Mastering SEO for Long-Term Online Business Success

Ever wondered how to make Google fall in love with your online store? Our deep dive into SEO essentials reveals how search engines like Google work and explores advanced SEO strategies that can take your online presence to the next level. From keyword research to off-page SEO, this episode covers it all. Tune in and take the first step towards mastering SEO for your online business.


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Chapters

• 0:00 SEO Basics for Online Business Success
• 17:02 Advanced SEO Strategies for Online Success

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 2:55

Running an online business involves juggling many tasks, but one of the most important aspects to master is search engine optimization, or SEO for short. Understanding the basics of SEO can significantly impact your website's visibility, traffic and, ultimately, your sales. Today, we're going to break down the essentials of SEO, giving you the knowledge you need to start optimizing your website effectively. So join me as we explore the world of SEO and how it can benefit your online business. Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine month old my main goal to help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry, and even more than that in web development, I've seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast. Today, we're focusing on one of the most critical components of running a successful online business SEO, or search engine optimization. Think of SEO like it's the heartbeat of your website. Without it, you'll need to have ads and all this work put onto social media to keep traffic going to it. Sure, ads and social media can be great for growing your audience and there are times when one or both of those are very appropriate for a business. But SEO is your long game. It continues to work for you time and time again after the social media and the ads disappear. While I do believe that regular social media presence is necessary in today's world, what happens if you get sick? What if you're out for several weeks or several months? Unless you have staff posting for you, all your social media traffic will disappear. Nobody's going to see the posts from weeks ago, right? So with SEO, it always exists. It's always there for you, providing new traffic to your website. It's a long game, like I've said, and it takes time to build, but it's very well worth it being a long game. Sometimes you put energy into something and then it continuously brings you revenue. Yes, of course you want that right, and you can't say that about an ad or social media post unless you're reusing and regurgitating your content a lot, and even then those things only last for a little bit of time.

Carrie Saunders: 5:26

Before diving into the specifics of SEO. It's important to understand what search engines like Google do and how they work. Search engines use algorithms to crawl the web, index pages and rank them based on relevance and quality. Now, that's a lot of text speaking a lot of words, so let's break that down. What does that really mean? So what search engines really are is they are a bunch of computer systems that sit in the background and go and look for websites out on the Internet. They read all the pages on the Internet. They read each individual page likely on your website and try to figure out what is the most important topic on this specific page. What are they trying to convey to users on this page? So that's what it means. By crawling and indexing the web is they're looking through all the websites and gathering the information about it, and then they take the information they gather from it and try to make the best guess on what that page is about, and then rank them appropriately and put them in the search results, based upon lots of things that we're going to talk about in this episode, like reputation and your content, and things like that.

Carrie Saunders: 6:34

Your goal with SEO, though, is to make your website as attractive as possible to these algorithms. And also, again, let's not let that scare you, because the algorithms nowadays are much more tuned to what would be attractive to a consumer. So when you're making your pages attractive to consumer, you're also doubly making your pages attractive to Google and other major search engines. So how do we get started? First, we want to do some keyword research. It is the foundation of SEO. I'm sure you've heard it before and sometimes it can sound really scary, but really it's not too bad.

Carrie Saunders: 7:13

What you need to be thinking about is what are the topics and the things that you describe you and your business as? Are you an online coach? What type of online coach? Get really specific here. Do you sell actual physical products? Let's say, you sell treats. Maybe you sell specialty dog treats. Maybe they're gluten-free or green-free or organic. You know, think about these very specific phrases that you use to describe you and your business and what you're selling. And then you want to utilize that Really. Brainstorm here and don't let anything really hold you up or get in the way. Just write down everything that you can think of that people might use to describe you and your business and then, once you get it, make it even more specific. So, if you feel like the words you came up with are generic, not a problem. Start using the internet and finding a bit more specific words. So, like I said, like if you're only thinking of like dog treats or something like that, let's get really specific. Is it grain-free dog treats? Is it grain-free dog treats in a specific region? So, say, you're a local store that sells online as well. Maybe it's grain-free treats in Athens, ohio, where we're located, so you might want to use some of those words on your website.

Carrie Saunders: 8:31

Now, the one thing you really need to keep in mind, though, is when you're working on a web page, a specific page, you want to concentrate the keywords on that page around one focused topic. So think about it as if you were writing an article to your English teacher back in school. You don't want to have a paper that's about all kinds of different topics, like cat treats and dog treats and iguana treats. I'm just throwing out some words here. Like you don't want to have one article that's about all of those things, right, your teacher's going to get you on that. They're going to be like you need to be focused here, and Google and search engines are the same thing. You need to focus on one specific topic per page. So let's say it's grain-free dog treats, and the reason I come up with that a lot is we need to have grain-free products in our house because I'm celiac, so grain-free dog treats is pretty specific and so your page needs to have content about grain-free dog treats.

