Understanding what SEO stands for – Search Engine Optimization – is essential to digital marketing success. Search Engine Optimization is a process designed to increase both the quantity and quality of relevant traffic your website receives from other search engines like Google through web pages or a blog post.
The ultimate goal?
To make sure that when potential customers type relevant search queries into the Google search search engine results pages, it’s your site and/or blog post that they see at the top of those results.
We’re not talking about paid search results—those that are marked as ‘Ad’—but those that appear naturally for free (well almost).
But there’s more than just pleasing search engine algorithms; creating an optimal user experience should be an integral part of any successful strategy too.
Developing an SEO Strategy can seem like a daunting task. This process, often shrouded in technical jargon and complex strategies, is critical for any business looking to increase its online visibility.
But fear not!
We’re here to demystify the world of SEO marketing, breaking it down into manageable steps that anyone can follow.
No matter your expertise or familiarity, this manual will assist you in comprehending the complexities of optimizing your own site for search engines.
You’ll learn about keyword research tools, content creation strategies, link-building techniques, on and off page SEO, and much more.
THE POWER OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) IN CONTENT MARKETING
As coaches, therapists, and wellness practitioners navigate the digital marketing landscape, one tool continues to stand out: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Unlike traditional organic social media marketing platforms like Instagram or Facebook, Search Engines like Google provide a unique opportunity to business owners who enjoy creating quality content and want to leverage the power of organic search results to generate more traffic to their websites and their businesses.
Prefer a more interactive visual experience? You can explore our free 90-minute on-demand workshop for scaling without social media to understand the core principles of how search engines work and how you can leverage SEO to ditch social media altogether by clicking here.
Understanding Inbound versus Outbound Search Intent
Why is SEO marketing so great?—we’ll be comparing Social Media Marketing and SEO Marketing to find out.
When creating content for social media, the average marketer is focused on creating content that will interrupt or disrupt the user to grab their attention and get them to pay attention to what they have to say. This is often where we see wild and outlandish content produced on social media platforms, which heavily focuses on quantity rather than quality.
I will explain the full concept of the Attention Merchant Business model in the blog post here along with a complete podcast episode.
Inbound SEO Strategy
On the flip side, Search Engine Optimization is very much the opposite experience where that same user is choosing to actively seek out information online using search engines like Google to ask questions and find answers.
Instead of you having to compete and keep up with the trends on social, the user, through the power of a well optimized SEO strategy, finds your epic blog posts and other websites that have all of the relevant information to answer their question and end their search.
The user is coming to you, hence the term INBOUND. Alternatively, with cold outreach, direct marketing, and social media marketing, YOU (the business) are actively pursuing clients and reaching OUT to capture their attention, hence the term OUTBOUND marketing.
SEO Optimized Content Versus Social Media Content
Unlike traditional social media posts that have an average lifespan of 30 minutes to 48 hours, the average blog post ranking on the Google search console averages a minimum of ONE to THREE YEARS of continuous growth and visibility.
You can see the comparative growth outlined below.
The Power Of Blog Posts
Additionally, your SEO efforts go even further by providing the opportunity for you to compound the amount of site traffic and website visitors month after month and year after year which continues to build the reputation of your entire site content and position you as a leading expert in your niche.
In the example above, we can see how the blog posted in 2019 with a minimal amount of 18 monthly views continue to grow in it’s reach and engagement over the course of the last 4 years and is averaging 802+ views every single month through google search, you can see the full blog post from this example on our business partner’s blog here.
We can also see from the image above, how this single blog post is also ranking for other related keywords and keyword phrases with varying search volume.
Search Volume is an important metric to measure that identifies the average amount of monthly searches for any specific key phrase or key term based on a complex algorithm used by search engines.
The higher the search volume, the more traffic potential there is for any specific key phrase or topic.
In order to understand how SEO strategies can benefit your own site and business, it’s important to understand how search intent works.
Search intent is a technical term used to describe what the user is actively looking for, there are a few different types of search intent that are important for you to know:
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Informational
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Transactional
Informational Search Intent tells search engines that the user is looking for information relating to a specific topic.
This can be identified by using terms such as “how to” or “what is” or “step by step” within the search queries or questions- aka the phrase you type into the google search console.
Transactional search intent is about helping the user identify information pertaining to making a purchase and often is paired with terms like “best” “top” or “versus” which provides search results often related to articles that compare the top products or services in any niche or industry.
