SEO Material

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your website for search engines so that your content or business can be discovered by users more frequently. Quality SEO ensures your website receives increased organic web traffic by appearing to users over your competitors.

This material will uncover valuable SEO techniques, what they are exactly and how to utilize them to attract free search traffic to your business.

Keyword Research

One of the first steps in an effective SEO campaign is Keyword Research. This is the act of identifying what Keywords users in search are looking for, relating to your business. Your SEO Objective will determine what your focus will be for your research. For instance, if you are a roofing contractor, you will want to find and utilize key terms that users intent on hiring a roofing contractors would type in as a search query. The correct keywords will place your website in a stream of organic search traffic you may be missing out on. Increasing your website’s visibility within these high traffic keywords can be incredibly valuable to your business.

To Conduct an audit of your website, we recommend https://www.semrush.com/lp/site-audit-new/
- Prioritize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions errors.
- Resolve these issues utilizing your keyword research, if applicable.

Website Audit

After you have gathered a Keyword list that pose opportunities for additional traffic, the next step is a Website Audit. Website Audit’s can seem daunting but there are tools that eliminate the need for any technical knowledge and share with you prioritized SEO issues and how to resolve them. With a website audit and keyword research, you’ll be ready to tackle your first optimizations. Resolving issues that arise from an audit strengthens your website’s SEO.

To Gather keywords from using Keyword tools, we recommend https://Ahrefs.com/keyword-generator
- Make a list of keywords that relate to your business or a specific product that contain the highest traffic possible. The keyword tool will show variations of your search and provide you with how many users are searching for those in a month.
- Look at your competitors’ websites and analyze what keywords they may be using. If they have a successful website, this competitive keyword analysis can help you get a jump start on research and guide you to compete with them in search result pages.
- Some keywords with lower traffic may be a great opportunity as well. Utilize https://Trends.Google.com/ to discover if these keywords are trending upward over time. Optimizing keywords relevant to your business that are in an upward trend pose an excellent opportunity to dominate search results before competitors attempt to.

Optimizations

With Keyword research and your initial website audit prepared, you are ready to undertake the process of Optimizing your website for search engines. This guide is focused on on-page optimizations specifically. With these, you will improve the quality of your website, increase visibility in search engines, drive valuable user traffic, and convert that traffic into paying customers.

