What is search engine optimization? Every business knows about it. Almost everybody has a story about how this is hard and how the rules of search engine optimization change every year. You would think what business coaching has to do with it? Well, I guess everything because business coaching is also a business. Here is […]
Every business knows about it. Almost everybody has a story about how this is hard and how the rules of search engine optimization change every year. You would think what business coaching has to do with it? Well, I guess everything because business coaching is also a business. Here is what I learned about SEO, why this is important, and how to run it so that it actually brings you traffic.
If you are a business owner, you are used to challenges. It’s just another challenge. Peanuts right? You start studying it, and if you are not a trained tech person or an SEO specialist – pretty soon, you realize you go down the rabbit hole, and your mind goes blank. Nevertheless, day by day, you hear that one can’t have a successful business without SEO. The pressure is on.
Someone out there has to know the answer to this, right? Come on. SEO? Maybe you don’t even need it? How can it help you and to attract clients and aid you in becoming an expert in your field? In order to understand the importance of search engine optimization, let’s look at the bigger picture.
In today’s business environment where access to information is so easy and convenient, and when there is so much content to choose from, it can get very overwhelming.
Throughout this magnificent fight for attention, and if you’ve followed me for some time, you’ll know that I believe in the following equation:
Attention = Sales = Money
It is my new age business coaching mantra if you will. Whoever gets attention today- gets monetary equivalent tomorrow and can grow exponentially. You don’t even need to be Warren Buffet for that.
Look at the Kardashians. They are geniuses for keeping peoples’ attention for so long. Now we can argue about the ways, but we can’t argue about the results they got.
According to Nielsen Taboola research human attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2018 – beating out the even-distracted goldfish, which clocks in 9 seconds. I know, scary.
Companies who pump massive amounts from advertising, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo, and so on, have learned that if people are not interested in the content they are shown, the attention will drops. This will bring to people not buying products. Therefore they won’t be paid for the ads, and no one makes money.
So, these companies came up with extremely complex algorithms. These algorithms know about you more than your momma. They allow these companies to calculate the relevance, engagement, and the demand for the content that is being published. Therefore, these companies end up showing people only the content that the audience is most interested in.
As consumers, we can disregard it, but as entrepreneurs, we directly benefit from keeping up with how these algorithms are rewarding our content. So let’s learn how we can exploit them to grow our business. Well, if we are smart about it.
As a business coach that works with different businesses, I can tell you that optimizing your digital presence with SEO gives you the ability to speak the same language with the algorithms. Therefore you gain competitive advantage.
So, you have decided that search engine optimization is a good route for obtaining new clients for your business. You have done your research, talked with other professionals who have had success using search engine optimization, and you know that using it will help you take your business to the next level. But how do you implement an effective search engine optimization strategy?
Let’s take a look at the steps below. Although there are endless depths to the vast world of search engine optimization, the below business coaching tips can help you take your SEO game to the next level:
What do you sell? What are your clients searching for when they need to find your products or services? If you sell a diet pill, your customers probably aren’t searching for deeply scientific terminology.
They’re probably searching phrases such as, “How to lose weight.” If you run a marketing company, people probably aren’t searching “How to build a complex sales funnel.” They are more than likely searching for things more related to their pains, such as, “How to get more clients.”
Now once you found these relevant, searchable “keywords,” you need to check how popular those keywords are in the search engines and how much competition they have. The best keywords to use for your search engine optimization strategy contain high demand and low competition. Those types of keywords are going to yield you the greatest results as you implement your SEO strategy.
There is much different software available for finding and analyzing your search engine optimization keywords; some of them are free. But if you want a quality readable analytics, I’d recommend such resources as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz.
These resources contain all of the necessary tools in one place and make it easy to calculate what keywords are going to be most effective for your business strategy.
Another successful business tactic to employ throughout the process of analyzing what keywords are going to be most effective for your search engine optimization strategy. It is to evaluate the keywords that your competitors are finding success from using.
People, success leaves clues. Of course, you do not want to copy the entire strategy of any of your competitors. However, it will be very useful to employ some of the search engine optimization keywords that are bringing them success within the search rankings.
Indulge yourself in sharing those keywords and the traffic that they yield. Business is war, and it gets hot on the first page of the search. Generating web traffic is half the battle.
