This is one that fell through the cracks a bit and should have been posted long before today. Last year we were fortunate enough to have Michael Daehn in to talk about the work that he does as a marketing consultant for all kinds of businesses. The purpose of this talk was to give people an overview of search engine optimization (SEO) and how they can use it to help their customers find them.
SEO is Earned
SEO is earned, it’s an organic process where you create content on your website, on social media accounts, or elsewhere online and that content serves as a way to connect with your customers. But it’s more than building a lot of content and waiting for customers to flood your website, you need to proactively work to improve your site’s SEO.
Keywords
In order to rank high in search, you have to work on creating the best keywords for your site. To do this you will need to do research into the kinds of words that people are using to find your products and/or service. How do you find this information?
One proactive way would be to start by using Google’s Keyword Planner to figure out some of the keywords and terms people are using. Additional information includes: how many estimated searches are made per month for each term, what the low and high cost per click bids are, and what the relative competition level is for each term. This is a good tool to start out with to get an idea of what kinds of terms work for your site.
Another tool that I like to use is Yoast SEO. I use this tool on our (WordPress) blog to finetune our SEO and to get ideas of what works for others. Whereas the Google Keyword Planner helps you come up with ideas for keywords, the Yoast SEO tool helps you focus on using keywords the right way. Yoast SEO will not only help you with keywords but with how to craft your posts to maximize your SEO ROI.
The secret to good SEO is a good user experience
One of the key things that Google is looking for when ranking sites is that people like using the site. If people are spending time on your site, and they either spend a lot of time on your site and/or visit a lot of different pages, then that is a pretty good indicator that your site is a quality site.
And that is what Google and all the other search engines are trying to do when they rank sites: Find the best search results for their customers (the people who do online searches).