3 money-making SEO tips for your business

Here are three money-making SEO tips to get your business booming. 

SEO, or search engine optimization, helps your website rank higher in the search results, leading to you getting found by the right people when they’re searching online.

SEO should be the foundation of any online marketing program because it’s critical to your website’s online visibility. A site that’s not optimized will not get the amount of traffic that one that’s well optimized does.

Optimizing your website for search engines can increase your rankings in the search results, leading to more traffic coming to your site and more sales from your website.

But if you're new to SEO and content marketing, it can all seem overwhelming. Don't worry, though; that’s what I’m here for.

In this post, I'll share three actionable tips to help you get started with SEO and see actual results for your business.

Focus on long-tail keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of SEO. They're the words and phrases people type into search engines when looking for something online. By targeting the right keywords, you can attract more relevant traffic to your website and increase your chance of making sales online.

But with so many businesses competing for the exact keywords, ranking high in search engine results can be challenging for popular keywords. That's why focusing on long-tail keywords is important, especially when you’re a small business or have a newer website.

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases people use when searching for something online. They're less competitive than shorter, more generic keywords, which can make them easier to rank for.

Long-tail keywords often have less search volume than shorter ones; however, this is okay. The consumer searching with a long-tail keyword often has a better idea of what they want. You can sell more by ranking higher for a long-tail keyword than some shorter keywords.

For example, if you run a fitness blog, instead of targeting the keyword "fitness tips," you could target the long-tail keyword "10-minute workouts for beginners". This is a more specific phrase that's less competitive than the generic keyword, which means you'll have a better chance of ranking highly in search engine results pages. And if you had a 10-minute workout for beginners course, you could likely enroll students into that course easier than if you were ranking for fitness tips. The consumer searching for 10-minute workouts for beginners has already told you they’re both a beginner and looking for short workouts. If they search and find your 10-minute workouts for beginners class page at the top of Google’s search results, they’re likely to click and visit your website to learn more because this is precisely what they’re searching for.

The person searching for fitness tips hasn’t told you anything about what they want, and they may not know either. It’s doubtful that someone searching for fitness tips is looking for 10-minute workouts for beginners, and due to this, ranking high for that term when you sell a 10-minute beginner course won’t lead to as many sales (if any).

By focusing on long-tail keywords, you can attract more targeted traffic to your website and increase your chances of converting that traffic into paying customers. Isn’t that what you want? It’s one of the main ways to make money from your SEO efforts.

Create high-quality, engaging content

It’s been said at least a million times before, but the content is indeed king regarding SEO. Search engines love fresh, high-quality content relevant to your target audience. Creating high-quality, engaging content can attract more traffic to your website and increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results as long as you optimize for the right keyword.

But creating great content is about more than just writing blog posts or articles. It's also about making videos, infographics, podcasts, and other types of content that your target audience will love. Don’t limit yourself to just one kind of content. You can be creative and add different types of content together. For example, if you have a blog and a podcast or YouTube channel, you might want to embed your podcast or YouTube videos into your blog posts. This helps give your website visitors the chance to interact with their preferred content form. Still, the audio/video files can also increase the time a visitor spends on your website, which helps boost your time on site, which is an engagement metric for your website.

When creating content, it's important to focus on your audience's needs and interests. What problems do they have that you can solve? What questions do they have that you can answer? By creating relevant and helpful content for your target audience, you can build trust and establish yourself as an authority in your industry, and that’s good for you, your audience, and Google.

Build high-quality backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They're an essential factor in SEO because they help search engines determine your website's trustworthiness and authority; however, they can be very risky to build. You must be careful and follow the rules, or you can be penalized.

To improve your SEO, you need to focus mainly on building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry.

You can ask to provide a guest blog post for another website.

You can sign up for HARO and be a resource for reporters, providing quotes for publications. You can also guest on podcasts and have the host link back to your website from theirs.

You can also build links safely from local groups such as the Chamber of Commerce in your community or small business associations.

Another way to build high-quality backlinks is by creating shareable content. If you create interesting and informative content, people are more likely to link to it from their websites which will help your website.

Don’t ever buy links. You will receive offers to sell you links regularly. Don’t do this. It will get you in trouble.

How links help your SEO

Maybe you’re wondering why link building matters to your SEO, so let me explain how the SEO process works quickly.

Every website has something called a Domain Authority. It’s a score of a website’s perceived authority and is a score from 1-100, with 100 being high. The higher the DA, the more likely it’s thought that website will be able to rank for a keyword. The higher your DA, the easier it should be to rank high in Google’s search results.

When you rank higher in the search results, you get more traffic from people searching for information related to the keyword they’re using. The higher you are on page 1, the more visits you will get. If you’re on page 2, you aren’t going to get traffic for that keyword.

The higher your Domain Authority, the higher your rankings, and the more traffic you get. It’s pretty simple. And how do you raise your DA? Through link building/link attraction.

If you want to make money through SEO, you must work with Google to help them better understand your website. You can make money from SEO by creating great content that serves your ideal customer, optimizing that content for Google (and using the right keyword), and safely building links to that content.

SEO takes time; it’s not an overnight revenue booster but a long-term strategy. Your blog post this week could potentially still send you traffic 3-5 years from now. Can your social media post do the same? Nope, and that’s why SEO is such a powerful marketing channel, especially for small business owners.