When you hear someone say “SEO” do you freeze?

Unless you are tech savvy or a developer figuring out your foundational SEO pieces can give you a major headache.

I totally get it. When I first learned the importance of search engines and having potential customers be able to find us when they didn’t use Instagram, I quickly got up to speed on the essentials.

61% of business-to-business marketers said that organic traffic and search engines gave them more leads than any other method. And 66% of people do online searches before making a purchase. Your leads are looking for you, they don’t know you exist yet.

If you are ready to help those already searching then follow these super simple SEO tips to get found by the right customers.

Know your target market and the problems they google at 4am

Okay, so you know the last time you were considering a big purchase or looking for the ultimate solution to the problems that keep you up at night … what phases did you type into Google?

These short phrases are called keyword and they are straight money when you get them right.

What do you want to be found for?

What is your unique-selling-proposition? The thing that makes what you do special.

Come up with a few short-tail (2-3 word phrases) and long-tail (4-7 word phrases) that your ideal client would be searching for to find you, your website or any of your services.

Optimize your images

Any time you add anything to your website, it is an opportunity to get found by search engines. Let’s start with your website images.

Have you ever been to a website that loaded so incredibly slow that you just left without finding what you were looking for? Ours don’t do that…

Yeahhhhhh, that was a website with too many giant files on it.

Follow these simple principles to make sure that doesn’t happen to you:

1. Open new images on your computer first before uploading
2. Next, resize all banner images to be no wider than 2500px and inset images (in the body of the page) no wider than 1200px.
3. Rename all images with descriptive keywords so that anyone searching will see them populate in the images section of the search engine. This is best practice for web accessibility as well.
4. Ensure all images are under 500kb. If they aren’t, then you will want to use something like TinyJPG to compress them.
5. Viola – upload them to your site.
6. Make sure you write an alt text description of the image (accessibility).
7. Bonus if there is the ability to turn a caption on/off. Add a few more keywords here then toggle it back off.

*Make sure that you aren’t using the same phrase over and over. Google will ding you for duplicate content.

Styling your website typography for SEO

This step gets missed a lot. Many, many websites that I have audited have been designed to be pretty but not found.

Above I’ve shared what our typography hierarchy looks like for our website.

The Page Title is our heading 1. SEO best practice is to have one assigned per page.

Next our Heading is our Heading 2. Followed by Subheading for our Heading 3. Then paragraph text.

You can see by the sizing what appears to be the most visually important and ensuring they fall in this H1 to paragraph order is very important. Search engines do not in fact have eyeballs. So they read the content on the page using the html snippets (those being H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, p, p a, etc). By utilizing the heading tags, you can tell the search engines what is the most important content on the page.

Connect Google Search Console & Use it

Setting this up is so easy and it give you valuable insights to help you make better decisions online.

Here are instructions on how to set it up.

How to connect Google Search Console to website on Showit and Squarespace .

Once you’ve had it set up for 30 or 90 days, login and review the Core Web Vitals, Page Speed and performance. You’ll be shocked at what comes up.

Need help? Book us for a website audit here.

Measure and track your progress

Search engine optimization is a long term game and you won’t see instant results. But by reviewing your progress, site conversions and the pages that your audience is interacting with the most, you can get a pretty clear picture on how to create more engaging content. Blogging is the best way to do this. Each new post tells the search engines that you have a resource for your audience.

Bonus tips:

• Make sure each page has a character count of atleast 500 words.
• Alt text, alt text, alt text. Add it.
• Font size should be no smaller than 16px.
• Each page needs an SEO Page Title and SEO Page Description.
• Hide or disable any pages that you don’t want to be found (or crawled by search engines)
• Check for broken links and have an error 404 page for users to land on if there are any.
• Update old blog posts as if they are new and re-publish.