Keyword Research & SEO Made Easy

If Potential Clients Can’t Find You, They Can’t Become Clients

New to town and need to know where to go for a haircut? No problem. Just search on Google.

Hungry and looking for a restaurant near you? No problem. Just search on Google. 

Need a mechanic to fix your car? No problem. Just _____ __ ______. 

Let me guess, you had no problem filling in that blanks, did you? That’s because Google searching has become the answer to figuring out just about everything in our day and age. 

If you want to attract visitors to your website so you can turn them into clients, then you need to focus some attention on search engine optimization (SEO). 

SEO is actually a complicated field to work in. But I’m going to give you the down and dirty, easy to tackle highlights to get you moving forward. 

Brainstorm Keywords

Google knows what your website is all about based on its text. It looks for words and phrases that are related, and then gets an idea of how relevant your site is for searches. The more relevant it is, the higher up the page your business appears. 

That means you need to be mindful of the copy you have on your web pages. Most especially, you want to write your web pages so that they highlight the “keywords” that you want to rank for. Each webpage should only focus on a single keyword. And the keywords for the individual pages should be different. 

Brainstorm different keywords you want to rank for on Google searches, as well as variations. One way to do this is just to sit down and imagine all the possible words and phrases you might search for if you were your ideal client. 

If you are an online marketer who helps small businesses, you might try the following: 

• Need help with marketing
• Small business marketing
• Create marketing strategy
• Marketing basics
• How to do online marketing

When you’re done with that, you might try typing a topic or question into Google search and see what it recommends as possible searches. 

Here you have several things you might address on your web pages to help you rank better in a Google search. 

Use the Tools Available to You

In my opinion, the best tool out there for looking up potential keywords is Google’s Keyword Planner.  Simply type in the word or phrase you want to rank for and see what pops up. 

In this example, we’re looking up “small business marketing”. The results will show you the most related words and phrases, how often they are searched, and how competitive they are. You can use all that information to help you pick related keywords. 

If you have a WordPress site, then you will want to install the Yoast SEO plugin. That will guide you as you build a page or article so that you have the content that is SEO friendly. It will tell you how many keywords you need based on the length of your page text. It will let you know if your sections are too long. It will even let you know if you need more alt-tags on images. 

I love the way Yoast SEO tells you how well you’re doing with your page’s SEO: a red, yellow, or green face. If you see anything less than a green face, just check the list of things to do to make it turn green. Talk about SEO made easy! I don’t think it gets any easier than this.

Build Link Connections

Google Search likes it when you have links. If you have the opportunity to add a link on one of your pages to a link on another, I recommend you do it. This is an internal link. 

External links are to pages on other websites. Google likes these, too. Make sure you are sending people to another page that is relevant to what you are presenting on your own page. For what it’s worth, any time you send people off your site, I recommend you have that link open in a new tab. That way, they still have your site open and can come back it. 

Finally, there are backlinks. Backlinks are links to your site from other sites. Perhaps the easiest way to get these is to do some guest blogging for someone related to what you do. This not only helps make you known to their audience, but it also allows you to add a link to your own website in the bio. As people go through that link to your site, Google notices and considers your website more authoritative. It’s an easy way to “borrow” authority from someone else. 

Cornerstone Content

What are the most important pages or articles on your website? This is the information you want to get in front of people most. I recommend you set those pages and articles as “cornerstone content”. This gives those pages preference over the others in Google searches. 

If you have Yoast SEO installed, setting up cornerstone content is easy. Just edit the page. Look for “Cornerstone Content”. Flip the switch to “on”. Easy peasy. Don’t do this for every page. Only do this for the most important pages. 

There’s So Much More to SEO than This

Oh yes, so much more. After all, SEO is an entire field in itself. But, this is about SEO made easy. I just want to give you enough information to get you off the ground while consuming as little of your precious time as possible. After all, SEO is only part of a strong marketing strategy. There are many other things that you need to spend time on if you want your business to succeed.