How to Get Your Website on the 1st Page of Google with Melissa McGraw
Episode 327: Show Notes
Today on The Strategy Hour we are joined by the amazing, the wonderful, the gifted, Melissa McGraw! Melissa is the founder of The Creative Potential, an agency dedicated to helping online business owners increase their traffic and revenue through improved SEO. She and the company have aided countless brands grow their audience by millions and applying her strategies can multiply your organic search results tenfold in just a few months! With Melissa's help we are going to be breaking down SEO in the simplest of ways, not getting too nerdy but also not skimping on great, actionable plans and ideas. We want to get you ranked on Google ASAP! Get your notebook ready so we can start getting more traffic and customers and have that reflect in your bank account!
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It's been a while since we have talked about SEO and just as a reminder it is very important for all, and we mean all, businesses! If we are honest, SEO is still a foreign language for some of us, while others of us have kind of got the hang of it. Our goal today is to get your site search engine friendly and high up in the rankings! We will be going from the simplest questions about what SEO is and how it functions, how to utilize it for your biz and even touching on some of the higher end stuff that will get you to the top of the first page! These strategies are super accomplishable but it is also worth noting that you are able to hire someone like Melissa to help you out with this task, get an expert to do the work for you, so there is that option too! Now, let's get you found online!
The Simple, Un-Nerdy View of SEO
So, as most of you probably know, SEO stands for 'search engine optimization' but we forgive you if you didn't! And generally what it does is improve your chances of getting found online organically, so not paying for ads and boosters. Paid spots and sponsored links are something else and not what we are talking about today. The first lesson from Melissa is that you do not have to rely on loads and loads of content, something we did in the beginning of our online careers! There is also quite a clear science to it, so guesswork from the beginning will not get you very far. The first step in the process is to get clear on what you want to be known and found for. Which words, phrases and questions do you want to link to your company so that you can be visible to your ideal clients? This is where keyword research comes into play and carrying it out thoroughly can help you balance a broad cover with specific and niche terms. There are a lot of software and online services that can help you with clarifying these terms! You also need to allow for people not knowing exactly what they are looking for. Searches are more and more specific these days, however they are mostly not very technical, because your potential customers are rarely experts in the field you are in. Use tools that are online to find out what exactly people are searching for around your product or service, which will allow you to cast the net wide enough and with enough detail to catch the exact fish you want to. In the end getting lots of traffic is great but narrow and accurate results are even better!
Getting on the First Page of Google
Another thing to consider is the difficulty of your keywords; harder terms make it harder to rank. This is where variations of the keywords come into the picture. This can all get quite technical but the main idea is to get specific first and then provide lots of variations on top of that. Google has a service called Console which helps you so much in getting ranked! You can submit your website and it gets verified, Google then indexes each page and post and automatically matches searches with your content and keywords. A few other strategies are to use keywords in your URLs, blog titles and page titles, this increases the hits and matches that Google looks for. At the same time you do not want to overstuff keywords that clash with what you are doing, keep your content streamline and in line with what it is about. Google sidelines pages that are too all over the place. You can use the naming of images and videos to further increasing your hits as Google will not know what it is until you add text to it. Don't forget to check your Google analytics!
The Quickest Way to Get Your Ranking Up
If you have a blog, do not be scared to use it! Remember Google also loves video at the moment, so why not embed some video content into your pages and posts? Video has been proven to potentially increase your ranking by 50 times! You can even transcribe video content to increase the data on your pages. Melissa reminds us that it is so important to know what platform you are creating for, and tailor to the specifics of that, whether it is your website, Pinterest or any other social media site. Another important aspect is the speed of your site, you can test your website's speed on various online platforms and see what might be slowing it down and how well it loads across devices. Remember to clear out all old code, widgets and junk that can slow you down, you want to keep everything as smooth and quick as possible. Compress as much as possible and check for old broken links! Now go get your website up a few notches!
Quote This
The first step is knowing what you want to be found for.
—Melissa McGraw
Highlights
The Simple, Un-Nerdy View of SEO. [0:03:53.7]
Figuring Out What People Are Searching For. [0:10:21.2]
Getting on the First Page of Google. [0:13:40.6]
The Quickest Way to Get Your Ranking Up. [0:25:20.7]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:36:59.9]
Check Your Site.
Beef Up Your Keywords.
Submit Your Site to Google.
Build Up Your SEO Strategy.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Melissa McGraw
The Creative Potential
Website | The Creative Potential
Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
I’m Melissa McGraw, founder of The Creative Potential. I’ve helped brands grow their organic audience by millions, and brands I’ve worked with have multiplied their organic search by triple digits in a matter of months. I’m bringing all of that big-brand experience to help creative entrepreneurs boost their online presence, so they can make the impact and the money they want. You see, I kind of fell into the world of SEO when I started writing copy for Amazon over 9 years ago. I openly admit to being an analytics dork, so the psychology of why people search for certain phrases or keywords fascinates me. That fascination led me to create over 100,000 SEO friendly product listings that are bringing in the dollars on Amazon today. But hey you’re not Amazon, so why should you care? Well, because I have been right where you are. You’ve created this amazing, life-improving product or service, and now you need to bring in the eyeballs (and credit card digits) to actually BUY IT. Well, I’m the SEO wizard who’s going to do the hard work for you no matter if you have a product or service based business and get you more clients, web traffic and sales!
KEY TOPICS
Keywords, Optimization, Online Visibility, Ranking, Content