How To Get Your Site’s Pages to Rank #1 on Google
These words or phrases are known as keywords and are critical to helping search engines find and match relevant content with relevant queries.
In the image linked above, we can see the search results when we create a google search for the phrase “Branding and Web Design Packages” and what other sites are currently ranking for the primary keyword “branding and webdesign”.
In this example, the particular page that is ranking for this term is our business partner, Mel Judson and her homepage that has been optimized to rank #1 on Google Search for this term.
We can also see in the image, the other sites that are competing to rank for the same keyword or key phrase.
We’ve broken down a simple overview of how the organic search process works in the image below.
HOW TO RESEARCH KEYWORDS YOU CAN ACTUALLY RANK FOR
Now that you’ve started to understand the way search engines work, the next step is exploring how to leverage different SEO tools to analyze and create a powerful digital marketing strategy.
There are different types of keywords you can try to write for, below is a brief overview of the main types of keywords and the benefits of each:
The Primary Keyword is the larger topic of what you are looking to explore and can often times be seen as 1-2 word phrases like “Business” or “Online Marketing” which tend to have a much higher search volume (SV) but with higher SV, comes higher competition and difficulty ranking especially for a new site that has minimal link building or on page SEO built into it.
If you’ve never created and SEO Strategy before, it’s crucial you focus on long tail and short tail keywords to target for your blog posts that have a lower SV but are easier to rank for because there’s less competition.
Short Tail Versus Long Tail Keywords
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Short Tail Keywords – these are keywords made up of 2-4 words that have some specificity but often have a higher search volume since they’re more general terms.
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Long Tail keywords – these are keywords made up of 5 or more words and often referred to as keyword phrase, long tail, or LTKW and focus on a very specific topic that often is correlated with lower search volume because of how niche it is an example of long tail keywords are “Online Business Course For Stay At Home Moms” or “How To Create A Boho Mirror DIY On A Budget” by adding more words to the search, we’re getting more specific and telling search engines exactly what we’re looking for.
So HOW do you find keywords you can rank for?
There are two SEO tools we recommend to all clients:
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Ahrefs – This is the number one keyword research tool for any serious blogger or online business that’s leading the way in SEO tools optimized for ranking but comes at a higher ticket price of $99/month for their base plan. If the ticket price isn’t in your price range, the next option is below.
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Ubersuggest – If you’re looking for a more cot effective keyword tool, uberuggest is a great option that offers daily SEO tips along with an entire library of information on how search engines work along with SEO new and updates and costs $29/month.
KEY METRICS TO AIM FOR KEYWORDS
Not all Keywords are created equal.
Keywords are one of the core components of on page optimization that control your web pages ranking and how you can help your overall site or any specific page of your site start to rank for the keywords you want to be found for.
Attached below is a graph from our SEO course for online business owners demonstrating the 4 core KPI’s for choosing the optimal Keywords for your site and blog posts:
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Newer blogs are aiming to have a medium to low SV with under 1000 people searching every month to have a higher chance of ranking.
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We want to see a decent amount of traffic potential meaning how many folks we can expect to visit our site from that word but again, lower traffic is fine when just getting started.
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Keyword Difficulty is one of the more important measurements and something you need to look out for when picking words to rank for. If you’re a brand new blogger or have never created an SEO Strategy before, ensure you are only picking keywords with a KD under 10-13. If you have a decent amount of SEO built into your site, you can target more difficult keywords with a higher score.
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Cost Per Click is a less important metric unless you’re running an SEO strategy that focuses on paid advertising, but it’s helpful to see how much marketers are willing to pay to be placed on the first page of Google.
USER EXPERIENCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON SEARCH RANKINGS
Apart from driving traffic and increasing visibility, good user experience also impacts how well you rank in SERPs. For instance, Google confirmed last year that Core Web Vitals will become ranking signals moving forward.
If you’re interested in furthering your knowledge about such trends, check out resources like online courses or blogs dedicated to staying updated with changes in the world of search engine optimization.
To have a successful SEO strategy, you must first understand the fundamentals of on page seo and off page seo to ensure your quality content isn’t getting docked visibility and reach due to lack of proper setup on the front AND backend.
On Page and Off Page SEO Metrics That Matter
On page or on-site SEO refers to everything that’s within the actual blog posts or web pages of your site and how you’ve structured data in a way that’s easy for search engines to crawl and understand.
KEYWORDS
If you’ve done your proper keyword research, you’ll know exactly what keywords you want to be ranking for and want to ensure you’re including those keywords throughout your blog posts and web pages.
