I was having a chat with a work colleague the other day and he as telling me about his wife’s Health and Wellbeing business. I don’t know too much detail but I assume it was some sort of naturopath style business.
Anyway, within one night she had bought a domain name, signed up for a Wix website and built herself a neat website. She was having trouble still getting some traction online. As I was pressed for time as I had a meeting to attend, I told him I’ll email him something that night. This is what I sent to him word by word. I trust it’ll be of value to you.
Hey Dan,
Firstly, congratulations to your wife on taking the initiative and getting something going quickly. Wix is a great tool for doing this. The downside is that you can’t customise and add plugins etc afterwards. If she is serious about blogging and really scaling this up, then it’s advisable to change over to a maybe WordPress platform. My tech guy can help with this. I’ll leave the details below.
Blogging
If she wants to keep things the way they are, that’s fine. I found this article which shows the best practices for boosting your SEO (search engine optimization) which is basically your online visibility.
Targetting your keywords
The most reliable option for doing this is to use ‘Googley Keyword planner’. I don’t want to provide you with a link as they keep changing the name but if you search for it, you’ll find it. It’s not the most intuitive tool to use but it’s reliable and completely free.
UPDATE: 2019 September – Promo has expired for Alli-ai.
Appsumo, the site I told you about today seems to have a SEO tool on sale at the moment but I haven’t used it so can’t really recommend it. You’re welcome to check it out never the less.
https://appsumo.com/alli-ai – pls read the reviews before buying this.
I won’t be buying this as I’ve got other tools I use like LongTail Pro. You don’t don’t need any of this. At the moment, I recommend just using the free Google keyword planner. Maybe watch some YouTube videos on how to use it. Might be a bit of a learning curve for you though.
Social Media Syndication
The next step would be to publish your article on different social media websites. You can do this manually or by using a tool. I’ll probably end up buying this myself actually – https://appsumo.com/socialbee-2019/
One word of warning I suppose. Though these lifetime deals are great, they have the potential to go belly up. But at the end of the day, you’re only risking USD49 so no real biggie. The reviews seem to be positive so they don’t have native integration with Instagram.
Next Level SEO
Another way to boost your rankings on search engines is to give it a boost by finding a freelancer who can add backlinks of your articles on high authority websites. You can find reliable freelancers (use the ratings) to find go local SEO people
http://www.fiverr.com/
I can’t stress this enough. Don’t go crazy at once by buying like 1,000 backlinks. Go for quality instead of quantity. The last thing you want to happen is to be ‘slapped’ by Google for gaming the system. Slow and steady.
Professional Email
For my business stuff, I use a professional email with Google G-suite. It’s $5 a month. If you can justify paying it, here’s the link to set that up – https://goo.gl/p8MhCE
If you want any sort of Tech support – you’re welcome to use my Tech guru guy – Tarun (https://www.acentriasoftware.com/). Tell him you’re one of Opi’s friends and he’ll look after you. He charges me US$15. I think he’ll do the same for you.
Video
Lastly, add some videos to the site and include them within the articles. This is so simple but not many people do it. Therefore, anyone doing it will definitely have an edge.
The easiest way to do this is to take out your smartphone and start recording and then upload that to YouTube. This isn’t the most professional way but it’ll get the job done.
The other is what I sometimes do, is to use a tool like Content Samurai. This link will give you a free trial to test out this software. The downfall is it’s $47 a month. I haven’t been able to get around this man so it’s upto you on whether this makes financial sense for you guys. Either way, I highly recommend getting videos you on the site. The software itself runs on the cloud and it’s solid!
Register your business on Google
This is pretty important if you’re a local business as it’ll help you to appear in the Google maps listings. Goto the below link and complete all the steps and bring your profile to 100% complete.
https://www.google.com/business/
Add Citations – really easy win for you guys!
For local businesses, this is a step which most people do not follow and it’s so easy to do. Add more and more citations. A citation is basically your business name, address, and phone number. This three appearing on a directory (like yellowpages online) is kind of like a backlink to your website. This basically gives your site more credibility. Does that make sense?
You should be able to find a freelancer to add citations to your site on http://www.fiverr.com/
Conclusions
Your aim should be to get on the first page of Google (and Bing,Yahoo and DuckDuckgo). Especially if you’re going after the local market, this can definitely be done. Normally when you search for a local keyword term like “herbal doctor in Geelong”, you’ll get three local directory listings coming up. This is commonly referred to as ‘the snack pack”. If you follow the above steps, you can get on the snack pack within a matter of months which means more business coming in the door for you.
I think I’ve covered everything. If I remember anything else, will let you know.
Feel free to come back to me if you have any questions. Apologise for the brain dump!
Cheers, good luck!
Opi