 Welcome to the journey. Today we're going to talk about 11 SEO best practices for your small business website. So it's easy to fall victim to these fads or trends with how to like improve your SEO, but be mindful of that because while a quick fix can be appetizing and appealing, it can actually hurt your SEO in the end. Yeah, if you really want to impact your SEO, you can't fall into those gimmicks. It's all about the long-term results. And we've got some best practices, 11 of them. Let's just go ahead and dive right into them. All right, let's kick things off with the SEO best practice. Number one, research your keywords. This is super important and I know a helpful site thanks to Nealey. It's the Google Keyword Planner, remember? Show me that. I remember. It's very helpful. And that's great because you can find relevant keywords that online visitors enter when searching. So this is really important. Think about long-tailed keywords so you can get more specific. Yeah. So those long-tail keywords are, say I do coaching, you don't want to try to capture the market on coaching because there's so much competition. It would cost you a fortune to actually rank there. But say I'm a coach to help you advance your career in the San Diego area. I want to focus on those keywords, but you really want to research what keywords make sense, the trends and things like that. So you're not focusing your attention on just irrelevant things that you'll never actually make an impact in. Yeah. So if we hop over here, we can actually enter in the products or services closely related to what you do. So what kind of coach is Nealey? We'll say a career coach. Career coach. So if you want to go ahead and type in career coach, it's going to give you some trends and some alternate keywords you can possibly use as well. And is it good to do one at a time or should I add all the keywords? Let's do one at a time for now so we can get the results and kind of just see what might pop up. Okay. So I did that and now I click get results. Let's see what happens. Yeah. So as you can see here, we searched career coach and it's going to give you a list of a ton of different keywords that you can add to your website. Now you don't want to go overboard and really add every single one in here because it may not make sense for your brand or your business. I picked the ones that really make sense for you and what you want your target audience to search for, what you think they're searching to find you. It shows average monthly searches for career coach, 10,000 to 100,000 competition medium. So are you looking for medium as your competition level? Is this a good amount of average monthly searches? Like how would I know that? Yeah. So if you were just starting out, you don't have much authority yet with the industry. I'd highly recommend to niche out even further. So what type of career coach do you, are you right? Or what type of business are you and kind of go a couple levels deeper? So if you're the fitness industry, don't just try to go for fitness or if you're a yoga studio, don't just go for yoga because there's way too much competition. So what's a super unique yoga studio you've been to? Yeah, I got a curved ball for you. Speaking of yoga, specifically different than other ones. Goat yoga. Have you done goat yoga? I don't say that I have, but I'm all about it. That's one where like you're doing yoga and there's just little goats all around you. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So that could be your niche, goat yoga or outside goat yoga and really niche down. So if someone's searching goat yoga in San Diego or Ocean Beach or wherever it is, you'll be found. So that leads us to the SEO best practice number two. Create great content for your website and that's where the keywords come into play. Add that into your text. Think about what are those online visitors searching when looking for a business like mine. Yeah. And you'll want to make sure that whatever keywords you use, you're not just stuffing in where it doesn't make sense because not every other sentence should be around goat yoga. Really explain what you do, the atmosphere and things like that. But then stuff goat yoga every now and then throughout the website or whatever your keyword is for your business. Yeah. And I have a great example. I know when we worked with the All Purpose Kate Co, they, I was checking out their website and it really actually, let's take a look right now. They did a great job of doing content that would attract the right audience because they're a unique business. They're not just an cake company. They're all purpose cake coat that specializes in gluten free to check out their cakes here. So you go over to like their about our cakes and you can see here, keywords, gluten free, dairy free, keto and diabetes friendly. So this is going to help them to be found by that right audience that they're looking for with their unique market of cakes. And tip number three is make sure your website is mobile friendly. Over half of search results are happening on mobile phones. So you only make sure it looks good on mobile because if it's not, Google is not going to actually rank your site for people searching on the phone. An easy way to see if your site is mobile friendly is if you're in your browser, you can right click, choose inspect. And then this little guy down here is a basically toggle device toolbar. So you can see what the website will look like on different types of devices, whether it's an iPhone, a pixel, an iPad, things like that. So if it looks well here, chances are it's going to look look well in the wild on an actual phone. Yeah, you don't need a pinch and poke to read that. It's very eligible, looks sharp. And I even checked it on my iPhone earlier today. Next tip, understand metadata and how to use it properly. So for example, if you do Google search, let's stick with the cake theme gluten free, typed in gluten free here and the Google search. And what comes up is you have your title line here, like easy gluten free chocolate cake. And then the description below that notice, what did I type in gluten free and it's bold, it's in bold here. And that's why these are coming up first. Right. And that meta title and meta description is placed on your website itself kind of on the back end. So most website builders that use out there, whether it's good as website builder plus