It’s crucial that your main keyword you want a specific page to rank for is within the page title and ideally within the slug URL of the page. For example, when targeting the keyword, SEO Coach, I’ll include SEO Coach in the TITLE of the blog post and in the URL i.e. sophiekessner.com/seo-coach to help search engines quickly understand what the page is about.
AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING
Keyword stuffing is a form of black hat SEO that involves trying to manipulate algorithmic systems in order to rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) without necessarily offering real value to users visiting the page.
We see this when other websites will add in unnecessary sentences, or hide text on the page to try incorporating relevant keywords throughout but there isn’t any real value behind the content on the page.
Sometimes these techniques can seem tempting as quick-fix solutions, but beware: not only do they often lead to poor customer satisfaction rates – even if they initially manage to fool bots behind the scenes, soon enough major players like Google and other search engines understand and will penalize accordingly, causing significant damage to reputation and rankings that far outweigh temporary gains made at the outset.
PROPER STRUCTURED DATA
Another core principle of on page SEO is understanding how to properly organize the content of your blog or website in a way that Search Engines can easily read.
This includes using proper Title Tags such as H1, H2, H3, H4 throughout your site.
H1 should always be reserved for the Title of the page and only used once.
H2 is used to break up sections of the content and should be used sparingly
H3 is like a subsection of H2 and should be neatly organized under that topic
H4 is the additional sub section of H3 that takes it even deeper and helps to organize complex ideas or topics.
Remember, even if you’re creating high quality content and done your keyword research, if you’re not properly creating the content on the page, your SEO strategy will suffer.
GOOGLE IMAGES AND ALT TEXT
When creating content, it’s also important for you to include google Images that can be indexed by the search engine crawlers through the form of alt text.
Alt text is the way you describe the image to a search engine like Google. It’s essentially a description of the image since search engines are unable to crawl an image itself, they use alt text to read and understand what the image is about.
Alt text is different than the actual title of the image you’re using but should also be correlated to it. An example of Alt text is having an image of a dog and using “Golden Retriever on Grass” in the alt text to help improve organic traffic from both Google Images and any other search engine where a user may also be looking to find an image or blog about a Golden Retriever.
For more complex graphics, it’s helpful to include an SEO strategy. This includes providing a detailed explanation of the graphic and using keywords in the description to improve organic traffic.
META DESCRIPTIONS AND META TAGS
Meta descriptions are a tool used to provide a brief summary of the page as a way to encourage increased click through rates from organic traffic that comes through search results.
Essentially, whenever someone searches for something on Google or any other search engine, they land on what’s known as the SERP or Search Engine Results Page. On this page, they aren’t able to read every blog in detail BUT they can see a meta description under the title of every blog.
This meta description is under 180 characters and briefly summarizes what kind of quality content the user can expect to find by clicking on the link.
Though having a meta description isn’t directly on the page of your blog or web page, it’s a crucial factor to increase organic traffic from search results.
Here you can see an example of a meta description used for one of our blog posts.
Notice how the meta description includes keywords relevant to the blog post as well as providing a snippet of what the reader can expect by clicking over.
If you notice that you’re not seeing a huge click through rate even though you’re ranking on Google, it’s important to review your meta description and compare it with other websites on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to see how you can improve.
OFF SITE SEO LINK BUILDING AND INTERNAL LINKING
If you pay any attention to SEO news from other SEO coaches or consultants in the industry, one of the biggest topics you’ll hear about is off-site SEO link building and internal linking.
Off-Page SEO refers to acquiring backlinks from other websites to your own. This external effort can involve various tactics such as guest posting, where you write content for another site with a link back to yours; the Skyscraper technique, which involves creating content that’s better than existing linked content and encouraging those linkers to link to your piece instead; and broken link building, where you identify broken links on other sites and suggest your content as a replacement.
Internal Link Building, on the other hand, involves linking from one page on your website to another page. This is crucial for SEO success as it helps distribute page authority and ranking power throughout your site.
When you add internal links to your website, it’s important to use anchor text that includes relevant keywords from related pages. This helps search engines understand the content on your website and can improve your search engine rankings.
Internal links also enhances user navigation. Users can easily navigate to other relevant pages on the same site, without the need to search elsewhere. Additionally, internal linking can help to improve site structure making it easy for search engines to understant the relations between your pages and content.
