Guest Blogger Jenna Ahern shares:
Trying to wrap your head around a new business and SEO?
You’ve probably heard that SEO can help your business grow, which is true.
When you’re good at SEO, your website gets on the first page of Google.
As cool as that sounds, it takes a long time to get there and can be an overwhelming and expensive process (but worth it:)). When I first started learning SEO, I was very nearly frightened off by terms like crawlers, backlinks, anchor text, nofollow vs. “dofollow,” white-hat vs. black-hat etc.
When you first launch a business, you should feel like you’re sprinting and oftentimes, the marathon pace of SEO and investment may seem counterintuitive.
So how do you optimize your website for Google as a sprinting startup?
Today I’ll explain the 7 steps to prioritize for SEO that you can do and monitor yourself. At Guardian Owl Digital, we define a startup as a website that has less than 50 pages. Even if you’re looking at your website right now and saying “I have more than 50 pages but haven’t really been practicing SEO” this is for you.
#1. Install Google Analytics- Google Analytics is very accurate and it’s a free analytic traffic tracking system that allows you to measure your site visitors who just like if you were in a retail location you want to have a great understanding as a business owner how much of your traffic is repeat customers coming in and out of your storefront every day every week or once a month also as a business owner needs new sales and new revenue each month you want to ensure. You’re measuring how many new people are heading this site every single month and the org day and what are they signing relevant to them. This is going to allow you to better understand your target audience and opportunities to change or pivot.
#2. Verify Your Business on Google Search Console – You’re going to verify your ownership in Google Search Console. Google search console is a free tool that Google allows (Bing also has their version, It’s called Bing webmaster tools) you to see what people are typing in before clicking on your website. Type into Google “Google Search Console” and you’ll see a hyperlink that directs you to the search console to set up your website domain and choose whether or not you want your website showing with www or maybe just the start of your business like Guardianowldigital.com. Once you do this make sure you’re then linking Google Search Console to Google Analytics.
#3. Fetch & Index as Google- In Google Search Console you can tell Google to “fetch” your website. Imagine you’re standing in a line waiting for Google to read your website, this puts you higher in the line! You have a brand-new storefront and if you do a search in Google you are competing with hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of similar sites just like yours. This is how you move to the front of the line. When logged into Google Search Console, manually insert your url’s in the url bar and click “Request Indexing”. This is essentially like knocking on Google’s door bringing them cookies and inviting them to look at your site.
#4. Audit Your Website Navigation- Do an audit of your homepage and see the actual call to actions on site and you have relevant landing pages for your ideal customer to take action. for example if you’re a window cleaning company that does both Residential and Commercial companies you’re going to want to have two separate silos to make it super easy for a visitor to navigate the site and distinguish where to go. This also gives you as a business owner the opportunity to measure (if you have Google analytics) what your visitors look like and what side of the business you’re attracting through your website.
#5. Call To Action on Landing Pages- Make sure you go through all of your landing pages and ensure you have call to actions whether it be an email or newsletter signup, a contact us button, or consider even using an image banner that takes you to another landing page on your website. Having call to actions allows more visitors interactions and ability to engage with your website which indirectly helps your SEO.
#6. Align Brand Terms & Search Terms- Ensure your brand terms align with the search terms that your visitors are using on Google Search. You can see the search terms being utilized in Google search console once you have it setup. Take the example of “athletic shoes”, maybe your branding is all-encompassing around utilizing the term athletic shoes however you realize that people are actually finding your website by searching “running shoes” or “trainers”. You don’t need to necessarily adapt your brand strategy, you just need to make sure that those search terms are located within each landing page of your website.
#7. Refresh MetaData for 2021- You’re going to want to make sure you conduct an audit of your page titles, meta descriptions, and descriptions in your images which are called “alt text”. You want to ensure that you’re utilizing the search terms and queries people are using in Google Search. Within this metadata do not just add your brand name and brand terms. Find what your page titles and meta descriptions look like by using tools like Screaming Frog or just by searching for your company in Google Search results. Your page title is the blue hyperlink within the search engine page and the meta descriptions are the black descriptive text below the blue hyperlinks. This is certainly something that you’re going to want to focus on because if you don’t have information like page titles and meta descriptions, Google’s not going to know when to show your website for a visitors search result.
Learn more by visiting Guardianowldigital.com to enroll in our weekly search engine updates.
About the Author:
After Gaining 10 years of experience, while achieving some of the highest sales honors within the automotive industry, Jenna left her 6 figure corporate salary to build a business doing digital marketing the honest way.
Guardian Owl Digital was born in 2013 and serves businesses trying to appear higher and more frequently in search engine results like Google.
Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky Guardian Owl Digital is women owned and has gained recognition by Forbes, BossBabe.Com, and Business Insider since its inception.