Key Takeaways
This is a guest post from Derick Michael who is the SEO expert over at Firon Marketing, which is a strategic digital marketing agency in NYC.
Imagine that you have an amazing product and you’re ready to introduce it to the market. So, you decide to design a website to show it off to the world. And you just know with the deepest certainty that everyone is going to love what you have to offer. It seems foolproof.
But then a few days go by, a few weeks, and then months….and it’s nothing but crickets. Soon, it’s a year later and the only sales/views you have are from Grandma Sandy.
Moral of the story, folks? What good is a great website and an even better product if no one can find it? That’s where SEO comes in.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. SEO is used as a tool to improve your site’s organic presence in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages, i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing).
There are two essential concepts to learn here:
1) Do the SERPs understand what your website/webpages are and their purpose?
2) What keywords/phrases does a customer or client search for in your category and does your site show up for those phrases?
Let’s tackle the first one, first.
SEO Compliance
In a nutshell, the goal of SEO for your website at a basic level is to achieve SEO compliance. This involves many different components such as Robots.txt, responsiveness, site speed, sitemaps, language tags, schema, headers, alt tags, etc. If this sounds like gibberish or some strange language to you, no worries! That means you’re like most people. There are so many great resources you can use to deepen your understanding. Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin are two such examples of SEO experts I would recommend checking out. If you’re thinking about outsourcing your website’s SEO, you might be thinking that it could get expensive. However, you do not need to get a full time SEO person to help set up or check your SEO compliance. There are many marketing agencies out there who offer these services.
Think of SEO compliance as the foundation of a house. If your website does not have a solid foundation, it’s going to be a challenge to rank high in the SERPs. Once your foundation of SEO compliance is strong, now it’s time to get your whole team on the same page. Make sure that your team has a basic understanding of SEO, so as they develop content for your website like blog posts, product pages, etc., they know how to properly add in headers, keywords, alt tags, etc. so search engines can read your website well. Once the search engines can read your pages, they can start showing you in search results. A good marketing agency can take care of this for you or help train your team on how to do the essential SEO tasks.
Ranking in the SERPs
When your SEO foundation is stable (and you should check on its status regularly), you have clearly laid out to Google and the other SERPs what each page of your website is and their purpose. This is great! You can see in Google Search Console how Google has crawled your site, as well as indexed you. Let’s say you rank now at about page 50 for your keywords. Here’s the thing: since most people don’t go past page one when searching for results from a query in the SERPs…. you’re probably still only selling to Grandma Sandy. That’s why it’s time to do your homework and put it in the time to set yourself up for success in the future.
AND, this is WHY it’s so important to start SEO early. You probably already did some keyword research to create your landing pages, but now you should also start ramping up production of other content such as blogs (without cannibalizing the keywords) and reach out to obtain reputable backlinks. There are many different strategies you can utilize but remember that this takes time. It takes time to write good educational content, it takes time for the SERPs to index it and it takes time to acquire credible backlinks to your pages. And the catch? You need to do this over and over and over and over again.
Starting Early With SEO
Whether you already have an existing website, or your site is very new, it is still a best practice to make sure you start SEO-ing your site as soon as you can. If you have an existing site, and you have not yet started SEO, don’t worry. Like I said, a good marketing agency can look at your site and help you fix any errors and get you going, if you don’t want to put in the extensive time and research on your own. If you have a new website (not yet launched), it’s always a good idea to have an SEO expert on board to make sure your launch is that more successful. No matter where your website stands now, it’s never too late to get started with SEO, but the longer you wait… well, then you might just be selling to Grandma Sandy.
About the Author
A strategic digital marketing agency in NYC. Firon Marketing creates coordinated growth by providing the entire acquisition ecosystem. Full-funnel growth marketing with SEO, Content, Email, Ads & Websites. All at Once.