Remember, you want to add internal links on every page of your site. Otherwise, you may get hit with warnings from your SEO tools such as an “orphaned page”—which refers to a page with no incoming links.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is an important process that involves optimizing a website’s infrastructure and make it more search engine friendly. It mainly focuses on the website’s technical aspects such as its code, rather than the content itself or the website’s promotion. Tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console can help you identify these errors.
The goal of technical optimization is to improve the site’s readability, making it easy for search engines to understand and process, and to provide a good user experience that shows the website is of high quality.
To optimize your website’s crawlability, you need to manage your robots.txt files, use sitemaps effectively, and avoid duplicate content issues. It’s also essential to have a well-structured website with clear navigation that can help users and search engines find content more efficiently. A flat site architecture is generally.
URLs play an important role in technical SEO. They should be concise, relevant to your content, and easy for both users and search engines to understand. Additionally, minimizing 404 errors and setting up 301 redirects properly helps maintain a good user experience and transfer link equity from old URLs to new ones.
MOBILE SEO & PAGE SPEED FOR SEARCH ENGINES
Most online business owners have a desktop site they love, but in today’s modern world, it’s crucial we are also checking for mobile seo which refers to how easy it is to navigate a site on mobile.
Mobile SEO can be simple components such as how easy it is to read the text on the page, image load time, how big the buttons are, the color contrast of the colors on the page etc. That all impact how a user experiences your site and overall, the mobile SEO ranking for your site.
Page Speed is one of the more important variables for any SEO strategy and has to do with how quickly a site on your page loads. This might seem like a rudimentary topic but it’s crucial for anyone serious about content marketing to recognize the impact of a slow loading site and how that will often deter users from visiting or reading anything you’ve written, regardless of much how high quality website content you create.
If your site is too slow, it’s time to dive into more technical optimization strategies to improve your overall load time and ranking.
Local SEO
Local SEO empowers brick and mortar businesses to effectively optimize their online presence, allowing them to attract more local business and establish a stronger connection with their community. With the right approach, businesses can significantly improve their search engine rankings and ultimately drive more traffic to their physical locations.
Google Business Profile
One of the most effective strategies for enhancing your local SEO is to create and optimize a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). Having a profile on Google Business can significantly impacting your website’s visibility in local search results, particularly the local map pack.
The local map pack is an important section of Google’s search results, which displays the top three local business listings relevant to the user’s search query, along with a map. Ranking in this section can significantly improve your business’s online visibility.
A fully optimized Google Business Profile includes complete information, regular updates, quality photos, and management of customer reviews.
The impact of such efforts is notable. Statistics show a surge in “Near Me” search queries by over 200%. Furthermore, Google Business profiles have been shown to produce substantial interactions, with over half leading to website visits.
What’s more impressive is that more than 5% of Google Business Profile views result in a conversion, such as booking an appointment, requesting more information, or making a purchase.
Local Business Listings
Local business listings are an essential aspect of local SEO. They refer to mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on other web pages, including local business directories, websites, apps, and social media platforms.
To build local citations, start with reputable directories such as Yelp, Foursquare, and your local Chamber of Commerce’s website. After that, you can expand to industry-specific directories.
Make sure your NAP information is accurate and consistent across all platforms. Inconsistencies in your business’s NAP information can confuse Google and your potential customers, leading to negative impacts on your local SEO. You can find tools like Bright Local to help you manage your business listings.
DON’T FORGET TO SPY ON YOUR COMPETITORS
The success of your competitors is a testament to the possibilities of what you can achieve in your industry. By closely observing their SEO techniques, you can gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. This knowledge can help you refine your business SEO efforts and stay on top of market trends. Remember, your competitors are not your enemies but, rather, a source of inspiration and learning.
Competitors can be divided into two categories: direct competitors and indirect competitors. Direct competitors are those who offer products or services similar to yours. For example, if you’re selling athletic shoes, your direct competitors would be other companies that sell athletic shoes.
Indirect competitors, on the other hand, target the same audience as you but with different offerings. For example, if you’re selling athletic shoes, your indirect competitors might include companies that sell sports equipment or fitness apparel.
You can use various tools, including Semrush and Google, to identify your competitors. Semrush is a comprehensive SEO and PPC tool that can help you analyze your competitors’ online presence, including their search rankings and advertising strategies. Google, on the other hand, can help you identify your competitors by conducting a simple search for your product or service and seeing who else is offering something similar. Using these tools, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies and improve your marketing and sales efforts.
