Optimizing your website's on-page SEO and improving your search engine rankings
In this episode of "Process to Profitability," we're diving deep into the world of on-page SEO and how it can skyrocket your website's search engine rankings. We all know that being found on Google is crucial for attracting the right clients, and I’m going to share my strategies on optimizing your website's SEO to increase visibility and drive organic traffic. Plus, I'll be discussing the long-term benefits of SEO and how it can help establish you as an authority in your industry. Get ready to take your online presence to the next level.
Timestamps:
[00:00:35] What is on-page SEO and why does it matter?
[00:02:04] Why on-page SEO is important for your search engine ranking
[00:03:21] SEO is a long-term strategy
[00:04:50] Keyword and audience research
[00:07:54] Create SEO optimized content
[00:10:49] Optimizing the page descriptions and meta-data of your site
[00:12:32] Search engine ranking also depends on user experience
[00:14:18] Get a professional website before starting major SEO efforts
[00:15:26] The Website Design VIP Experience includes SEO research and optimization
Key Takeaways:
What is on-page SEO and why does it matter?
Why on-page SEO is important for your search engine ranking
SEO is a long-term strategy
Keyword and audience research
Creating SEO optimized content through blogging
Optimizing the page descriptions and meta-data of your site
Creating a great user experience
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: On today's episode, I want to talk about on-page SEO and how we can optimize our websites on-page SEO for improved search engine rankings. And then later this week, I have an episode where we are talking about offsite SEO. So these two are going to work together really well and give you a great overview and starting point so that your website can start to be found by more of your right fit leads and clients.
What is on-page SEO and why does it matter?
[00:00:35] Samantha Mabe: So let's start by talking about what on-page SEO is and why it matters for SEO and search engine rankings.
[00:00:47] So SEO, search engine optimization, that is just how you get found by Google. So it's the words and the phrases that you are using that when somebody types those into a search engine, you are going to show up.
[00:01:05] And the reason that we want to show up in the top rankings for those search engines is because most people never go even to the second page of search results. They are going to look at those top couple of rankings when they want to find a solution. And so we want you to show up for the terms they are searching for so that your business gets those clients into it.
[00:01:33] Now, on-page SEO means it's SEO that's happening on your website itself. When we talk about offsite SEO later this week, we're going to be talking about SEO that is not on your website, but this is what you control. It's on your website. So it's the words and the phrases and the metadata and all of that stuff that is on your website that you own, that you create.
Why on-page SEO is important for your search engine ranking
[00:02:04] Samantha Mabe: Let's jump in to why on-page SEO is so important and so significant for helping websites rank higher for search engines. And what I want to iterate here is what I want to make sure you understand here is that SEO is an organic way that you can get traffic to your website. And that's going to help you increase your visibility for your business for the right people that are searching for you.
[00:02:39] So this is not ads. We're not using keywords for targeting in any of those paid ways. This is all organic marketing and SEO is one of the ways that people are going to find your business.
[00:02:56] I have found that most of my business comes from referrals and the second most popular way clients come to me is because they found me when they were searching for something. And usually they find me on Google or another search engine.
[00:03:11] It doesn't matter how much work I'm putting into social media, if people are finding me through search engines, that's where I want to be putting my effort. I want people to find me there.
SEO is a long-term strategy
[00:03:21] Samantha Mabe: The other thing that is so important about SEO is that it's a long-term strategy. Unlike social media, where a post can disappear after 24 hours, most of your audience may never see it, what you're doing for SEO now is going to have a long-term impact.
[00:03:42] I very recently did a website for a client who found me through a blog post that I had written back in 2018 about brand design. I'm not offering brand design anymore, but when she was doing some searching, she came across my website, she reached out, and we developed a relationship, and that is why she decided to hire me for her website. That is a long way from when I originally made that post, but you can see that it's got that long-term impact.
[00:04:18] The other way that SEO is long-term is that over time, as you build more of your SEO strategy, you build more of this on-page SEO, Google and other search engines are going to recognize you as more and more of an authority.