marketing, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, there's always a section to add those there, WordPress, just install a plugin like Yoast SEO, and you can easily add that. So they say your title should be anywhere between 50 and 60 characters. You want to make sure you include whatever your primary keyword or keyword phrase is there. And then with your description, should be around 150 to 160 characters. And again, put your description in there, just like we saw with the search result gluten free popped up multiple times. So if it makes sense for your content, again, don't stuff, make it legible for anyone to actually read, include it there. So Google and visitors know exactly what that page is all about. Yeah. And that will increase the number of click-throughs that you get. Next up SEO best practice, avoid duplicate content because search engines will penalize you if you are using duplicate copy. Tip number six is to showcase your reviews and testimonials. Reviews and testimonials are what it's all about. It's the word on the street about your business. These are your actual customers, your actual clients, basically praising you for being the awesome you that you are. Yeah. So turn your website into word of mouth, right? Like I land on your website and from there, I can see what your customers think because you've shared maybe your Yelp reviews or your TripAdvisor reviews or Google reviews. So have those testimonials there and it'll boost your credibility and trust with that potential new customer. Next up SEO best practice, understand backlinking. So think about how you can get relevant blogs or other sites that you could link to your website. Yeah. You can think of backlinks like tiny little upvotes for your websites. Like Instagram, you got likes, websites all about the backlinks. Now there are a difference between good and bad backlinks. There's a very, very bad practice of paying for backlinks where like a bot or some other random service will put your website on a bunch of random websites. It's not always the best to do because those websites may not be reliable. They've been malicious in nature. Then Google will see those and now those backlinks, which were supposed to be upvotes are now downvotes. So if there are relevant blogs out there that basically compliment your services, go and add some value to their posts, their blog posts, their, whatever they have on there. And if it makes sense, link to your website or guest blog or see basically create great content where they want to link to your website. And at the end of the day, don't be afraid to link back off to other people's website. You can make those links, open a new tab so your content doesn't go away, but then you're kind of giving the brands that you know and trust, tiny little upvotes to create like a little cool community. Next up, SEO best practice. Don't play tricks. If there's something that seems like, oh, this is going to be a shortcut. This is going to help me out. Going to cut corners. It's probably not a good idea. So do your research to learn about what those shortcuts are and try to avoid doing them. Yeah, you don't hurt you in the end. You don't want to fall into those bad practices. They may have worked at it for a short time, but the long-term game is where it's at. Don't play shortcuts, which leads us to tip number nine is to measure your success. Like, how do you know at the end of the day if all the effort you are putting into your website, your content, your whole online presence is working? Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the way to measure that success. It's a free tool. Again, most website builders have it in an easy way to actually integrate it. WordPress, there's tons of plugins to do that. We actually have a video that goes super in depth with Google Analytics. If you don't know what it's all about, you can check it out here. Next up, submit your site map. That's actually going to help out your website for when Google or a search engine is indexing, looking for you, like a table of content in a book. Or I cook a lot, like a recipe. Maybe you want to get to a specific Italian recipe in your cookbook. So that's something you can kind of relate to when you think about a site map, but it is really important for search to have this. Yeah. And once you have your website site map created using website builder, they'll likely do it for you. If using WordPress, use Yoast SEO or some other search engine plugin, it'll create it for you. You want to tell Google about it. Don't wait for them to come to you because they eventually will, but it might take a while. So how they recommend Google Webmaster Tools. It's a free service with Google. You can go ahead and say, Hey, here's my website. Here's my site map. Now, crawl it. The cool thing with Google Webmaster Tools that kind of relates to this video is you can see the search engine trends. So you can see what people are searching for, how often, how often they're seeing it, how often they're clicking it with keywords that's related to your industry. And now if you start seeing keywords that just don't make sense, well, now it's time to go back to square one with our tip number one and research those keywords of what you want to be known for and search for. And last but not least, SEO best practice, speed up your website. If it takes longer than two seconds to load, you're going to lose traffic and potential customers. Yeah. There's lots of things you can do to speed up your website, setting up some sort of caching mechanism. There's tons of CDN providers out there, a content delivery networks that basically just puts little copies of your website throughout the world. So if I'm in Seattle here, but the server's in Europe, I'm not going to Europe all the way to get the content. I'm going a server close to me in here in Seattle. You can plan a vacation. I mean, a reason to go. Or camp Europe. Now, you know more about SEO best practices. We've covered a lot, right? Research your keywords, put high quality content on your site. You even found tools to help you find those keywords that work well for your site as well. So put it to work. Go get on your site now, boost that SEO and be sure to like this video. Comment below with the best practice that we gave today. Yeah. And make sure you subscribe to our channel and ring that bell so you get these episodes first. This is the journey. See you next time.