If you’re building a business, you’re posting consistently on social media, you’re doing all the things and screaming from the rooftops about your product or service, but no one is coming, it may just be because they aren’t being shown what you have to offer. In today’s post, we are going to look at how SEO can help you get seen by the people you want looking at your business.

When you hear SEO, what comes to mind? Are you clueless as to what it actually is, or do you have somewhat of an understanding of what it involves? Basically SEO is how you get found on Google (or any search engine actually). It’s what the bots and algorithms use to help get you to the right people. 

You know how when you’re having a conversation with someone and then ads for whatever you were talking about comes up in your Facebook feed? It’s gotten a little scary as to how good the AI is at picking up on keywords. But it’s all SEO. It’s all about how you word things that allows Google to pick up on what you’re putting down. 

We are going to break this down into simple bite-size action pieces that will help you get started with updating your SEO from here on out. The awesome thing about SEO, is it is never too late to go back and update things, so when you have some downtime in your business, you can go in and update things a little at a time. 

First things first…

Before you can apply SEO strategy to your social media, emails (yes, you can do that in your emails), and your website, you need to know what you want to be known for. What do people search to find what you offer? And don’t think about this in a way that is centered around your business, think about it as if you had a problem you were trying to solve. What would you search for to solve that problem? Leaky faucet? What would you search for? Are you a DIY kind of plumber or are you looking for someone to do the work for you? Think in perspective of your customer. The first thing you need to do is figure out your keywords. This is going to put you at people’s fingertips so that they can see what you’ve got.

Write it like you mean it…

After we have our keywords, we don’t want to sound like a robot. I mean, chatGPT is pretty impressive, but we want our customers to feel like we are talking directly to them. Like your best friend is telling you all about the next best thing that has come along. When you write your descriptions, your captions, your email subject lines, make sure that you are writing to include those keywords, but also to a person. 

Name that file…

The next place you want to work on putting SEO to work is in your image file names. If you think about a google image search, what comes up when you search for something in particular? How many times do you find things that are spot on and how many are not relevant to your search? When you are naming images to go into a blog post, social media post, email, or on your website, you want to make sure that you name it using keywords. For example, the picture in this blog post, I could have left the file name whatever it was when I downloaded it, but I want it to show up in a google image search, so I renamed it to match the topic of this post. A good rule of thumb too is to not make it all one long word, but instead break it up with hyphens (how-to-get-found-on-google-with-seo.jpg). This allows the bots to search and recognize keywords in your image title. 

On your website…

When you are working on a website, you may not pay much attention to the SEO appearance settings, but they are vital to you being found. We will go more into websites at another time, but these small things can make a big difference. Make sure to include SEO titles and descriptions so that Google can find you. 

I hope that these things have helped you with how to improve your SEO on your platforms and website. If you’d like to have more info like this, I have a brand new group that will be working through planning out social media, working on templates, and using SEO to help grow your audience and bring you more sales. It is open for founding members as of right now, and I’d love to have you join us! We are kicking off this summer so that we can get ready for the 4th quarter and BFCM sales (and yes, even if you’re a service provider, you can plan around these dates). You can find out more about the group here.