SEO… Say It Ain’t So! (A Beginner’s Guide To SEO Domination)

Intro:

Oh no, here we go 

Breaking down the subtle art of SEO 

Making sure when it comes to Google that you’re in the know

Gonna teach you how to optimize with my flows

With tips so sick you’ll need to blow your nose

And I’m almost out of rhymes so let’s begin the prose 

Welcome back Thrivers! It’s the week after Thanksgiving and I’m super pumped to be back in the business coaching office and back on my journey of continued education and life lessons. Also, sick rhymes at the top of this blog right? I binged more of the Wu-Tang series over the holiday and I’m still feeling the hip hop inspiration almost a week later. Television binging aside I also spent my downtime diving back into the Search Engine Domination book before entering a minor food coma. What is this Search Engine Domination book that I speak of? I’m glad you asked! It is one of the most helpful books I’ve read in quite some time and was actually created by none other than our own Jonathan Kelly and Clay Clark. It details how to successfully climb the ranks of Google and ensure that your business can come up top for all of your ideal and likely buyers. Now, you might also be asking, “Why the heck would you be using your holiday time reading about search engines?.” Well, my business coaching friends, the end of the year is a great time to ramp up your SEO game and most small business owners were never taught how to approach this strategy. The book itself is full of extremely helpful content, however, I wanted to share with you some of the main areas I’ve learned my clients personally struggle with. As well as provide the tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way to improve in each of these areas. 

The Four Variables You Need To Start Considering Now

So let’s start by breaking down what exactly SEO means. Most people hate abbreviations and acronyms because typically they don’t know what they stand for. SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization”.  Understanding the ins and outs of search engine optimization can help your business’s website rank highly in Google, which means potential customers can find you faster and more frequently than your competitors. Now that we know what SEO means here comes the obvious question, “How the crap do I start optimizing my site and business?”. For the small business owner this could seem like rocket science if approaching SEO alone, but fear not! You are in fact not alone. I’ve had many of my personal clients riding in this same boat. They were able to navigate the intimidating seas of SEO by embracing and practicing the four main variables of SEO domination. The magical four variables are as follows: 

1. Canonical Compliance 
2. Mobile Compliance 
3. Google Reviews (Quality AND Quantity) 
4. Creating The Most Original HTML Content 

Still, feeling lost? No worries. Follow me, my little business ducklings, and I’ll walk you through exactly how each of these variables is broken down. 

Google Canonical Compliance and Mobile Compliance

I’m lumping these two variables into the same category mainly because they are the most similar, and unless you also have a background in website management or coding these two are best handled by the business coaching professionals. However, they are still important to understand. In a nutshell, mobile compliance and Google canonical compliance are best defined as the requirements your website needs to meet in order to be a Google and mobile device friendly website. Now, why is this important? The numbers don’t lie, Google is used for more than 90% of all internet related searches. Meanwhile, Americans are now on their mobile devices more than 80 times per day. If these two platforms are the most utilized, then it would behoove us to ensure that our websites are optimized to function with them perfectly. Again, I know this may all seem completely confusing so let’s put it in a simple checklist to better understand what is needed to meet proper compliance. 

1. Your website will need an optimized meta title tag
2. Your website will need an optimized meta description 
3. Your website will need “Above The Fold” social proofs and trust symbols
   1. Notable and noticeable businesses that you’ve worked with/for, awards, certifications, ETC. 
4. Your website needs to have an “Above The Fold” call to action 
5. Your website needs to have an “Above The Fold” testimonial 
6. Your website needs to have an “Above The Fold” video detailing what your business does along with a play button that encourages visitors to click on it
7. Your website needs to have an “Above The Fold” clickable phone number
   1. Make it easy for your customers to reach you faster 
8. Your website needs to have an “Above The Fold” horizontal navigation bar
   1. The row of clickable links located at the top of most web pages 
9. Your website needs to have an “Above The Fold” data capturing value exchange 
10. Your website needs to have 1,000 words of content per indexed page
    1. Indexed pages are the pages available for visors to view 
11. Your website needs to have a “Below The Fold” HTML sitemap 
12. Bonus Items
    1. Above The Fold is basically everything visible in the top half of your site before scrolling down
    2. Below the fold means, well you probably guessed it, at the bottom… 

Two Variables Down… But What In The World Is HTML Content? 

The HTML content is what search engine bots “crawl” through to better help direct their users towards the best results. To put it into perspective, if I were to be on the hunt for the single greatest burrito in Tulsa I’d most likely hop on Google and search for  “Best burrito in Tulsa”. Now what Google is going to do is crawl the entirety of the internet and find all of the sites that reference this combination of keywords then rank them by who has the most content referencing them. Whoever dominates these keywords will receive higher rankings on Google, meaning they will appear on the first page for potential customers to find and vet first. This is where you want your business’s site to be. Getting it is not terribly difficult, it just takes planning, patience, and consistency. Step one is to determine what keywords you want to be dominant for. These are the terms that your ideal and likely buyers will be using when searching for your product or business. Once you’ve done your research it’s time to start creating content. Now, this is the part where most people tuck tail and start running in the opposite direction. “What do you mean I have to write 1,000 words of content for my sitemap articles?? I DO NOT have time for that!!”. Slow down there Jefe! Take a deep breath and follow me here. You can simply record an audio podcast and transcribe your audio into many articles. It’s that easy! If you still feel intimidated or are still convinced that you don’t have time to do that either, there are many SEO writers out there that you can pay to solve this problem for you including our business coaching team. 

Reviews, Reviews, REVIEWS!!! 

The other main portion of the SEO quad that you directly are responsible for is gathered real and objective reviews from your customers. This is important because it further establishes your online and overall reputation. Consumers vote with their dollars and they will gladly take their dollars to your competitors if they have a higher rating or more reviews than you. In relation to that, the number and quality of your google reviews also affect your google ranking. My successful clients that are crushing it on Google all have the same things in common, they have twice as many reviews as anybody in their industry AND their reviews are of a higher quality to boot. Once you start gathering reviews it is wise to put a repetitive system in place so that your ranking doesn’t plummet. Google loves consistency so it is wise to get at least one review per day or at the very least a few per week to keep your relevancy up. 

Ready, Set, SEO! 

Okay homies, now that you’ve been given the beginner’s guide to optimizing your SEO the next step is to actually do it. Seems redundant right? But it’s so true! I’m not lying to you when I say all of my business coaching clients have struggled with starting the SEO process. Once they were able to find the areas that they could comfortably handle and delegate the important tasks that were outside of their wheelhouse, they began to rise through the ranks of Google and overall online dominance. But don’t just settle for my simple cheat sheet, do yourselves a favor and check out Search Engine Domination: The Proven Plan, Best Practice Processes + Super Moves to Make Millions with Online Marketing by Jonathan Kelly. There’s even a rumor going around that you can download it for free on the Thrivetime Show business coaching website… But you didn’t hear that from me.