Are you a small business owner who has tripped all over herself in an attempt to avoid learning about SEO? Maybe it intimidates you, overwhelms you, or maybe it’s just One More Thing to deal with in your already way-too-full life!
Here’s the great news: SEO is far easier to understand and implement than it sounds! More great news: Most small businesses do not need complicated or advanced SEO strategies to notice great results!
What Is It?
Search Engine Optimization: Having traffic delivered to your website from search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Being highly visible to people searching for what you offer because a link to your site pops up in the first few search result returns.
Why Do You Want It?
A high search engine ranking is free billboard advertising for you. Here’s an example to bring the concept home.
You’re a mosaic artist, and you specialize in a technique called pique assiette. Your tesserae or tiles, are vintage pottery and china, along with other bits and pieces. In fact, this mosaic style is sometimes referred to as “bits and pieces” mosaics, also picassiette.
Pique assiette, or PA, has been popularized in the U.S. over the last 20 years thanks to folks like HGTV and Martha Stewart. You’ve got competition in CyberLand.
You have your own website, and an Etsy store. Sometimes you sell on eBay, and have dabbled in other e-commerce sites for artist collectives.
Your sole goal with SEO optimization is to leave a clear and colorful trail of breadcrumbs, or mosaic shards, on the Internet by which shoppers can easily find your artwork when they hop onto a search engine.
How Do You Get It?
Keyword Relevancy! Think of descriptive words for your art and plug them into all of your website pages, titles, and product descriptions as organically as you can. Be authentic!
Pique assiette mosaics
Vintage china mosaics
Pottery shard mosaics
Bits and pieces mosaics
Set yourself apart with a value proposition: “Self-taught pique assiette mosaic artist.”
Quality Links! Link back to your own most important pages and best blog posts as often as is natural within your sites.
Incorporate a few outlinks to reputable entities. In this case, SAMA is a good choice (Society of American Mosaic Artists).
Ideally, once you publish enough quality content on a consistent basis, you will have some highly trusted sites linking back to you.
Quality User Experience! Find your way to a reputable freelance writer website where talented writers craft customized, creative content for their livelihoods. The best investment you can make in yourself and your product is to provide quality written content on your site.
What Do You Do With It?
Tweak, tweak, and tweak some more! There are a plethora of free analytical tools that show you exactly how people are finding you. Etsy offers a detailed page of “Shop Stats” that break it down by total number of visitors, traffic sources (who sent them), top keywords (the exact search phrase that brought them in: “pottery,” “mosaic mirror,” “jewelry mosaic”).
A very simple and free monitoring tool is SiteMeter. You learn how many visitors land on your pages daily and the actual search term and referring site that brought them to you under “Recent visitors by referrals.”
There is a ton of free info and help available to take the SEO intimidation factor down a notch! Keeping it simple, high quality, and consistent over time is the only magic bullet.
Laura W is available for projects at WriterAccess.
