What is Search Engine Optimization and how can it help your Nashville business?
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is a strategy to get more visitors to your business’ website. Simply put, SEO is the idea that most people are finding your website through search engines and that you can use strategic keywords in your website content to reach more potential customers.
Over 3.5 billion Google searches are made every day. Are those customers able to find you in their Google results?
This guide will outline the basics of SEO and is by no means an exhaustive resource.
There are three steps to implementing Search Engine Optimization on your website:
1. Select your keywords
To select the keywords you’d like to target, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you were looking for the products or services that your business provides, what would you type into the Google search bar? For a barbecue restaurant here in the Nashville region, those keywords might be “Nashville BBQ”, “barbecue”, “BBQ restaurant”, “southern food Nashville” or even “bbq near me”.
After brainstorming, try typing your keyword ideas into a Google search. Does your website show up? How far down the page are you? Do you have to go to the second or third page to find your business?
If you are not on the first page of results, then you have just found some great keywords to target in your SEO.
2. Incorporate those keywords into your website content
Once you’ve chosen keywords to target, take a look at your website. How many times do those keywords appear on any of the pages of your site?
To show up in search results, you need to make sure your SEO keywords are included throughout your website content. Making sure your pages include these keywords a few times will improve your Google search ranking.
You can also start writing blogs or articles on the keywords you’d like to target. Blogs also exponentially increase your chances of ending up of the first page for a targeted keyword, since every article can help boost your overall website.
3. Measure and track results over time
Search Engine Optimization doesn’t happen overnight. Results take time, which can cause impatient marketers to abandon their SEO strategy before it can bear fruit.
When you make changes to your website content or write a blog, the pages must be crawled indexed by the search engines. Click here to learn more about the crawling and indexing process for Google.
The time it takes for content changes or a new blog post to be indexed varies, but you can expect to start seeing results in 4-6 months. However, these results will continue to grow over time, so you can expect to see full SEO results in 12 months.
After you begin changing or creating content that hits your SEO keywords, check your website analytics to see if news traffic is being brought in by your content. If you’re seeing now improvement after 4 months, your strategy may not be aggressive enough to get the results you want, or your keywords may not be appropriate. Analyze your results over time to make sure your Search Engine Optimization strategy is really working for your business.