[00:04:34] So the more content on your website that you have talking about these topics and answering these questions, the more of an authority you're going to be seen as, and the higher that you are going to show up in those rankings.
Keyword and audience research
[00:04:50] Samantha Mabe: So how do we get started with on-page SEO? The first thing we want to do is keyword research. And I know this is the part nobody likes to spend time on, but it's so important because we need to know what words and phrases people are actually using that are going to bring them to our website.
[00:05:09] What I really like to do when I am helping my clients in the SEO portion of our Website Design VIP Experience is to actually go to ChatGPT. I will put in information about their business, their name, the type of clients they serve, all of this information that I have gathered from them. And I put it into ChatGPT and I ask it to give me some keywords that are related to this field. And I can't take that list and run with it, but it's a great starting point.
[00:05:44] So what I do is that I pull out that list and I review it, and I take out ones that don't make any sense or that I know are going to be really broad.
[00:05:53] And then you can go into other tools, Ubersuggest is one, Keywords Everywhere is one. You type those words into Google itself with that plugin turned on, and you can actually see where it ranks. How hard is it to rank for these things?
[00:06:10] And what you really want to do is you want to hone in. I like to have 10 keywords and phrases that I'm really working towards at any time. And I want to make sure that they are getting some traffic, but they're not so hard to rank for that I'm never going to make it to page one.
[00:06:29] For example, if I were trying to try to use website design as a keyword for my website, I would never make it to page one on Google because there are so many website design companies and so many of them are bigger than I am, but I can start to rank for Squarespace website design in a week, Website Design VIP Experience. I can rank for my podcast name and my name. Those are things that are a lot more likely to draw people in.
[00:07:03] So you really want to think about who your audience is and what are the terms they are actually looking for. Not the terms that are your industry jargon or the things that you use when you talk to other people in your industry, but what are the terms your clients would be searching for when they're looking for you.
[00:07:23] When I was looking for a chiropractor when I was pregnant, I was looking for, chiropractor for pregnant women in Richmond, Virginia. Location can be very important if you are a local business that serves people in person. The type of client you serve and then the industry that you're in, those can all be some of the keywords that you want to try to rank for.
Create SEO optimized content
[00:07:54] Samantha Mabe: And then once we have those, we want to start creating SEO friendly content. And that means we are creating high quality, valuable content that incorporates our target keywords naturally.
[00:08:07] I still get the question can't I just make a list of all the keywords at the end of my blog post and maybe we can hide it or we can turn it off? The answer is no. Search engines are very smart, and so they want to see us using these keywords naturally, in a way that makes sense, in a way that answers people's questions.
[00:08:27] The good thing about this is that you don't have to use that exact phrase every time. As long as you're combining those words together in different ways, your search engine ranking is going to start to improve because search engines know, okay, these words are together. They might not be in this exact order in this blog post, but we know that this is the topic and this is what they're talking about.
[00:08:54] The other thing we want to do is make sure that our content is readable for human audiences, but also optimized for search engines.
[00:09:05] The best way to improve your search engine ranking is to have a blog that you update regularly. You want those blog posts to be very readable and consumable by a human audience, but you also want to make sure that it's optimized for search engines.
[00:09:23] What I really like to do is use my keywords to come up with a topic. That's going to be the topic of the blog that I am writing and then I will go through, I'll think about, 'okay these are some of the points that I need to make.' I'll write the whole thing out and then I'm going to go back through and I'm going to optimize it for the search engines.
[00:09:43] What is really important here is that you have an optimized title. So the title of your post needs to include the keywords and phrases that you want to rank for in a way that is going to get people to click on it. You also want to make sure that you have headlines that break up the post, but are also going to contain those keywords.
[00:10:06] So if I were to be writing a post, and I did this recently about what my VIP Experience is like, what I would do is I would say how you can get a website in a week with a VIP Experience. That's going to be the title. I'm going to go through the whole thing, but then I'm going to break it out into sections using headings.
