3 Basic Ways to Start Using SEO in Your Marketing

The ultimate purpose of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to get your business more organic website leads. The easier it is for potential clients to find your website via a search engine (today we’ll focus strictly on Google) the more organic traffic and leads you’ll get. 

While there are a lot of factors that go into SEO, below are three basic ways to start integrating SEO into your marketing today.

1. Get access to Search Console
   1. Search Console is a free tool where Google shares your site’s Search traffic and performance data. You can see (1) what keywords it shows your site for, (2) what position your site is ranking for that keyword, (3) how many impressions and clicks your site has received from that ranking, (4) and much more. While there are many paid third-party tools that provide similar information, I prioritize Search Console’s data because it’s coming from the source (aka Google). To get access to your site’s Search Console data, follow the steps here.
2. Set up tracking in Google Analytics
   1. Now that you know what keywords are getting you organic traffic, the next step is to track if that traffic is turning into leads. Google Analytics is another free tool that, once installed and set up correctly on your site, can break down (1) what traffic came from an organic search, and (2) what percentage of that traffic ended up converting (ie. calling you, filling out a contact form, etc.). If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, you can create one here. You’ll want data from both Search Console and Google Analytics to get a full picture of how your site is performing organically.
3. Make sure the keywords you want to rank for are on your site
   1. This seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many audits I’ve done where the main keyword a business wants to target doesn’t exist on the site. Without getting too deep into how Google works (for those who are a bit more curious you can view a short video here), you need to have the target phrase on your website for Google to consider showing you for that phrase. A neat trick to see how you’re doing for any particular phrase is a “site:” search. Simply type into Google site:yoursitehere.com and it’ll show you all the pages that Google has indexed. If you want to check how many times a particular keyword is mentioned on your site, add it with parentheses.
   2. For example, if I want to check how many times “SEO” is mentioned on Sebo’s site, I’d search the following: site:sebomarketing.com “seo”. You can see from the image below, we have about 77 unique pages that mention that phrase. If I change this to an irrelevant phrase (we’ll use ‘hippo’ as an example) you’ll see that we have zero pages on our site that contain that keyword (which is okay since we know nothing about hippos). If you found that your target phrase isn’t on your site, then I suggest you add it where relevant!
      

These 3 basic steps are easy ways to (1) understand how your site is performing with regards to SEO and (2) identify quick opportunities for improvement. For more information about SEO, you can check out our blog here.