Growing Your Business With SEO the Right Way

Alright, there’s a ton of information out there on SEO and how to do it right. 

But, you’ve probably noticed that there’s so much information that’s simply rehashed and spun to sound unique but really isn’t. 

It’s too bad because SEO done right is one of the best ways to grow your business as there’s so much competition out there and more and more people are using the internet to find products and services. 

So what we’re going to try to do here is make something unique and actually somewhat helpful.

The first thing to understand is that you’re not going to learn SEO overnight. The easiest thing for your business is going to invest an agency or consultant that knows what they’re doing. 

And understand that SEO is an investment. It’s definitely not something that happens overnight, but definitely, something that pays for itself many many times over, when done correctly.

So how is it done correctly? This is a quick guide. If you want to take the time to learn SEO, know that you’re going to be investing thousands (more like tens of thousands) into learning it and getting the web properties. Plus, you’re also going to have put a LOT of time into just the learning—and then there’s the implementation time. But if you’re dead-set on it—here goes. This post is going to focus on the first step—on page SEO.

The first thing in doing correct SEO is getting your on-page done correctly. The single biggest factor in your on-page SEO is your domain name. If you’re trying to rank for something along the lines of HVAC repair, but your domain name is BigJohnsPlumbing, well, that’s going to be a lot harder to rank for HVAC repair–even if your company does do HVAC like a lot of plumbing companies do. (Maybe it’s just in our area; seems like every plumber is also an HVAC guy.) 

So why the hell do we not have SEO in our domain name? Sigh. It’s complicated. Like a complicated love triangle, complicated. Grin.

After the domain name, do you have keywords in your URL? The URL is the second most important place to have a keyword. If you don’t have a keyword in your URL—get a keyword in your URL! So if your company name is BigJohnsPlumbing, but you really want to rank for HVAC and you’re not willing to change your domain name—at least have HVAC-repair in your URL.

Next comes the Titles. Page titles that is. This is going to be that fun little blue title you see when you type in whatever you’re looking for on the net. Do you have any keywords in your page titles? (What about your site title? That one’s actually ridiculously important!) If you don’t have the keyword in your title—effin’ do it!

Next, come your H-tags. These are those paragraph headings you see in a lot of articles. Maybe you’ve even seen them in this post, my savvy reader? There are a few different ones that we’re concerned with: H1s, H2s, and H3s. 

The rule is ONE H1 PER page. Why? Because like the title, this tells the search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) what your page or post is about. If you’ve got more than one H1 (like we see a lot of web designers do . . . shudder . . .) then it’s very confusing–and you’ll get bitchslapped from the search engine. Yep. I said it. 

Now, you also want to have your keywords in your H-tags. If you don’t—you’re wasting valuable resources. And confusing the search engines. 

Is it okay to have more than one H2 you ask? 

Yes. Apparently, it is.

Didn’t seem to use to be a few years ago, but now, it’s fine. And if it makes sense on your page to use multiple H2s, then do so. And by making sense, I mean with like call out boxes, visually, that sort of thing. 

You can use as many H3s as you want. 

The next thing is your content. Yes—if you saw the post about updates, you know what I’m talking about. But if you haven’t; go look at the Google update post. It helps make sense of it all.

Content still isn’t king. But it’s getting a lot more important. So, check your competitors and see how much content they have. What do I mean by that? How many pages and posts do they have? How many words are on the first page? That sort of thing. 

If you need to know who is actually ranking, open up an “incognito window” in Chrome, and type in the phrase you want. That’ll show you. It won’t if you’re in regular search mode, because it remembers your history. 

So that’s on page SEO in a nutshell. 

Sound complicated? 

Not really, right? Well, how about when we make it look natural?

That’s right. Take all of that information I just gave you, and now, make it look natural. Like you’re not trying to be an SEO genius. 

I’ll deal with that in another post.

But in the meantime, keep it dreamy, doll.