[00:10:27] And those headings are going to be something like: how to prepare for your VIP Experience. What do you need to expect on the day that we are doing the development? How, what type of content do I need to provide? Things that are easy for people to scan, but also. Include those keywords in are things people are going to be searching for.
Optimizing the page descriptions and meta-data of your site
[00:10:49] Samantha Mabe: And then on the back end of your site, you want to make sure you have an SEO description for each page and each blog post. In Squarespace and in most website platforms, you can get to this in some kind of page settings.
[00:11:06] You're going to go into the SEO and you're going to write a description for that page or that post that really talks about the topic that you are covering and then gives a call to action for people to check it out.
[00:11:18] The reason this is so important, and you don't want to just rely on what Google will automatically pull, is because many times when we're writing blog posts, our first paragraph or two is an anecdote. It's not super keyword heavy.
[00:11:34] We want search engines to see what this post is actually all about instead of thinking, Oh she told this story about how she drops her kid off at preschool. That must be what this post is about. No, I dropped my kid off at preschool and then I jumped into work. And now I'm going to explain what that is.
[00:11:54] So I want to make very clear to the search engines and then to the people finding me that's what they're going to be reading here.
[00:12:03] The other reason that these descriptions are so important is that is actually what shows up on the search results. So if you go and you type in some keywords into a search engine, it's going to give you a bunch of results and for each of those you're gonna see a title and then you're gonna see a couple of lines of text under that. What we are doing is making sure that those Items show up the way that we want them to.
Search engine ranking also depends on user experience
[00:12:32] Samantha Mabe: All right, so we've got content, got our keywords. Now let's think about one more important piece that I think most people who are not in the SEO and design world tend to miss when it comes to search engine rankings. And that is that we need to make sure that the user experience of our website is really strong for two reasons.
[00:12:58] One, a great user experience is going to keep people on our website, it's going to make it easy for them to click around and learn what they want and then get in touch with them. So we want it for the actual website visitors.
[00:13:11] But the second reason it's important is because search engines are actually considering user experience in the way that they rank your website. They are looking at things like how fast does your website load. Is your website easy to navigate? Does it meet accessibility standards?
[00:13:31] And we can't start creating content that's really strong and leave the design and the user experience to the side. They have to work hand in hand to start getting your website to show up higher in the search engine rankings.
[00:13:49] So as you are thinking about how you want your website to get more traffic, find more leads for you, I really want you to consider what SEO efforts you need to be putting into your business. What keywords do you want to rank for? What kind of content can you create?
[00:14:07] And then take a look at your website and see if you need to make improvements to the design and user experience before you start putting in the effort.
Get a professional website before starting major SEO efforts
[00:14:18] Samantha Mabe: One tip that I give everybody that I talk to is that if you are considering switching website platforms because you want the power or the usability of something else because you want to work with a certain designer. Many of my clients have come to me and said, I really want to go to Squarespace and I know I want to start ranking higher on search engines. So which should I do first?
[00:14:44] And I recommend that If you have the ability to invest in moving to that platform and getting the design done, do that first, because you will see a slight dip in your SEO results if you move platforms, and we don't want to lose any of that.
[00:15:05] So if you're going to be putting in a ton of effort for your SEO results, you're going to be writing blog posts and taking the time to optimize everything, go ahead and move your website to the new platform first, get your new design up, and then you can go in and start putting forth that effort. That's going to be more of a long-term strategy.
The Website Design VIP Experience includes SEO research and optimization
[00:15:26] Samantha Mabe: That's why my VIP Experience is so powerful, is because you are getting your website transformed in a week, including the basic SEO research and optimization, and then you can put it on your schedule to write blog posts, or you can outsource that to somebody else, send it over to a VA, so that you can continue to build that search engine ranking and that on- page SEO, and you've got the design that is going to keep people on the website and convert them once they come across your site on a search engine.
[00:16:02] If you have any questions, I would love for you to reach out and let me know and make sure you tune in on Thursday to listen to my episode about offsite SEO and how the two tie together to really start to bring in more leads and therefore more clients to your business.
