How to get started with SEO for your business

Have you ever said to yourself…

The best thing to remember is that a search engine’s job is to serve the user.

When someone searches, search engines like Google want to return the best results that match what they are looking for. Your website page has to match their “query intent” – what they need. Try and understand what your user needs and their intention then serve them that.

By designing your website around your ideal customer’s needs and making sure your site is easily accessible you will improve your chances of reaching and gaining more customers.

Google Search - how to start seo

In a hurry?

Find out 5 optimisations you can do right now on your website.

Before you start on SEO you need to know your online goal

Make sure that you are clear on:

Getting lots of traffic to your website is a waste of time if the people coming to your website aren’t relevant to your business.

Being clear about what you want to achieve will help you:

  • Identify what you actually want to rank for (topics / keywords)
  • Know what you should be focusing on
  • Monitor and measure if what you are doing is getting you towards your goals

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is ongoing improvements that you make to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. It’s about improving the visibility of your website pages in search results for relevant searches.

It’s good to have an understanding of how search engines like Google work.

How does Google Search work?

Let’s start with Google’s mission statement.

Our mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Search should deliver the most relevant and reliable information available

Google searches for new pages then crawls the page to find out what is on it.

It then tries to understand what is it about and stores the information about the page in Google’s index.

When someone searches on Google it tries to find the most relevant content to return in the search results. These results are based on many ranking factors, including the words in their search, the content of the pages, the authority/expertise of the sources, your language, and location.

Google’s ranking systems are designed to sort through billions of webpages in their search index and find the most relevant and present it in a way that helps find what they’re looking for.

The relevance of your website is the most important factor

Relevancy is about answering the question the user asks. Think about what the user wants when they are looking for this.

Relevance of website pages

The most basic check is when the page contains the exact keywords as the search query.

The information is likely to be more relevant if the keywords appear:

  • on the page
  • headings
  • body of the text

 

But that doesn’t mean if you search for “unicorn” that you want to get a page with the word unicorn repeated many times. That’s not helpful.

That’s why Google also assesses whether the page contains other relevant content beyond the keywords, like pictures of unicorns, what they are, types, etc. For example, the top result is a Wikipedia page on Unicorns. 

Tell me one thing I can do

Get a quick video review of your website.

5 things you can do right now to improve your results


1. Measure your SEO

How will you know that you are on the right track and improving your website if you can’t measure or monitor it?

The first thing I do when I start with a client is make sure that they have the following:

These free Google tools help you measure and optimise your SEO.

Google Analytics

Once you have Google Analytics installed on your website you can start analysing user behaviour on your website.

Google Search Console

By verifying your domain in Search Console you can start to understand how your site is performing in search.

WordPress Tip

Use Google’s free Site Kit WordPress Plugin to easily connect your products including Google Analytics and Search Console. 

It also gives you an overview to quickly see how your website is doing within WordPress.

Google Site Kit

2. Get on the Google Map

If you are a service area or product based business you are missing out on people searching in your area if you have not got a business profile on Google. You don’t even need a website to get one!

Google My Business is a free tool from Google that lets you manage how your local business appears on Google Maps and Search.

It also gives you great insights on who is finding your business listing locally and what search terms they are using even if they don’t actually go to your website. Handy for discovering relevant keywords you should be ranking for.

Add your business to Google My Business

Follow these instructions on how to sign up for Google My Business (links to Google help).

Below you can see when you search for my business Bizstyler my business appears in the organic results and also local listing on the right hand side.

Google My Business - Bizstyler

3. Start your keyword research

Keyword research may not sound like fun but once you start you might end up enjoying it! (or maybe that’s just me).

Remember you will need to be clear on what your online business goals are and who your ideal customer is.

  1. What keywords are they searching for?
  2. How often are they searching for them?
  3. Understand their user intent (what does the user actually want when they are searching for this? And is it relevant to my business?)

What are your potential ideal customers searching for?

  • What words do your users search for to find your content?
  • Different users may use different keywords (e.g. based on their knowledge of the topic)
  • Think about common questions that you get, survey or ask your potential users/customers.

 

Think about the language your customers use, common questions, and use the below methods to discover more keywords.

You can use a spreadsheet to record your keywords and pages that will be optimised for those keywords.

Have a look in Google Search Console

Once you have data in your Google Search Console you can start using it to discover keywords for your business.

The Performance report shows you the search queries that your site has appeared in search results.

You might discover that a query is getting lots of impressions (appearing in the results) but that isn’t getting many clicks.

You can then go to Google and search for the query and investigate what search results are returned. Are they relevant to you? Do you want to rank for this query?

Use Google to find keywords

Have you ever noticed that when you start typing in Google it starts giving you auto suggestions? 

This can be good for discovering keywords. When you search a broad term like “product photographer”. In the search results you might see:

Related to product photographer

People also ask

Related searches

 

If you click on Image results you also get more ideas from the filters “studio”, “still life”, “creative”, “Instagram”

Have a sneaky peak at your competitors

If you have a Google Ads account you can use the keyword planner to browse for keywords by entering phrases or you can enter a website address and see what that particular page or site is ranking for. How neat is that? That can give you lots of keyword ideas that potentially are relevant for your business too.

4. On page SEO

Start with your most important pages such as your homepage, about, service, product pages, lead page, or blog.

This is a basic start to helping with your relevance of your page.

Check your titles

Make sure your page has a Title and it:

  • Contains the keyword
  • Describes what the page is about
  • Unique to other titles on your site
  • Short and informative

Check your headings

Your H1 tag should contain the keyword and your headings should:

  • Highlight the main points and sub-points of the page (H1, H2, H3, etc)
  • Only be used where they make sense (not just for formatting)

Check your descriptions

Make sure your page has a description and that it is:

  • A summary of what the page is about
  • Unique to other descriptions on your site

 

Google sometimes displays this in your search results and although it is not a ranking factor it can be used to encourage users to click on your search result and go to your website.

5. Have clear call to actions

When someone lands on your site what action do you want them to do?

  • Sign up for your newsletter
  • Download your lead magnet
  • Contact you
  • Make an appointment
  • Buy your service, course, or product

I’m surprised by how many sites I go to that have no clear call to action. You could be missing out on a sale or lead!

It’s also important not to put too many as this will confuse your visitors.

Review your pages and check you aren’t missing any opportunities.

Below is my call to action for this page “Ask a question in my Facebook group”. I want you to help you get started on SEO and know if you get stuck or have any questions you can join my free group and ask :)

I'm still stuck

Still not sure where to start? Let’s chat