SEO Magic
A VA asked me today how she could get more hits to her website, it had been up for several months and was averaging just a few hits a day… Now firstly whilst this seems a bit rubbish, it’s actually not unusual for a VA website – here’s the average number of hits our members get:
Loading ...Secondly there are a few nifty shortcuts you can do… Google wants to serve up search results to their customers which are highly relevant for whatever they type in. And they also want to promote their own services like YouTube, Google Places, Google+, Google Adwords etc. at the same time. Why are we so concerned about Google rather than any other search engine? Well, nearly 70% of searches worldwide are done via Google – they are the world leader, and where they go, others follow. So by concentrating on keeping Google happy, we tick lots of boxes with everyone else too.
We don’t want to annoy them by doing complicated razzmatazz and trying to pull the wool over their eyes with Black Hat SEO techniques, we want the people who land on our website to be interested in what we’re talking about too, because that’s how you convert leads to sales.
Is your product unique?
If your product is unique then you’ll find that it is easier to get up the search engines simply because there is less competition, but you need to make sure that the product or service keywords on your site are the ones that people actually would type in to find you. So for example, “virtual assistants” is a pretty competitive search term, but “marketing assistant Cleathorpes” will be easy to get near the top of the search listing because there are less people in competition for it.
Use terms that your clients would use to search for you – ask them what they would type in if they were looking for your services online. It might be something you’ve never thought of calling yourself… “freelance secretary” “remote admin assistant”. Include your locality as (strangely!) clients still do place a lot of importance on this. Have a different page for each search term so you can optimise it properly for that search term including keywords in the titles, the text etc. and tweaking content to fit that particular customer.
Keywords
How do you determine the correct keywords to use on your site, simply follow the 3 bullet points below to get you started:
- Will people search for the product or service you are offering on your site? If not you’ll want to stop here and try other marketing methods.
- Okay so they will, now you need to figure out what words or phrases they would use to describe your product or service. Ask people to describe what you have, you may be surprised to learn words that you would never have thought of as you are too close to your company.
- Now you have your keywords type them into search engines and see who your competition are. This will also let you see how difficult it may be to get up to the top of the listings.
Here are a couple of really good tools to help with keyword searches and the best bit it that they are completely free!