If, for my business, I analyze keywords “business coaching” or “business coach,” I will see that they have different search demands (vibrancy) and different levels of competition. If you have a new domain with no domain reputation built, you better go for the least competition keywords.
So my website has pretty decent domain authority, so I’ll choose the one that I can compete with, probably on a medium level. If you have a new domain with no domain reputation built, you better go for the least competition keywords.
The domain authority is profoundly affected by the number of quality backlinks you have. I’ll tell you more about the backlinks below.
Aim use the same keywords that are bringing success within the search engines to your competitors while building your domain reputation. Once you generate web traffic, then it becomes about how you handle the traffic. Social proof gets really important too. You’ve looked up businesses on Yelp and Trustpilot, right? You see the common denominator here? It’s a reputation.
So let’s recap our SEO business coaching tips that we have learned by now:
One of the easiest yet time-consuming way to start boosting your search engine rankings is to publish consistent blog content. In which you should implement the keywords that you have selected to use throughout your search engine optimization strategy.
Start searching for content within Google. What pops up when you type in phrases related to your business? Look at those articles and start publishing content that is related to the already “hot” content.
Remember that Google scans everything for plagiarism. DO NOT just look up popular web content and copy it to use as your own. Give your own take on the content and start creating your brand voice and image using the content that is already popular.
Another great way to boost your content is to talk about things that people are interested in talking about. Celebrities and popular events are a great resource for boosting your search engine rankings, but that depends on your business identity. Don’t just talk about the new Kim K’s scandal. Be aware of what audience you attract, in other words, who would be interested in such content.
Think building reputation and think conversion. If you want people to respect you, find a way to incorporate the knowledge that can help people to make their lives better. Don’t try to be smart but just really give value.
Let’s think about something recent that occurred and try to generate a way that you could use it within your content together.
Let’s say that you run a wedding planning company. Recently, Justin Bieber and Haley Baldwin celebrated their wedding. Yes, they were already married, but recently they completed their actual, fancy ceremony.
As a wedding planner, let’s say every week you post a blog post about something related to planning a wedding.
One of the things that you could do to enhance your content would be to analyze Justin Bieber and Haley Baldwin’s wedding ceremony. Make it interesting and give useful advice to your audience.
There are many different ways to incorporate interesting topics and tactics into your content to ensure that you are receiving the advantageous search rankings that you deserve. One thing you need to remember is to focus on keeping your content engaging.
Google can tell if someone clicks on your piece of content and leaves the page right away. Find creative and different ways to keep the audience reading. This is the forgotten piece of creating original and organic content to boost your search rankings.
Think of what pain they have that you, as a wedding expert can resolve for them. Talk about what kind of decorations they used, and where to order it cheaper, how to find a perfect location, or what entertainment to choose – things like that. If people see you are good at what you do, they most likely would want to hire you.
Nobody wants pain, yet everybody wants someone who will not only have the solution but will help them to incorporate it. Even though we are surrounded by people in this world, it often gets lonely to face a challenge.
People are people, and they are not just a target audience. When they feel genuine care, and you know how to rank it – now you have a business coming in.
Using the above tactics is vital to a successful search engine optimization strategy. The bottom line is that you need to start putting out organic content to boost your search rankings.
In this case, cleanse and compress your website.
As quick and easily accessible as everything on the internet is at this point in history, it almost seems trivial to talk about how quickly your website functions.
Remember back in the day when it could take up to five minutes for just one of the pages on your website to load. And then, once it did load, it could be extremely low quality. But, nobody cared because they were just so enthralled with the fact that we could access information over the internet.
Well, we’ve got news for you — speed matters like never before. Now we measure in seconds instead of minutes and remember the “goldfish” attention span? These seconds should be minimal. If your website takes too long to load or it is not functioning properly, then people are going to leave your site for the next one that functions in the way that they expect it to.
Nevertheless, if we talk about high ranking- most likely, Google won’t put you into that position. Exceptions exist, for example, Tony Robbins has a slower site, but the number of backlinks this big guy has over 40 years of actively hitting the market is enormous.
If your business is not quite there yet, you have to be considerate of the speed.