Next, you want to review their website structure, design, and content. Take a close look at how they’ve used keywords throughout the site. Pay close attention to the placement and frequency of those keywords.
In terms of on-page SEO, check your competitor’s website’s speed, which can significantly impact user experience and mobile search rankings. Look into how they’ve structured their URLs, meta tags, and social media integration.
Conducting content gap analysis can provide a strategic advantage to your business as well. To do this, you need to understand the topics they cover, the depth of their coverage, and how they address the needs and questions of their target audience. By doing so, you can find areas that are not covered or underserved. This presents an opportunity for you to create content that fills these gaps. This approach is a powerful way to attract an audience looking for information that your competitors are not providing.
Analyzing the backlink profiles of your competitors can provide strategic insights into how they are acquiring these valuable links, the quality of the sites linking back to them, and the types of content that are most successful in earning backlinks. This can also help you identify potential opportunities for your own link-building efforts.
Competitor analysis is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. By keeping track of the latest search algorithms and your competitors’ strategies, you can evaluate your own business’s strengths and weaknesses.
Building Your Unique SEO Strategy
Now it’s time to put it all together and create your own SEO Strategy.
STEP 1. KEYWORD RESEARCH
Conduct proper research for your own business and track performance over time using tools such as Ubersuggest, Ahrefs or Google Analytics can reveal areas needing improvement as well as successes worth continuing to build upon in future efforts.
Choose a list of 10-15 Keywords you want to target based on the Keyword KPIs shared about above.
STEP 2. OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE FOR SEO
Go through your entire website and ensure you’ve optimized all of the variables talked about in the on page and off page SEO section to enhance your sites loading speed, mobile optimization, alt text, proper titles, headings, structured data and more.
Remove any broken links or broken images and use free tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest to help you see where else you can improve your overall site score for readability to improve your ranking.
STEP 3. START BLOGGING
Now that your site is ready to go and you know what you want to rank for, it’s time to get busy creating consistent blog posts full of high-quality content you know your audience is searching for.
Spend time testing different topics based on your keyword research and regularly refer back to the core tools to see how you can improve your content and ranking. Check out our guide to B2B blogging here.
STEP 4. START LINKING
As you continue to build your own library of content, it’s important you’re building out links both to and from your site with other credible websites that can help build your authority online.
Spend time creating an ecosystem of webs linking relevant blogs and content to other valuable pieces on your site and refer to other helpful sites when appropriate.
Take chances and see if you can guest blog on other websites to help improve your referring domains.
Rinse and repeat!
Custom SEO Strategies For Coaches and Therapists
I explain an in-depth overview of SEO strategies for coaches and keyword research in the blog here and have another blog post that tailors SEO tips for therapists and other wellness practitioners here.
If you’re looking to create an SEO strategy for your own online business, you can learn more about how we help clients inside our course, The Online Business Automator, that teaches health and wellness experts the step by step process to doing keyword research, creating high ranking blog posts, and tracking data to improve your ranking on search engines so you can get off social media marketing all together.
If you’re curious about working with an search engine marketing coach or consultant, you can learn more about The Online Business Automator here.
SEO Marketing FAQs
To start SEO marketing, focus on understanding your audience and market. Conduct keyword research to identify terms your target audience uses. Optimize your website’s content, structure, and metadata for these keywords. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and has fast loading times. Finally, build quality backlinks to improve your site’s authority and visibility in search engine results.
The main purpose of SEO is to increase a website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), driving more organic traffic. It involves optimizing website content and structure to make it more attractive to search engines. By improving rankings for targeted keywords, SEO helps connect businesses with their ideal audience, enhancing online presence and accessibility.
SEO is used as a marketing strategy by improving a website’s visibility in search engine results. This is achieved through keyword optimization, quality content creation, and enhancing website performance. SEO strategies focus on attracting organic traffic, which can lead to increased brand awareness, higher conversion rates, and improved customer engagement, making it a cost-effective marketing tool.
Choosing between SEO and social media marketing depends on your business goals and target audience. SEO is better for long-term organic growth and attracting traffic with high purchase intent. Social media marketing excels in brand awareness and engagement. Ideally, integrating both strategies offers a comprehensive approach to digital marketing, leveraging their unique strengths.
The benefits of SEO in digital marketing include improved website visibility and higher organic search rankings, leading to increased traffic. SEO targets quality traffic with high intent, enhancing the chances of conversion. It also offers cost-effectiveness compared to paid advertising and contributes to a better user experience by optimizing website performance and content relevance.
