Larger companies can
typically hire or retain competent assistance to help with search engine
optimization. But smaller businesses often have to do it themselves, especially
when those businesses are new.
In this post, I will
share 10 do-it-yourself tips to optimize organic traffic from search engines.
The tips have the added benefit of helping smaller businesses understand SEO
now to make intelligent hiring decisions later.
To help explain, I’ll
use a hypothetical example of launching a business that rents tiny houses
nationwide.
(As an aside, in my
experience the best way to learn how search engines function and how to
optimize traffic from them is via Google’s in-house resources. I’ve listed my
favorites at the end of this article at “Learning SEO.”)
1 SEO
Tips for a New Ecommerce Site
1.
Start
with a compelling product or service. Having searched on Google, I know there are sites already
offering tiny houses for rent. Our first task is to study them to find a
competitive differentiator.
Searching on Google shows that there are
already sites offering tiny houses for rent
Using Google Trends,
we can confirm that this is a growing opportunity. The search term “tiny houses
for rent” is becoming more popular. We can see where most searches come from:
North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Washington.
Using Google Trends, we can confirm that the
search term “tiny houses for rent” is becoming more popular.
I checked the
competing sites to see if they had inventory for those states. They do.
However, there are many popular vacation destinations. Thus our strategy could
be to find other places where consumers want to go where competitors have no
rentals.
There is likely
overlap between tiny houses and recreational vehicles. Consumers that are
interested in one could be interested in the other. (An RV is often called “a
tiny house with wheels.”) Thus we can use Google Trends to determine the states
where searchers are interested in finding RV campgrounds.
Note, below, that
Montana is popular for the search term “rv campground.”
Montana is popular for the search term “rv
campground.”
—
Using this technique,
I again checked the competitors. Only one site, below, listed a tiny-house
rental in Montana.
Just one competitor listed a tiny-house rental
in Montana.
Thus by creating
listing pages with more offerings than competitors — tiny houses for rent in
Montana in this case — we stand a chance to rank. We are capturing excess
demand that competitors do not satisfy.
2. Focus on one audience. Most sites, including our top competitor for tiny houses for
rent, target all consumers. Their messaging is typically generic. But in our
case, we will carefully choose our target audience. We could choose single
people, young couples with no kids, families with kids, older families, and so
on.
Each group of
prospects has different needs and tastes. They would likely type different
keywords in Google to express what they want.
The advantage of
targeting one group is that we can focus all our content — descriptions,
images, pricing — to those prospects.
Say our target group
is backpackers. Backpackers travel more than other consumers, and they
generally visit multiple places during each trip. So, we could offer rental
packages that include many locations.
Another advantage of this
target audience is that we can research the places they like to visit and make
sure we have tiny home rentals nearby. We can also ensure the tiny homes we
offer are properly equipped for backpackers.
3.Offer a first-rate experience at a reasonable price. Backpackers are cost conscious. Thus we want
to make sure our website provides attractive pricing. We also need the site to
be extremely mobile friendly as backpackers will likely access it while on the
go.
4. Verify demand with Google Ads. So far we have only educated guesses about the
potential of the business. Before we invest more time and money, it is
important to validate our assumptions. We can do that easily with Google ads on
its search results.
We can study
competitor ads and create ours to highlight our key value proposition (as
discussed in the first tip).
Instead of targeting everyone searching
for tiny houses for rent, we will narrow our focus to backpackers. We can use
demographic targeting for this. Google will display our ads only to that
demographic group and send visitors within minutes of the ads’ launch.
We should A/B test
different messages in our ads to emphasize price, convenience, cleanliness, and
other features and with different keyword combinations. Google will rotate them
and tell us which work the best.
Verifying and testing our tiny-home-rental idea with Google ads
greatly helps with organic search efforts. It provides us with keywords, messaging in search
snippets, and target demographics — which we can track in Google Analytics.
5. Build social proof. From our paid search campaign, we should have renters that we
can solicit for reviews and feedback about their experience. As incentives
for honest reviews, we can offer discounts on future
stays. Video reviews are likely the most helpful for potential new renters.
Each review increases trust. It adds user-generated content to the site, which could help
with search rankings. Plus we can use structured data for rich snippets in the
search results, which will increase clicks.
6. Leverage customer-service queries. As we obtain renters, we presumably will field
customer support emails and calls. If we make them public on the site, they
become valuable content for SEO.
Moreover, the next
time another prospect asks the same question, we can send him to the previous
answer and encourage him to share it on his social networks. There are
inexpensive customer support platforms that offer this capability.
But, more importantly,
prospects could ask the same questions in a Google search box and come directly
to our site since we’ve published the answers there.
7. Optimize page resources. We include images and videos of each tiny
house rental listing. Google doesn’t just rank web pages. We can also get
decent traffic if our images and videos rank and get clicked on. They can rank
in image and video searches and when Google blends them with regular web
results.
For each image, we will make sure to have descriptive file
names, image alt texts, and comprehensive image XML sitemaps.
We will also track the results of our efforts in Google Search Console.
For videos, we will
also add video markup to help Google learn more about what our videos are about
and potentially help us achieve video rich snippets.
8. Get active in social media. We email our subscribers as we publish
relevant content on the site. We’ll also encourage our subscribers to connect
with us on our social channels. We’ll repost the best rental pictures to visual
networks such as Instagram and Pinterest. Each like from a follower can bring
more views and more followers, which can quickly build a strong distribution
channel for new content.
9. Power up with influencers. Now that we have a credible site, with many
tiny house listings, beautiful pictures, and positive reviews, we can focus on
public relations. We can reach out to journalists and influencers that cover the backpacking industry and tiny house
movement.
A potential strategy
would be to invite them to stay at one or more of our properties to report on
their experience and share it with their followers.
10. Confirm indexing. Finally, we should take an hour or two each week to review
Google Search Console, to confirm our growing content is getting indexed and
clicked on at a decent rate.
.
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