Carrie Saunders: 9:34

Well, when you're creating a paper, say you're the English teacher, what are you going to look for? You're going to look for the title of the paper to have that main idea in it grain-free dog treats. You're going to want to have supporting paragraphs talking about grain-free dog treats, maybe the benefits of them, what ingredients to look for, what ingredients not to look for? So supporting headings along with supporting paragraphs to support that main topic. So when you're building out your website, utilize those elements that you can pick. When you're building them out in, say, wordpress or your content management system or your e-commerce system, use those elements, the heading elements, to further support that. We also like to use bolded words and italic words on the web too. So use that as well to really emphasize those main key points. And you can also use your URL structure.

Carrie Saunders: 10:32

So this is a little bit more specific to the web and techie, but your link up at the top it should have those keywords in it as well, as well as the internal linking. So let's say you have gluten-free dog treats but you also have another article on grain-free dog treats. You can link to that other article the grain-free dog treats from your gluten-free article, but make sure you have the words find out more about grain-free dog treats here and make sure you are linking the find out more about grain-free dog treats. That's the important part. Link the important words in your link, not just the click here part, if that makes sense. It's a little easier to show you on an actual computer, but make sure your links have the keywords in it when you're linking. So that's called internal linking. So we just did something kind of techie there, but it really is not that techie. You've just got to be purposeful and really think about what are you doing on the website that shows to Google and your customers that this set of words is really important.

Carrie Saunders: 11:38

Also, your content quality needs to be very high. So you don't want to have a page that is very few words. Google likes to see and other major search engines. People stay on a page for a decent amount of time. So if your page only has a few words, like a few hundred words, they're not going to stay on a page for a decent amount of time. So if your page only has a few words, like a few hundred words, they're not gonna stay on there very long. Now if you have this really nice thoughtful article about the benefits of them, where you can find them, what they can do for you, the different various ingredients you can find in them and why some ingredients are better than others, then you're gonna capture the attention of the consumer, hopefully, and have them read your article a lot longer and stay on your website a lot longer. That tells search engines because they track this that that was very important to consumers. So when you're having somebody stay on your website a little bit longer, that also helps here. So this all kind of flows together.

Carrie Saunders: 12:34

You want to have your keywords one main idea per page. Support it with your title, support it with headings, support it with your paragraph words too, and then you can support it with links to or from that webpage and you can support it with the URL. Having the website link URL is the same thing as a website link having those keywords in it as well as making sure your content is quality and high quality and people will stay there and be interested in your article. So we kind of smashed a whole bunch in there, but they're all really work well together and once you start mastering that, it's going to become so much easier. So don't let any of that scare. You Start step at a time. First, start with your main idea and your headings and your paragraphs and make sure they all focus towards the keyword you're optimizing for that page. Then you want to make sure that URL structure is in place, your website link You're going to want to do this that at the same time as creating your article, that it has your keywords in it, and then the internal linking can be refined later if you want and making sure the quality is really high. Once you see whether people are staying on the article very long, then you can work to improve it.

Carrie Saunders: 13:46

So next we want to go a little bit into technical SEO, but let's not let this scare you too much. Technical SEO really isn't that technical, unless you kind of need to fix something. So bear with me here. So, since people are getting so much better at the content version of SEO, having their content really good. We need to.

Carrie Saunders: 14:07

You know, major search engines are now looking for other things and that's called technical SEO and some of that includes like being your website being fast. They want basically fast, high quality pages to present to the users. They want their users to get the best experience possible. So even if you have this really great article but your website is gruelingly slow and it takes forever to load or things move around whenever it does load and that's poor, you know, that's poor experience for the end user. So technical SEO just really kind of means what kind of experience are they getting on your website when they are seeing it? Is the web page fast to load? Do the menu items show up where they start to show up? And what I mean by that is sometimes you'll see a web page start to load and an image will be in one place, but then when the page is finished loading, the image is somewhere else or a menu item is somewhere else. That's called a cumulative layout shift. So that's shifting your layout of your website. So they don't want to see that. They want things to be presented where they are from the beginning and stay there.

Carrie Saunders: 15:17

So while that might sound a little bit technical, it isn't too hard to check for these things. So, first of all, site speed that's not too hard to check and we will link in the show notes to some really nice, easy, free tools to check for site speed. Google has one as well as we have two other tools, and we like to use a mix of them to really get a better idea of your site speed. Now, using the Google one is definitely free and it's a really good idea to use, because that's really what Google is kind of measuring you on. But I do like to get the perspectives of these other two places we will link to in the show notes. Also, we want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly. Now, when you check your website for speed with Google, it's actually going to make you aware whether there's mobile issues too. You can also sign up for Google Search Engine Console, which will also help you alert you when you have issues on mobile-ness, mobile friendliness, I should say. So these things are a little bit more techie and if you feel like you're a little bit overwhelmed on things like that, then definitely contact somebody like us or somebody that's trusted for search engine optimization to help you with these things, because they're generally not too hard to fix, but it's something I want to make sure everybody's aware of, because if you have somebody promising you search engine optimization services, they shouldn't be just doing the content. They should also be monitoring these other things like site speed, mobile responsiveness Is your site like, laying out in the manner that you intend it to, or do things shift as it loads? Those are very, very important to search engines right now, and so you need to make sure that you're aware so you're hiring the right person too, even if you aren't fixing these things yourself.

