Familiarize Yourself With the Basics
I won’t go into huge detail here, but these are essentially the fundamentals for SEO:
- Quality content creation – as I discussed downloadabove.
- Internal and external links – internal links are links in your content to other content on your website. These links, among other things, help Google understand your content. External links are links to other websites. These connect your website to bigger conversations that are happening on the web.
- Keyword research – finding keywords – that are appropriately competitive – that you can put into your content as you write.
- On page optimization – optimizing your titles, metadata, word count etc. so that it’s favorable to search engines.
- Technical SEO – optimizing your website as a whole to be more favorable to Google. This could include speed improvements, mobile-friendliness, 404 corrections, 301 redirects (did I lose you there? There’s a reason why this is called technical SEO).
- Inbound link building – Securing additional links from other websites. Think of a website link as a “vote”. The more votes a website gets (links), the more Google sees them as credible. But there’s more to it. These should be credible website themselves and not all links are created equal.
Contrast this with search engine optimization (SEO) that generally can take 6-12 months before you start seeing results.
Option 2: Referral Partnerships
Here’s one that’s pretty easy to grab onto. Find other companies that share a similar customer base with you. Reach out to them and see if there could be opportunities to refer out to each other. Do great work each time and you’ll find that the referral partner is more open and eager to send clients to your website.
Seem like a lot of work? Referral agreements, commission structures, constant communication with another company? Sloooooow down Nelly! Remember, our goal here is to get our feet wet with these marketing opportunities. Instead of asking for marriage, just ask the other company if they’d keep you in mind for a test project.
Stressing about referral terms and the like is pretty fruitless if the relationship doesn’t go anywhere.
Focus on starter project where you can prove yourself to your potential referral partner. Then if it works? You guessed it… keep investing!
Believe me. The moment you have a real sales call from a client that visited your website due to a referral partner, you’ll be ecstatic. Who knows, maybe you’ll even become a believer in marketing.
Conclusion
Your biggest liability in all of this is doing nothing. If you’re not investing time and energy trying things out then you aren’t learning. And that’s the goal, right?
