What IS SEO?
by Zhe Scott, The SEO Queen seoqueen.com
I built my first website in 1996 as a freshman at MIT. During this time it was intuitively obvious that websites were a big deal.
I remember what my first website looked like. It had my high school senior night photo at the top, a gear gif, followed by some text.
When I was at the Sloan school absorbing what I could about building websites and technology I graduated from MIT before search engines evolved beyond the directory site that Yahoo was.
I am sharing this story with you because we all know that the value of a website and seo is intuitive. However how do you use a website to make money? It’s simple. You want your website to be visible to your best prospects with the highest likelihood of becoming customers.
So as a business owner I know you are thinking: what does that even mean? I sell my services to anyone that needs it.
Now here is where you are wrong. I am speaking to both you and me here. I used to think that my personality was for everyone. However as time goes on I realize that I am an acquired taste. Having a child and being a parent forces you to really be real with yourself. This reflection is necessary for your business too.
Are your best customers male or female? Hispanic, Asian, White or Black? High Net worth individuals, Upper Middle class, Lower Middle class or poor? How do my customers like to talk about my products and services? Do they call it seo or digital marketing? Do they prefer shopify or wordpress? These are examples of questions that you really need to ask yourself to visualize your best customer. This visualization exercise is very important to being to tap into the essence of the thoughts that cause your target demographic to pull the trigger and buy.
Let’s face it. Creating a narrative that specifically describes your target demographic is tough. However it is necessary.
Let’s use The SEO Queen as a guinea pig. Without clarity around our niche we are just an seo company, an seo agency. However once we got clear about our best customers and that they were black owned businesses, woman owned business, and tech focused companies we realized that we can niche down to black owned seo company and more keywords like that.
So I want to know: who do you serve? Do you serve women, men? Do you serve busy entrepreneurs? What type of revenue or lifestyle does your target business or customer have?
Now since we know what our niche is, never forget that you are never done with this exercise. You are always improving your understanding of who and why people purchase products from you. Once you understand the who and the why you can take your unique service proposition and ask the question: What is seo?
At this point, seo is how you will take your website and connect it to your avatar that you described that is looking for you.
You will begin to niche down and brainstorm keywords that your target customer gets out of bed at night and google. You will know if they are a single mom or family and how they would search to match their situation and demographic.
Example: credit repair for single moms, CPA for plumbing companies, black owned seo companies.
Once you have 1) Niched down and described your best customer 2) Brainstormed a list of possible phrases that they would use to find you, Now your are ready for SEO.
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of making your pretty website a cash machine. Right before I started writing this article I responded to 2 emails from my website due to seo. It works.
The basic steps of SEO are: 1) Keyword Research 2) On page Optimization 3) Off Page Optimization. These three areas give you 200+ opportunities to make your website look Amazing for Google.
Keyword Research
This is when you use tools like The SEO Queen’s keyword research tool to identify your best keywords. Your best keywords have a high search volume and low competition.
On page Optimization
This is where you take your keywords and integrate them into the code and content of your website. You make sure that your website is loading fast, has proper security, and is mobile friendly.
Off Page Optimization
This is where you use backlinks to increase the authority and popularity of your website so that you come up in search engine results more frequently and higher on Google Page 1.
If you want to delve deeper into SEO, please claim your free case study from the SEO Queen. Just click this link
Zhelinrentice Scott
Email: zhe@theseoqueen.net
Phone: 617-475-0964
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