Does SEO Still Matter?
Yes. SEO is a marathon, it’s a crucial part of any long term website strategy, and it feels amazing when you start to see your page ranking.
SEO helps search engines ( Google, Bing, SnipeSearch, etc. ) find you when people look for something you talk about on your website. SEO is a good habit to get into to minimize your ad spend, while making it easy for your ideal customers to find you.
SEO takes time. Even with a perfectly built website you are looking at at least three months before you start to see any reasonable amount of traffic. It’s a habit for a reason.
If you want to launch your website quickly, and you have a modest social media following, your only option is paid traffic. For the rest of this article, we’ll assume you are here for the long run.
If you are just getting started, keep your SEO simple by naming pages clearly, answering real questions, and remove technical roadblocks that hide your content from crawlers.
How to Begin with SEO
- On-page SEO: titles, headings, copy, and internal links that match intent
- Technical SEO: crawl access, clean URLs, HTTPS, sitemaps, and speed
- Off-page SEO: mentions, links, and reputation that support your brand
What is the first page your visitors will see? Start there.
Imagine someone calling with your grandma on the phone lands on your website and starts reading your content to her, would she understand it? Yes? Good. Then ask yourself: if someone wanted to buy from me, would they find this page helpful? Yes again? Perfect, you are off to a good start on your SEO journey. For a more thorough SEO setup, check out our Fundamentals Implementation package.
Your Very First SEO Steps
On day one, you want to claim your domain, pick a template, add a way for people to contact you, and write some basic information. SEO rewards clarity and consistency more than busywork, you can implement complex tools later when you understand their function.
When you treat SEO as the slow journey that it is, you avoid panic and build assets that will keep people coming to your site even without ads. The internet rewards those who do their own work, the more creative and original your writing, the more the internet will see you are a key person of influence.
What’s Your One-Liner?
A one-liner is a single sentence that explains everything about your business, who you help, how you help them, and the type of content they might find interesting. Our one-liner is:
“The Harder the grind, The Greater their gain, so Pick Up the phone To Talk to PurPle Burgers“
Once you have your one-liner, share it with a non-marketer friend. If they understand it, keep that sentence above your desk while you build.
Run SEO Experiments
Keep an SEO notebook to learn faster by writing the changes you make, the date you made it and the result you expect to see in search or on the page. People who experiment outrank those who panic when their rankings drop. One deliberate fix beats five random tweaks.
If the results of your tweak is unclear after a week, adjust the single variable you changed, or give the page more time while you work on a different page. Steady SEO learning compounds when you keep track of them. If you’re part of a team, share the experiment you are running with them so the change stays.
- One SEO change, one week, one written expectation
- Check the page on a mobile before you call it done
- Prefer clear evidence over hunches when you review results
- Capture a screenshot of titles or reports for inspiration when you can
Next steps
If you want to get running fast, check out our marketing packages in the shop, or contact us through our contact page to let us what you are building, and the challenges you are facing.
To learn more about SEO you can Steve’s SEO Fundamentals: Optimizing for Search Engines from one of the Amazon links below.