Boosting Your Sales with SEO: A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Many tactics used to boost your sales involve paid advertising and marketing endeavors, but as small business owners we know that there’s a lot of other areas of your business that require your financial resources.

One skill that can help you boost your visibility across the web and drive organic traffic to your site is search engine optimization, or SEO.

Why is it important? While advertisements land big with increasing your visibility on social sites like Meta (previously Facebook) and Instagram, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Furthermore, organic search results appear more authentic and trustworthy to users than ads. So here’s the thing--if you invest the time learning and implementing SEO, you’ll see your traffic and eventually your sales increase over time.

So how do you do it? There’s whole courses on SEO, but here’s a few key pointers to help get you started:

Keywords

First, get started by understanding what your customers are looking for and how they search for it. By having a fundamental understanding of how they are navigating their shopping experience, you can include these search terms on your website. These specific search terms are called keywords. The more accurately you’re able to predict the search terms on your website, the better.

If you think about the customer journey, you’ll notice that people search for different things during different seasons. Because of this, you’ll want to understand the seasonality of your keywords as well as any trends and adjust your keywords accordingly.

Okay, so now that you understand your keywords, how do you use them? Here’s a checklist of places to insert your keywords:

• Include the keywords in the URL for specific pages on your website

• Add detailed meta descriptions on your site pages using the keywords

• Detailed on-page product descriptions using your keywords

Links

Links to high quality content are another important SEO element. In your case, you’ll likely want to include links to your products and any brand collaborations you’d like to highlight.

More importantly, you’ll want for other websites to create links back to your online store or products. These external links send the signal to search engines like Google and Bing that your website has high quality content and will ultimately help it rank higher in search results.

Developing Blog Content

After you’ve optimized the pages on your website for the right keywords, meta descriptions, and tags, another useful element is to develop a blog. Not only do blogs help tell the story of your brand, values, and products, they provide another searchable page that can help your website rank higher on search engines. Additionally, you can link to your products directly on your blog page to help drive sales directly--a true win-win.

Get Indexed

If you own a brick and mortar business, you’ll want to make sure that you’re indexed on Google. This will help customers in your locale find your products and services with a quick search.

After you implement these changes, here are some things to keep in mind:

• A boost in SEO occurs over time. While the changes you make will be important, you won’t see instant results.

• Remember, stay on top of your keywords and any trends and be sure to update your content accordingly.

• Getting other people to talk about your site and link back to your products will be a powerful boost in SEO.

We’ve barely scratched the surface, but these should be a few good tips to help you get started! Until next time :)