In fact, a slow functioning website is literally a kiss of death in today’s information-hungry age. According to eConsultancy, 40% of people abandon a website that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Head over to your website right now and evaluate how long it takes to load. If it isn’t loading at the snap of a finger, it is time to do some more investigating.
If your website is not functioning in the way that you expect it to or in a way that is beneficial to your search engine optimization strategy, there are a few different things you can start with to rectify the issue.
Basically, a backlink is a mention of your website on other sites. The better the Google reputation of that site is, the higher is the quality of the link.
Do not fall for a cheap backlink building strategy that dark SEO people propose. If they link your site to nonrelevant of suspicious sites, Google will mark your domain as spamming. That will affect your ranking. It’s a very slippery way. Go white SEO and organic. It’s always a better way.
Being a business coach, I constantly look for ways to hit multiple birds with one stone. So here are some of my favorite strategies to build backlinks:
But who needs my expertise? – You’d say. You’ll be surprised by how many people are looking for guests. You’ll need to hire someone who is good at research and somewhat understands your field and just pay them some little money for booked interviews in your brand’s field.
It also matters how you pitch it, of course. So be thoughtful of their needs when pitching.
Using these tactics will give you a great backlink boost, just don’t forget to ask to put that link in.
One of the things that you need to stray from is linking to websites that are not relevant. This strategy is very inauthentic. You can not use this false strategy for increasing your search engine ranking. Google and other search engines able to detect the fallacy of what you are doing.
Another way that this can be very helpful to your search engine ranking is that once you link to something that another person has published. They may link back to your website if it is relevant to them.
Do you see how this can create a spiderweb of relevant content? Make sure that the content that you are linking to is valuable and relevant, and you will start to see a significant increase in your Google search rankings.
What do I mean to write to people? I mean to write in an engaging way. I understand you are not a business coach nut you also have a lot to give within your expertise. Part of a successful search engine optimization strategy is using the keywords that you are trying to rank for more frequently.
The issue is that this can begin to sound extremely unnatural if we use them in the wrong situation. The truth is that your search ranking is boosted and varies significantly from people consuming your content.
In fact, that is what it is all about. It is all about people consuming your content. People consuming your content builds your brand, increases your credibility and referrals. It increases the likelihood that you are going to make more sales AND boost your search engine rankings.
But, if you are not writing in a way that is interesting and engaging to people, they are not going to consume your content. You are not going to see all of the fruits and benefits of the labor that you are putting in.
Start writing your content in a way that is engaging. Start having a conversation with your audience, and you will start to see that, not only will your search engine rankings start to see a boost, but your business will see a boost as a whole.
Do not write unnaturally just to throw in some extra keywords at the expense of sounding like a real person. Nobody wants to work with someone or listen to someone who is a robot or who is inauthentic.
Write to people, not search engines.
Many of you reading this probably do not even know what a meta-description is. But, they are very important for the search engine optimization of your website.
If you haven’t been paying attention up until this point, you are going to want to start paying attention to this article right now. This successful business coaching tip is one that you are going to want to incorporate into your business strategy TODAY!
A meta-description is just a snippet on the back end of your website that summarizes the content of your website page.
It is extremely important to have a unique meta description for each page of your website. This is important because the meta description is the first part of your website page that your audience sees when your website appears in a Google search.
How does this help to boost your SEO ranking? The answer to that question is simple. If the people who are seeing the meta description of your website in Google find it interesting, they are going to click through to your website. Simple as that. Ask yourself: How can I save their time to tell them right away what they are looking for on my page.
If before the traffic on the first page of google search was divided according to positions, now the one that has a great yet OPTIMIZED snippet steals the show, and traffic, and leads. Well, you got what I’m trying to say? Get the snippet in place, and may my business coaching force be with you.
It’s important to be interesting and engaging in every way that you can when you are putting out content for your business. It goes as deep as the meta descriptions on your website. Take them seriously and start implementing more and more ways to drive more traffic through to your website.
We have all clicked through to a website with a URL that has a hundred unique characters and numbers in it. You know, that website that if someone asked you to write down the URL to give them, you might actually start to cry?
Stay away from those types of URLs on your website. With just a quick search on Google or YouTube, you can easily learn to customize the URLs on your website, and this is extremely valuable.
According to Brian Clark, CEO of Copyblogger Google bots are like toddlers. They need to be spoon-fed, and everything within your URL needs to be easily understood.