Carrie Saunders: 17:02

We can also go into things like a sitemap. Almost every application now has a sitemap, so I'm only going to mention it briefly here, but just make sure you have a sitemap for your website. If you don't know what that is, just drop us an email. We'll also put a little link in the show notes to get a little bit more information about it. I don't want to go into it in the podcast. It would be really boring, especially if I'm not showing you what a sitemap looks like, and it's just pretty much code-based, so some people's eyes will glaze over on it Even mine do, and I can read what it's saying. And then we want to make sure your website's secure, and this is something that's been around for at least a year or two, where Google has required websites to have an SSL certificate or have that secure bar across the top. So if you don't have that already, you should, and if you don't, please contact your hosting provider. They should fix that for you. It's just standard nowadays and it's not expensive anymore either. Okay, so that was a bit of technical stuff, but let's go next to our last section in SEO basics is off page SEO. Next to our last section in SEO basics is off page SEO. What that means is search engine optimization that's not on your website.

Carrie Saunders: 18:14

So other things out there in the Internet universe affect your search engine optimization, including backlinks. What a backlink is is when somebody else's website links to your website. Somebody else's website links to your website. The more links you have coming into your website from other websites, the more Google will see your website as important. There is one caveat here is that those websites need to have a good reputation themselves. So back maybe, say, 10 years ago or so, there used to be these linking farms where you could like, pay or, or, or you know, submit your stuff to these places that would link back to you and it was just a way to kind of spam Google and to boost yourselves in search engine rankings. So those things are a thing of the past. Please do not use them. They are not effective. They will actually hinder your search engine optimization. But when you have somebody truly linking to your website because you have good content, because you have that great article about grain-free dog treats, for example, that really boosts your ranking in Google because they see, oh, this important website over here really likes this article, it must be important, it must give good value to users. So getting purposeful backlinks to your website is a great.

Carrie Saunders: 19:35

Next step, once you've mastered the basics we've already talked about again, be mindful about this Don't just tell anybody, don't just go ask or let anybody link to your website, that you've not already vetted and made sure that they have a quality website as well. And then, obviously, social media links back into your website are also good. Now, when we talk about social media marketing, you can't have all your social media posts linking to your website, because then that seems spammy on the social media side. But having those occasional links back to your website from social media does help you and is good for you. And finally, search engine optimization isn't a set it or forget it.

Carrie Saunders: 20:17

Granted, when you do the work, it does reap benefits in the long term, but search engine optimization does change as technology changes. So as long as you're keeping an eye on it and listening to the podcast, for example. But search engine optimization does change as technology changes. So as long as you're keeping an eye on it and listening to the podcast, for example, reading some articles occasionally, you're going to stay up to date and make sure that you're still doing the best practices Because, as I've even given examples, there used to be ways to boost your rankings that now aren't viable anymore. And really, when you just focus mostly on giving that great customer experience to your customers, that's going to help you with search engine optimization.

Carrie Saunders: 20:54

So always keep the consumer in mind when you're working on your website and your content on your website, and you can use fancy tools out there to monitor your search engine rankings if you want. It's usually more cost effective to hire somebody to do this for you when you get big enough, because they already have the tools to pay for the tools and then they're monitoring it and you can do the things that you're really good at. So I do recommend, once you're big enough if you're not already to have this hired out. It could be even a small retainer a month, depending upon your business scale and what your goals are, but it's definitely not a one-stop thing and you do it and you get done. You usually have to tweak it a little bit as you go, and it's really a lot less overwhelming to tweak and adjust a website to stay up to date with search engine optimization than it is to start from scratch. So don't let that don't let that hinder you in doing any search engine optimization, because it really does reap the benefits in the very, very, very long term. All right, so hopefully that was helpful for you.

Carrie Saunders: 22:01

Understanding search engine optimization and implementing it Shouldn't be scary. Take it one step at a time. It can significantly improve your online business and your visibility and your success. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. If you found this episode or any of our other episodes helpful, we would be grateful if you shared it with your online business friends as well. And please rate us on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us get our reach out there and it helps us help other business owners just like you, and we love hearing your feedback and suggestions. Feel free to drop them to our email, at podcast, at bcsengineeringcom, and also wherever you're listening. We have a cool little button in the show notes where you can send us a text message right directly from your phone. So if you have any feedback or comments, feel free to do that. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you're listening and we will see you next week.