laura figueroa-scott

You know when people use terms that supposedly EVERYONE knows?

I will admit I have acted like I know what people around me were talking about just to appear as cool and informed as they did a few times. Well, maybe more than a few times.

One of those moments happened when folks around me were discussing SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or SEO.

Seriously… you see that term all the time and what does it mean and what can it mean for you?

So I found out.

SEO is how you can make your website more visible to search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.). 

As a business owner, it is now very clear to you that the internet is huge. Getting traffic to your site amongst all the other sites can often feel just like this:

SEO can help you be picked out of that crowd regularly when people are searching for your product or service.

Sounds great! How do you start?

1. Write down a list of words and phrases relating to your niche, product, or service.

For example, a list of common keywords for online marketing are:

• seo
• target ad
• digital marketing
• affiliate marketing
• social media marketing
• marketing strategy
• email marketing

Just think about your product or service; each niche has its own set of terms that are used with both business owners and customers. Those are the words that you will want to start using in your social media posts.

2. Use a keyword search tool to discover even more keywords.

Keyword search tools can also tell you which keywords are best to use for your site (some you may not have thought of!) and posts to rank higher when people come looking for your product or service.

This is useful when crafting your posts to target your ideal clients and customers. It’s just another way to talk about what they want to talk about; it takes out a lot of the guesswork.

Many of these tools are paid services but if this is your first time in getting to know what SEO can mean for you and your business, these are two free sites for you to explore:

Moz Keyword Explorer for the best all-around free SEO keyword research tool and
Free Keyword Research Tool for a simple research tool.

3. Look at what your competitors are doing.

These tools can help you discover what keywords your competitors are using to rank higher in search results. This saves you the time of going out to their individual sites or doing a lot of scrolling to find their posts on social media.

Those tools are:

Ahrefs “crawls the web, stores tons of data and makes it accessible” to you.

Semrush gives you an estimate relative to the popularity of your specific keywords plus a whole lot more.

This is powerful information to have for your business to stand out online and get noticed so you can make more sales.

4. Look at what the search engines are suggesting.

Google has an autocomplete feature that people may not be taking a lot of notice of.

As a business owner, this information is gold. Autocomplete in the search field gives you top search terms and phrases for whatever subject your product or service comes under.

For example:

Those are phrases you can use with your keyword search tools as well. If they are showing up here, they are already popular and can be just the phrase you need to move you up in search engine results.

5. Choose your words wisely.

If you have done all the work and searches above, you will have a lot of data to work with. You can now pick and choose among the top 5 – 10 key words and phrases to use in your social media posts and as the hashtags that go with those posts.

It’s important to take the time to refine the terms that you are using as that will drive more targeted prospects to your pages and be suggested to people searching not just on the internet but on whatever social media platforms you have chosen to market your business on.

Going forward, you now have the knowledge to keep current in your marketplace and stay in the top suggestions for search engines.

You will have to revisit this data every so often but as your visibility increases and your brand is built by all of your satisfied customers, you will see that it is worth it to spend the time making SEO work for you.
Have more thoughts about this?

Send me a note at laura@laurafigueroascott.me and we’ll continue the conversation!