Last month, I talked about advantages of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and how each may fit into your marketing plan. I'm going to focus a bit more this month on some things you can do yourself to help with SEO. We all have budgets and professional digital marketing agencies, while expensive, are well worth their fees.
Jayson Demers, a contributor to Entrepreneur magazine, recently wrote a great article about 17 things you can do yourself to improve SEO. His list is exhaustive, but I'm going to focus on the three things you can do that will provide you with the greatest improvement.
This likely sounds obvious, but it's not as easy as you think. Recently, we spent several hours researching options for keywords for a client and it only reinforced what we already knew: there's a lot of competition for keywords. The important thing to do is find keywords for your services which have moderate search volume and medium or low competition rating. Google's Keyword Planner provides you with these metrics for free.
This will help your page stand out. If the page is about the services your offer, create a short (40 characters or less) title which accurate summarizes what those services are. Your content management system will automatically put your business name after the title you create. Keeping it to 40 characters or less means it won't get shortened when it's displayed in Google's search results.
This ties in with creating a unique title, but it's your chance to build on the engagement. Your title should have caught their eye - the description is your chance to sell them on clicking through to your site. It still needs to be short (255 characters or less), but you should be able to create a single sentence which will convince that person to click. Just make sure your content matches up with that description and provides a good overview and reason that person should click.
Take a look at Jayson's article for some other things you can do that don't cost you anything more than time. Any site we do includes a basic description for the site and keywords, but SEO is an on-going activity. If you are looking for a team to help you, contact us for a referral.