SEO 101: The First Thing You Must Do To Get Found On Google
I got this interesting question about SEO last week:
‘Fiona, how do I get to show up in Google for a specific keyword?’
And it’s funny, because whilst this last six months I’ve been talking mostly about online sales funnels, opt-in freebies and the importance of growing your subscriber list – actually, its my background in SEO and Adwords that I find myself getting asked about and referring to the most.
And there is one thing I keep coming back to when I’m helping my clients with their online marketing.
Something that they all seem to think they struggle with.
SEO.
But something that many of them are doing right without even realising! (I’ll come onto that in a bit…)
I thought I’d share this with you, as I’m pretty sure you too would like to know how to get your content onto the first page of Google, especially if you’ve been blogging or writing articles for more than a year.
So here it is. One SEO tip that you can implement right now and start to do on every blog post you write from now on.
If you do nothing but this one thing, you will 10x your chances of being found on page one of Google. This tip is powerful. It is ridiculously simple at the same time. If you take action and implement well, you’ll reap the benefits for months and probably years to come.
The very first thing you need to do is:
Choose exactly which keyword you want to be found for.
That’s it.
Let me explain. First mistake many people make – is choosing the wrong keywords.
Words and phrases that either have billions of results and so are hugely competitive (think ‘iphone’, ‘coke’, ‘how to be happy’ (!)):
That’s never going to end well.
Or, the other end of the scales is choosing keywords and phrases that no-one searches for. Or using jargon or language that your ideal customers don’t use.
Choose a keyword phrase that’s specific enough to your business (read ‘not massively competitive’) but which has enough people searching for it that you will benefit from being there on the search results.
Best way to choose?
Research it.
Take the time to sit down and use a keyword research tool to find which words and phrases your audience are searching for, AND which is not too competitive.
Here are 3 free tools to get started with:
- Google Suggest – Start with this one, it’s so simple, just start typing into the Google search bar and you’ll see Google ‘suggest’ what you might be looking for. Well those ‘suggestions’ are what others are searching for in order of volume!
- Keyword.io – easy and simple to use and includes Youtube, Bing and the Appstore too.
- Google keywords tool – the ultimate and best. Shows you volume of searches for any keyword you put in. Downside is that you need to have an Adwords account to use it (but its easy and free to set up).
But, back to that interesting question I was asked last week ‘How do I get to show up in Google for a specific keyword?’
Easy – go read this blog post, then implement everything you learned. It’s an in depth step-by-step guide to getting ranked on Google.
You’ll learn the exact seven steps that I went through to get a small unknown blog with hardly any content on it, to rank #1 on Google a keyword phrase with a high volume of searches.
The seven steps are based on everything I learned about SEO whilst I was heading up the Search department at Disney and Penguin for over 4 years.
So if you only do one thing this week – go back and check your latest blog post has a great keyword or phrase in it.