SEO for Solopreneurs: A Complete Guide for 2025

You’ve probably heard that SEO is important, but you might not know what it is or how to do it, and that’s OK. I’m going to help you understand what it is, why it matters to your website, and how to get started with it today. As a solopreneur, you have a lot on your plate, and it can be hard to know where to spend your time and effort to make the biggest impact in your business. SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the best things you can do to help your business grow. Let’s jump into what exactly SEO is for Solopreneurs and get started today.

What is SEO for solopreneurs? 

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which simply means we’re helping the search engines understand the content that we’re creating. When the search engines understand our content better, it’s easier for new customers, readers, listeners, etc., to find us. Think of SEO as visibility for your content. As solopreneurs, SEO helps us drive traffic to our websites without ads or social media. It's a great way to help people find our businesses organically. SEO is one of the best free marketing strategies you can use to help grow your business. 

How does SEO work?

When you do SEO on your website, you make it easier for Google (or other search engines) to understand the content that you’re creating. When it’s easier for the search engines to understand your content, they’re more likely to show you to someone who’s searching for the information you have on your website.

Rather than thinking of SEO as something extra that you need to do to your website or blog, try to think of it as the visibility boost you give your content. When you optimize your website, blog, or even podcast, you start to show up in the results more often, and new people learn about your business for free.

Do I have to do SEO as a solopreneur?

You don’t have to do SEO on your website to be in business. However, if you want to get organic traffic to your website (organic is free traffic from Google or other search engines), you have to do it. Your website won’t show up as often or rank as high on Google if you haven’t done SEO on it.

Taking the time to learn how to do SEO and doing it properly on your website can be one of the best investments you make in your business during your solopreneur stage because you’ll help your website show up more often on Google, you’ll build your free traffic, and start to grow your business. The great thing about search engine optimization is that the work you do lasts for years. When you’re in the early days of your business, if you create content that helps your ideal customer and optimize it for Google (do SEO on it), you can start to generate free traffic for your website that will continue to come in as you grow. I have blog posts that I wrote in 2017 that still send traffic to my website.

How much time is SEO going to take?

I know time is a precious commodity for solopreneurs. You have to do everything in your business yourself or with the help of a VA or freelance help. I get it completely. You want to make sure that the time you’re investing will pay off for your business. With SEO, it’s going to take you a little while to do the work on your website. If you have a strong understanding of how it works and know how to choose keywords and what to do, it’s under 30 minutes per page, but if you need to learn how to do it or research what to do, it will take more time. You aren’t really creating a lot more work; you’re simply choosing a keyword to use in your SEO elements to help Google or other search engines understand what your page is about.

How do you do SEO on your website?

Let’s start with the basics; you will need to choose a keyword to use for your SEO work. You’ll want to choose a different keyword for each website page or blog post that you’re going to optimize (that just means doing SEO). When you’re choosing an SEO keyword, you want to think about two things – does your customer use this word, and can you rank at the top of Google for this word? You’re looking for keywords your customer uses that your website has a good chance of ranking high on Google for.

How do you know if your website can rank high on Google for a keyword?

Well, to start, focus on low-competition keywords. The higher competition words are going to be much harder to rank for because the websites that already rank for them in Google’s search results are big, super authoritative sites. You want to look for words that are specific to your niche, maybe they’re long-tail meaning they are more a phrase than a single keyword, etc. For example, the keyword for this blog post is SEO for solopreneurs. I have a good chance of ranking on page 1 for this keyword, but if I were only targeting SEO, there’s no way that I’d rank on page 1 because the other sites that rank for that keyword are all huge companies. There’s less search demand for SEO for solopreneurs, but it’s also going to bring in people who are more my ideal customer than the word SEO would, so I’m not worried about the difference in search demand.

When you’re choosing a keyword for your page, go to Google and search with an Incognito browser window and see who shows up on page 1 for that search. If they’re small websites like yours, you’re probably on the right track, but if they’re big brands, big sites, etc., you need to look for a different keyword.

Doing SEO on your page step-by-step

Now that you have your keyword, you want to use it in the places that Google will look for clues about your content. You want to create a title tag and meta description and use the same keyword in both. Your title tag should be less than 60 characters, and your meta description needs to be under 160 characters. These are written for your reader because they will show up in Google’s search results but include your keyword for Google. Then, you’ll want to make sure you’ve used your keyword in your header tags; those are the lines with large fonts that separate the paragraphs on this page. There are six options for header tags, but as a solopreneur, you only need to worry about 1, 2, and 3. You can ignore 4-6, which we very seldom use for small business websites.

How do you use H1-H3 tags?

Let’s break it down quickly. Your page should have 1 H1 tag on it and no more. H tags are Header tags, and one is the most important in the site structure. You don’t want to have multiple “most” important tags, or that will confuse Google. If you’re using Wordpress, your page title is automatically your H1 tag, so as long as you’ve used your keyword in your title, you’ll be OK. If you’re on another website builder and you have to set your H1 tag, it’s easy. Be sure to include your keyword in your H1. 

Your H2 and H3 tags are subhead tags to help explain your content better and break it down. When trying to figure out how to use them or where to use them, think back to when you were first learning to write papers in English. Your H2 tag is your main point, and your H3 tag is your subpoint. For example, if your page has 3 tips for your reader, then tips 1, 2, and 3 would each be in an H2 tag, and if you want to break tip 3 down further, you could use an H3 tag to do that.

Use your keyword in your picture file name for image SEO

You’ll want to use your keyword in your image file names since that’s one more place Google will look for clues about the page content. You want to format it this way – keyword-keyword-keyword.jpg. Use the – between words because Google reads that as a space. If your keyword is a phrase with five words together, then use the five words with the – in between each word.

Use the SEO keyword in your copy

This should be a given, but I’m going to include it here because I got a question about this recently – you won’t rank for a keyword if you don’t use it in the copy. You have to use the word on your page. This should be pretty easy to do since your page should be able to use this keyword or concept anyway. Make sure you’re using the keyword somewhere on your page. You don’t need to use it a specific number of times; just focus on providing value to your reader, and you’ll use it naturally.

Easy tech SEO for solopreneurs

I know the word tech SEO can sound scary, but it’s so much easier today than it was years ago. For today, I want you to check a couple of very simple things to make sure your website is good to go. First, make sure your website is secure. You do this by making sure your URL is HTTPS, not just HTTP.  It’s small but matters.

Next, I want you to check to see how your website looks on different screens. Most of today’s website templates are what we call responsive design, meaning they are supposed to look good on phones, tablets, and computer screens. You want to look at your site to make sure it’s easy to read and navigate on each screen size.

Finally, you want to check your site’s speed. Having a speedy site is important to Google because it matters to visitors. People aren’t going to wait for a slow website to load; they’re going to go somewhere else. You can use a free tool like the Google Page Speed Test to see how your site is doing. If there’s anything you need to fix, it will tell you what needs to be done.

SEO tips and resources for solopreneurs

If you’re a solopreneur who’s ready to get started with SEO to drive more traffic to your website, I’m here to help show you how. Start with my free Beginner’s Guide to SEO and take the free class, or join me in Simple SEO (to learn SEO only) or Simple SEO Content (to learn SEO and how to create a content strategy to drive even more organic traffic). I want to help make this as easy as possible for you.