If you’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, or marketer looking to increase sales, SEO is one of the best investments you’ll ever make.
By creating content that your target audience loves to consume, you’ll be able to create consistent, predictable sales without having to pay expensive agencies.
With rising cost-per-click (CPC) costs in 2023 and Google’s new Helpful Content Update, SEO has now become more important than ever.
The caveat here is that many business owners still don’t know how to go about SEO, or worse yet, think it’s too complicated and expensive.
The truth is SEO doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. By learning the basics of SEO and following best practices, you can achieve significant ROI in a reasonable amount of time.
Here are 4 key steps to getting predictable sales using SEO without paying expensive agencies:
1. Start by doing keyword research and reorganising your website
Doing keyword research and reorganising your website is a great way to work smarter, not harder.
With Google Analytics, you can take a step back and gain an eagle-eyed perspective of your website. Not only will it give you the insight to identify which pages need more attention, but it’ll also show you how healthy your website is overall.
Specifically, you’ll be able to quickly spot pages with high bounce rates — meaning visitors left right away instead of sticking around to explore or take action.
After you’ve grasped which pages need overhauling or removing, it’s a good idea to create a spreadsheet with your pages listed and then designate one keyword (or group of keywords) per page.
Since every page has the potential to attract new audiences and customers, it’s important to think about each as a separate individual topic.
The reason for this is that Google will crawl your page to understand what it’s about based on your H1 tag and your metadata.
And if you’ve got competing pages that are trying to rank for the same keywords, this is known as ‘cannibalisation’ and should be avoided because you’ll be penalised by Google.
Instead, focus on organising your web pages into unique clusters that allow each to rank in its own way.
And after you’ve done this, you can bring those keywords into SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs and research if they’re worth targeting by looking at how much search volume they get.
That way, you can more confidently decide where to invest your time and energy.
2. Create a high-quality content strategy based on the keywords you’ve identified
Once you’ve done the keyword research and organised your website, it’s time to create a high-quality content strategy based on the keywords you’ve identified.
The best way to do this is to create content that provides real-world value — not just SEO blog posts written so obviously that they’re only for SEO purposes.
For example, a locksmith might have a service page for 24-hour emergency locksmith services. So they could write blog articles around people’s trending questions about this type of service.
For example, someone might search for “how to get into your home without keys“. So the locksmith could write a helpful article on ‘How to get into your home safely when you’ve lost your keys‘.
Or, if you’re an online clothing retailer, you could write blog posts about recent fashion trends and include links to your product pages (only when it’s helpful).
This type of content will not only help drive more organic traffic to your website, but it’ll also engage more people and create legitimate, non-pushy sales.
If you get stuck on this step, it’s commonly advised to seek out an online marketing consultant that specialises in SEO to consult you on this. Remember, avoid those expensive agencies at all costs.
3. Make sure you optimise for on-page SEO factors
No website is complete without the basics of on-page SEO setup.
Meta titles, descriptions, schema, keywords and internal links must be configured correctly, or you’re simply missing out on potential organic search traffic.
It may take some time to get these technical elements just right, but it’s totally worth it – your website will be easier for both human visitors and search engine robots to navigate.
Optimizing your website for search engine bots is paramount to achieving high SERP rankings. But, even more importantly, optimising it correctly adds clarity and ensures visitors can easily find the information they are looking for without any hassle.
This is a relatively quick win since you can implement most of these changes overnight (depending on how many pages you have).
Also, again, always strive to remove duplication of content so your website is well organised and there’s no confusion about which page should rank for each keyword.
4. Implement a link-building and outreach strategy
It’s important to find influencers or other relevant websites in the same field as you, then start nurturing relationships with them.
Establishing relationships with the top industry editors and blog owners is a surefire way to enhance your credibility, foster trust, and acquire advantageous backlinks- all of which can help elevate your website’s rankings.
The way this works is by writing high-quality guest posts for these blog owners. You would write these articles, and you’d have to, in most cases, incentivise the blog owner to publish them in some way (typically monetarily).
You can also pursue broken link building, where you find websites that are linking to dead web pages and then contact the website owners or editors to let them know so they can update their content.
Once these relationships have been established, you can ask for backlinks — not always, but when it makes sense naturally.
If done correctly, link building is a great way to drive more organic traffic to your website and help boost its rankings on SERPs.
Building backlinks takes a lot of time and effort, but if done right, it can significantly improve your website’s rankings in search engine results pages.
And once you’ve earned backlinks from other websites, you need to make sure that those links are indexed properly by search engines.
Start creating predictability in your business online
SEO isn’t something you can do overnight; it takes a lot of trial and error. You must constantly monitor your website, assess the results you’re getting from different strategies, and optimise accordingly.
But if done correctly, SEO can be an effective way to increase organic traffic to your website and help you create predictability in your business online.
