Cheat Sheet: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What is Search Engine Optimization?
The practice of getting your company’s websites to show up when somebody searchers for your product or service.
What can it do for my business?
- Connect you to new audiences that might be excited about your product or service
- Help your customers find your business
- Help you find new employees
- Better serve your community
Watch the Video
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem to be a daunting or even impossible task but Keith Roberts is here from Zenman to demystify SEO and tell you what many SEO agencies will not: 3 easy ways to get started that you can do right now.
Quick Tips
To get started with SEO first do these two things:
- Make sure that your NAP (name, address, and phone number for your business) is aligned across the 100 different places or so on the internet that keep track of these things. If you want to do it yourself here is a blog post that will help you get started:
- Adjust my NAP Profile for Local SEO
- Or alternatively here are some vendors that can also help you at a much lower cost than most SEO agencies: Moz, and Semrush
- Build your website correctly. That means a few things:
- Its well structured
- Its built for all devices (desktop, mobile, & tablet)
- Develop a habit of creating content regularly
For more details about how to improve your SEO by building a better website see below or go straight to the experts and get help from Keith Roberts agency at Zenman.
Getting Started with SEO
Building a Website – Keys to Success
- Your website needs to be responsive and work on all devices
- Make sure your page titles match the content on that page
- The more your page titles match the search terms that people are searching for the more likely they are to work.
- Add metadata descriptions, image alt text and descriptions, and other things to make your site more ADA compliant. Here is a free tool that can help you with that.
- Make sure your website loads quickly.
Learn from the Best
A great way to start building a better website is to look for other successful products or services in different communities and your own community and start to look at what they do well. Now its important that you do not want to copy them exactly – Google punishes you for this and is very good at discovering plagiarized or duplicate text – but it can absolutely be a good starting point for your site to start imitating what they do well while you add your own special twist.
For example, if you were trying to start a noodle bar in your local community, an intelligent way to start would be to search Google for “Noodle Bar in New York City” and take a good hard look at their website. You can bet that the top result is doing a lot of things right with their website. If you can learn from what they are doing and imitate them but not copy them – there is a good chance you can be successful in a smaller market.
Creating Quality Content for Your Website
One of the biggest factors in search rankings is high quality content. Here are the two things we recommend to get started:
- Start writing content on your website regularly. Setup a schedule, start doing it at regular intervals and make it a habit.
- Write about the things that your customers ask you about and that you know they care about. If writing is not your thing, then make videos – be a speaker not a writer – and post those videos on YouTube and link them to your site.
Over time these two things will allow you to create content that your audience cares about will turn you into a trusted resource and this makes a big difference in SEO rankings.