Optimizing your website’s URLs
- Avoid non-descript URLs.
- Name your URLs a 2-3 word description of your webpage
- Using a keyword is okay, but be sure it’s for the most relevant page on your website. Utilizing the same keyword on different pages is detrimental.
- Use hyphens in place of spaces.
  Incorrect: Https://www.restaurant.com/page3 Https://www.restaurant.com/seafood-restaurant-in-maine-takeout-out-menu-order-seafood-dine-in-reservations
  Correct: Https://www.restaurant.com/takeout-menu
  Https://www.restaurant.com/reservations
Optimizing your website’s Title Tags
- Title Tag Example:
- Keep title tags within 50–60 characters. After this, Google cuts them off.
- Title tags should be the page’s topic and utilize a Keyword from your research.
- Make sure each title tag on your website is unique. Title tags are a ranking factor and they shouldn’t compete with each other in rankings.
- Utilize a format across your website for consistency. Here are examples of successful title tag formats:
  - Product Title | Brand
  - Product Title | Category | Brand
  - Call-to-action + Product Title | Brand
  - Category | Brands
  - Call-to-action + Category | Brands
  - Restaurant Name, City — Town | Category | Brand
  - Industry in City | CTA — Brand
  - Topic | Company | Location
  - Topic | Category | Company
  - Call-to-Action + Topic | Company | Location
Optimize Meta Descriptions
- The meta description is where you will describe the page further and present a call-to-action. Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor and should be written so users will be compelled to click.
- Meta Description Example:
- Keep meta descriptions within 160 characters. After this, Google cuts them off.
Optimize the links on your webpages (Internal Linking).
- When possible in your webpage’s content, link to other pages when mentioning topics pertaining to those pages. Ideally you should use a keyword for that page within the link text (anchor text).
- Buttons can also be used on-page to link to other important pages on your website.
- By linking to other pages, it signals to search engines that those pages are important to your website and will be crawled more frequently.
Writing or rewriting content for your website
- Best practice for your webpage’s content is to provide as much information on a topic as possible. Providing value through your content is the No. 1 way of ranking for a given keyword topic.
- Utilize headings above paragraphs to act as headlines.
- Utilize content structions like numbered lists or bullet points when applicable. These can be useful to break up large portions of text and present important pieces of information clearly.
- Be sure to not use keywords unnaturally in text just for the sake of having them used. They should be used when appropriate, relating to the topic at hand.
Provide Call To Actions on your webpages
- A call to action is a small piece of content that encourages users to take action. Typically, this is in the form of a link or button.
- Examples of a call to action:
  - “Click here to learn more!”
  - “Find out why today!”
  - “Contact Us.”
  - “Call for a free quote.”
- Optimize you Google My Business Profile
  - A Google My Business profile is a critical part to your business’s visibility in search engines. For local businesses, it is an absolute must that the profile is optimized and maintained.
  - Fill out all information accurately. This information should be consistent with the information on your website.
  - Utilize images of your business logo, as well as product or service examples.
  - For best results, make weekly posts that advertise services or creative offers from your business. This signals to Google that your profile is active, which has been found to increase your visibility in search and increase traffic to your site.
- Obtaining quality backlinks
  - Backlinks refer to links on other websites that point to yours. These happen naturally, if your business is reputable or your website contains quality information.
  - There are ways to manually obtain backlinks from quality websites. This is called Backlink Outreach.
  - Contacting industry-specific directories for a listing is a great way to obtain backlinks for your website. Another similar way is to contact local directory websites, such as municipal chamber of commerce sites. These are often free and provide a great starting point for your backlink campaign.
  - Another method of obtaining backlinks for your website is to find blogs to talk about your product or service. They may write the article or you may be asked to be a guest writer for their blog. To find these blogs, you can use Google.com and utilize Advanced Search Operators.
    - Advanced Search Operators and how to use them:
      - Type in Google: intitle:Write for us
        
        This will show page titles that contain the phrase “Write for us.” This is a great way to discover blogging websites that you can use to promote your website, business, product, or service.
        
        Be creative with the advanced search operator “intitle:” to discover blogs related to your niche, business type, or location. This will get your content in front of your target audience.

Track Results

SEO has both short- and long-term benefits to your website. It’s critical to understand where your website is with your key performance indicators so that you can measure results over time. Depending on your objective, you may be looking for overall traffic increase from search, more actions to your GMB profile, or landing page visibility. Let’s look at how to track your objectives.

Google Search Console
- Getting started with Google Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9274190?hl=en
- GSC will allow you to chart your website’s visibility, traffic, and the queries that brought them.
- Google Search Console is a valuable free SEO tool that can track your key performance indicators as well as inform you of any issues on your website, as seen by Google bots.
Google My Business
- Within your GMB account panel, the “Insights” tab provides key metrics for your profile. You can track the search queries that brought people to your profile, the actions they took once they reached your profile, and how many times it was seen in Google search results versus Google maps results.
Uncovering Opportunities
- Using the tools mentioned above, you will be able to uncover opportunities to further your web traffic and visibility.
  - Click-through rate: If you notice within Google Search Console that a page is appearing in search results but not getting adequate clicks, you may want to tweak your meta description and track the results. Adjusting the title tag should be done with caution because it is a direct ranking factor. Refer to the “Optimize Title Tag” section here for more information on optimizing a title tag.
  - Search Queries: If you notice your site isn’t appearing for certain valuable keywords you’ve found within your keyword research, try optimizing for them on your website. Find the relevant page, or create one, and cover the topic in full as it relates to your business, service or product. Refer to the optimization portion of this guide for ways to optimize, on-page, for that target keyword.

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