've ever searched for a business on Google before their social media profiles do come up. So you're probably familiar with PR, or the act of getting publicity for your business. Well, you should be thinking about how you can do this digitally for your website. Off Page Optimization is essentially your digital PR, so backlinks or getting other websites to include links to your website are a really critical part of SEO, and it's probably one of the things that helps affect your SEO ranking the most. It's like getting a recommendation from a friend, if you have, let's say, news media posting a digital press release about your business you. Just launched a great new product, and they include a link to your website that's called a backlink, and that can really, really benefit you. It's essentially a flag to Google that says, hey, this website, website is being talked about online, and it's definitely worth checking out. So your backlink strategy is essentially looking at making a list of what are some of the other websites out there that I want to link to me. So news sites are a really good one, because they tend to be very high traffic, sites that are also very trusted. You may also want to look at, well, who are some of the guests, the bloggers that are out there that are talking about things that are relevant to my business? So if you have the Italian restaurant, you've got that great pizza. And there's some food influencers out there that have their own website and they do a lot of food blogging, a great backlink would be for them to test out your pizza and include a link to your website. 

Probably the easiest part of SEO is your Google My Business Profile Management, or your local listings management. Your Google My Business Profile is basically a white pages listing on Google. It shows where your business is, your business hours, photos of your business, and reviews, 5 4 3 2 1 star reviews that people have left for you. If you think about when you've ever looked for directions to a location that you need to go to or a business you're trying to find, the profile that comes up is the Google My Business Profile. Managing this profile is so easy to do. You can do it completely without me, but it really is very helpful for you. In terms of your SEO as well. You're going to want to do two main things. One, fill out the profile. Think of it as like a social media profile. You're going to want to have your business hours up to date, your website, URL, your products and services, pictures of your building, if you've got one. 

Very important, get those reviews. You have space where you can get customer reviews in your Google My Business, and it shows your star rating, so from one to five. So make sure you know you've got great rapport with some of your customers. Drop them the link to your profile and say, Hey, happy doing business with you. Love if you can leave us a review, and usually you'll get back something great. So those are two really simple, really easy things that you can do with your Google My Business Profile that people often overlook, but is a really easy entry point into SEO.