3 Ways to Master Your Website SEO
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As part of my one day website service, Launch In A Day I provide resources on SEO in the pre-work. In an early version I included a simple keyword brainstorming exercise. I thought it was simple, but it turned out to be too overwhelming for clients.
Not only was the guidance I provided overwhelming, it was counter-productive to getting a one day website launched.
SEO research is overwhelming not because my clients are dumb, but because search engine optimisation is an analytical, time consuming and complex process.
How do I know? Because it’s overwhelming for me too!
I made a strategic decision not to get too caught up in SEO when I launched this business. I knew it might be a way to get stuck in analysis paralysis.
So started my business, product names, and my website all without any SEO research. I tackled the time-intensive work required to optimize my website and Google rankings later.
In this post I share some resources and a do-able approach that I developed after doing a lot of my own research.
Approaching SEO the right way
It’s important to get started with a foundational understanding of SEO. This will make sure you optimise your website specifically with your business and customers in mind.
After wading through many bro-y and tediously technical podcasts I finally discovered the SEO bits podcast from Rebecca Gill. Apparently she stopped recording this podcast some years ago, but her advice is timeless.
They outline the right way to approach and think about SEO and they are blessedly short; each podcasts averages around 10 minutes.
These short episodes are not ‘how-to’ guides per se. What they cover is foundational exercises that walk you through a conceptual framework. Take the time to work through them before you start.
You really only need to listen to these three episodes:
Invest the half hour to listen to these podcasts and ideally to work through the questions she suggests. Then, get started with the process of finding your keywords and optimizing your website and content.
Step#1: Brainstorm Keywords
In some ways brainstorming keywords is the hardest part. It’s difficult to get out of your own head in the terms you’d think of for your business.
Here are two tools that I’ve found helpful to find phrases for my business and offerings:
Keywords everywhere - You can install the free tool on your web browser. When you enter a search term it spits out similar searches others have made.
Keywords everywhere - adding keywords to website
Pinterest Pinterest is surprisingly helpful for figuring out terms related to your business or offering.
Like Google, when you enter a search term it will provide a dropdown of similar terms in the search field. After you’ve entered your term you’ll also see tiles with related terms.
On Pinterest (and Google for that matter) you can use something called the ‘ABC’ method to find keyword phrases, which are just as important as keywords. Enter a core term for your offering.
For example, let’s say you’re an Osteopath. Type in the term ‘Osteopathy a’ and see what suggestions you get. Continue through the entire alphabet. You’ll be amazed at all the terms and phrases you didn’t think of:
Incidentally this exercise will give you tons of ideas for blog posts.
Step #2: Check Keyword Rankings
The holy grail of SEO is to find keywords with high value and low competition.
That means you want to find keywords and keyword phares that a lot of people are looking for, but that not too many people have published content about.
To determine how your selected keywords rank, you’re going to need an online tool (usually paid) to do this.
After some back and forth, I settled on KeySearch. A peer in one of my networking groups highly recommended it. She has a successful business almost entirely based on her SEO results.
KeySearch is a no-frills easy-to-use SEO research tool. The price is right at around $17 a month. They also offer a free month long trial which you can use to get started if you’re not ready to commit to yet another monthly subscription.
I bought the annual subscription. I’m getting more intentional about SEO in my business blogging, so I use it not just for initial keyword research but also each time I write a post.
I liked KeySearch’s welcome sequence. It was a series of easy-to-follow tutorials on how to use and get the most out of the tool.
#3 Adding Keywords to your website
Keep things simple in the beginning. Focusing on keywords for what you do and 1-2 of your core offerings or services.
I started with a short list of only 9, 2-3 keyword phrases. I’ll apply these keywords and phrases to 5 of my website pages and 9 blog posts.
Here’s a list of things to update:
Body text - as makes sense editorially; always write for humans not robots, insert keywords to the body text of your pages and blog posts.
Image captions - add keyword rich captions to images (you can hide the captions on images in Squarespace by clicking on the image editor and selecting no caption)
Headings - Add keywords to headings using headers 1, 2 & 3
Titles & Descriptions - Add keywords to titles and descriptions (I’ve got a tutorial on how to update your website title and page descriptions on Squarespace here)
And now, the hard part.
You’ll need to wait 3-6 months to know if any of this works has paid off. Can you believe it?! I know. SEO is a long game and it takes patience, time and experimentation.
How to check your progress? Check your traffic on both the Squarespace analytics panel and ideally Google Search console (I talk about Google Search Console in my post 5 Things You Must Do After Launching Your Website)
I hope you’ve found this post helpful. When done right, SEO can pay dividends in traffic and business for literal years.
I’m giving a live workshop in October 2021 on how to create and apply
your own list of SEO keywords. Click the button below to get on the wait list!