Imagine the situation above. Imagine that you need to write down the URL to a website. You go up to the search bar to look at the URL, and it is so long that you have to scroll over to write down all of the characters continually. Not only is the URL long, but it also contains a bunch of different characters like exclamation points and question marks.
Wouldn’t you be confused? Wouldn’t it be likely that you will make an error writing down the URL for the website? Or wouldn’t there be a very high likelihood of the person that is reading it making an error when they go to copy it?
The same is true when you talk about this in terms of search engines. The search engines become confused very easily, and if your URL is too long and confusing, it can hurt your search engine rankings.
It is important that your URLs are readable and optimized so that they make sense. Keep them to three or four readable words and do not include many unique characters other than hyphens and slashes. If you can add your keywords- do that.
When you’re looking through business tips and finding the path to becoming a successful entrepreneur, this tip tends to go by the wayside. Search engine optimization is a very big world. There are endless tips and tricks to becoming successful with your search engine optimization strategy, so it is very easy for different tips to be forgotten.
But, this one is very important for the success of boosting your search rankings. Put in the time and build the skills necessary to customize your URLs. Make all of the URLs on your website logical and readable.
This will help to boost your website’s search rankings significantly!
I know, I know I have already spent time talking about the importance of putting out content. But, you will notice that I talked mostly about the type of content that you are publishing. What we did not talk about is the importance of being consistent with your content.
Come on; we have all been there. We come up with a plan where we are going to publish awesome blog content on a weekly basis, but then we get busy. We have other meetings and responsibilities and are unable to publish the amount of content that we need to be publishing.
That’s why business coaching comes very handy- it helps you to create a plan that benefits your business, and you stick to it. A business coach also helps you manage your time and your emotions. Let’s face it if you can’t manage your feelings – you can’t manage your business.
Everything important in our lives requires time, so do search engines.
Your search engine rankings can be significantly boosted from putting out content consistently. So make sure that if you are truly focused on boosting your search engine rankings that your plan includes a consistent content timeline.
You just read so much all of the above. Overwhelming, isn’t it? Yes, of course, but this is one of the best strategies we have today that, when done right, can bring you significant traffic in 2-4 months.
I’ll be honest. I myself had a lot of pain and bruises with SEO. Some “specialists” took advantage of my not understanding the subject, or they just didn’t know what they were doing. Some even managed to ruin what I’ve built before, and I felt helpless. After some time, I felt they were all fraud so that I could trust no one.
It’s ok with me to lose money, but losing time was painful. Thanks to my “never give up” nature, I refuse to fail and being helpless. As a matter of fact, if I feel helpless, I start to study like a maniac. So, I rolled my sleeves up and dug in until I got it.
Frankly, I think that’s what I owe to my reputation of being an expert business coach. I love finding solutions. From my point of view, a business owner should be a versatile problem solver, and if you are a business coach, it goes 10x.
After I got some expertise in SEO, enough to separate fraud from a specialist, I hired an amazing mentor. Yes, I had to pay him a substantial amount, but it paid off in so many ways. I spent months learning and was frustrated at times until one day; it just became easy.
Now my clients tell me in unison that I should open up a marketing agency because they get a business coach and marketing specials all in one. Well, they also know that I have their interests at heart. Maybe by the time you are reading this article, I would actually launch it.
My point here is: you can start slow, but you must start. You will eventually get it.
The bottom line is that if you are trying to grow your business, you need to have an effective search engine optimization strategy. This is not a skill you can go without in the future if you want your business to be successful.
There are literally hundreds of different tips and tricks that can help you to boost your search rankings within search engines such as Google. I think the above tactics are a great place to start. I hope I have given you a clear and honest overview.
We all know that as entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals, we are all in a fight for attention. Many of us have great products or services, and oh my goodness, do we know how to sell it.
But we can’t sell it unless people know who we are. Search engine optimization is one of the most effective ways to get people to know who we are. Start employing the above strategies, and you’ll start to see the benefits that come from an effective search engine optimization strategy.
If you have a lack of inspiration or motivation or are suffering from any entrepreneurial roadblock on your journey, contact us today. We are passionate about helping people eliminate these roadblocks, release overwhelm, and become a better version of themselves daily.
Until next time,
Liana
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