SEO (search engine optimization) is a massively powerful long-term growth strategy that’s often overlooked in the age of Instagram. It can help you grow your reach, impact and revenue – and you don’t have to know how to code!
Making simple SEO-related changes to the way you produce and share your content can make a HUGE difference. I taught everything myself and know you can, too.
Whether you decide to dig into SEO yourself or hire an expert to do it for your business, it’s extremely valuable to understand how it works and approach it creatively.
What is SEO?
“Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.” –Wikipedia
Google ranks your content using a variety of factors, such as: how many people go to your website, how much time they spend on it, how many links they click, how many times your content is shared on social media, how many comments your blog posts and pages get. Paid Google ads do NOT contribute to your ranking.
It’s possible to achieve outstanding reach and get on the first page of Google results through organic optimization with a $0 budget – I’m here to show you how.
These 5 SEO tips and strategies are for business owners, coaches, influencers, bloggers, artists and consultants. If you have a website and are ready for your work to be seen by more people in a conscious way – these SEO tips are for you.
You can also get this content in podcast format – tune into episode 80 of The Ksenia Brief Podcast:
So why is SEO important?
Before we get to the tips, I want to give you an idea of the kind of results you might expect by optimizing your content.
Here are some results I got by putting intentional work into SEO on breakfastcriminals.com and on kseniabrief.com:
- 5+ blog posts that show up within on the first page of Google (on topics that reflect my core topics of interest – cacao ceremony, whole food nutrition bars, celery juice).
- 650K+ views on my top blog post.
- By offering value through intentionally optimized content, I’ve built my community and brought in customers who are looking exactly for what I have to offer. Content that I want to be known for is discoverable – which means I have a way to add value to those looking for answers to specific topics I’ve researched, while making affiliate commissions by recommending products I truly love and use consistently. For example, one of the cacao products I share on this page has sold $35,000 of product in one year. That’s $3,500 for me – without consistently promoting it. SEO is evergreen and once you rank, the traffic keeps coming and converting – if you create that opportunity.
- People are able to find me and hire me when they search for “conscious social media consulting/coaching”. Many clients have found me by googling “conscious social media” and ending up on the conscious social media consulting page.
- I’ve built the authority to charge over $2k for a single sponsored blog post.
Bonus:
I often get DMs from people that had never heard about my work before after they find my cacao blog post or cacao ceremony YouTube video. As a result of one such connection, I led a cacao ceremony Buenos Aires while visiting Argentina (I shared the full story on @ksenia.brief Instagram). You never know who will find and connect with your work and by having strong SEO, you’re creating more pathways for magic!
Are you ready to get in action and take the most effective steps you can to nail the SEO game and expand your reach?
These are the top 5 SEO tips you can start implementing right away to take your online presence to the next level.
Before we begin…
If you don’t already have a website – go get it. It’s the only way of communicating to your audience you own and can control. If instagram disappears tomorrow, what are you going to do? Your website is the only platform that you actually own. I use Bluehost to host my WordPress websites and highly recommend it.
You can use SEO to rank both blog posts and website pages – if you’re not yet ready to start a blog, start by optimizing your pages.
SEO Tip #1: Get An SEO Plugin
If use WordPress, install All in one SEO or Yoast SEO ASAP to optimize your homepage and choose what words come up, all other pages and blog posts. It will allow you to add keywords and optimize description and SEO titles for your post (which should be less like headlines, and more like Google search terms – think of what people are typing in the Google search bar).
SEO Tip #2: Create Keyword-Driven Content
Create content that reflects your expertise and what you want to be known for long-term, and share it as long-form blog posts with 500 words or more. Then, create “clusters” of content around the same topic, with all of them linking to each other and driving more traffic on topics people are already consuming on your website.
Not sure where to start? Spend some time in the backend of your website and find what your top pages and blog posts are, and give your audience more of that.
While it’s very important to build your content around targeted keywords, no one wants to read content that feels robotic. Creating optimized content is a fine balance between great engaging copy and smart, organic placement of keywords. You got this!
SEO Tip #3: Build Backlinks
You can have the best content, but if no one can find it, it’s not making any impact.
There are three main ways to build traffic:
A. Send people to your website from your other platforms – think email and social media.
B. Build organic keyword strength by optimizing your content and creating content around specific keywords
C. Build backlinks to your website.
Building backlinks is the reason I have said yes to countless unpaid opportunities to write guest posts for others and interviews for small publications.
I always make sure that the copy includes keywords I want my site to rank for, and link those keywords back to my site (ex: “cacao ceremony” vs “this is what I do in the morning”. )
How do you know if a backlink is worth your time?
This is where domain authority comes in. A domain authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. You can check your domain authority on websites like ahrefs.com or moz.com (both are paid services, I don’t know of a free way to access this information.) Until you’re ready to invest into paid tools, you can determine if the backlink is worth your time by spending some time on the website you’re considering, evaluating the quality of content, social reach and comments they get. You want to make sure that their website audience is aligned with the kind of person you want to attract.
SEO Tip #4: Create Video Content
Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google? If you haven’t considered video content yet, I encourage you to do so.
There’s a massive opportunity to create evergreen content that will help your website content rank even higher than through on-site optimization.
For example, when you search “What is cacao ceremony”, both my blog post and YouTube video come up as in top 3 results on Google. Both are ranked highly, and because they link to each other, they reinforce the ranking.
SEO Tip #5: Optimize your Instagram bio
This is a quick Instagram change you can make right away. In 2021 Instagram revealed that both content and profile information are going to be indexed by search engines. Adding a location (if you have a local business) and industry-specific keywords (if you have a global business) to your Instagram bio can make a huge difference.
I recommend adding it to either the Name field, or to your bio field.
For example, my husband’s company offers digital marketing to home services businesses, and they made sure to include “Home Services Marketing” as well as niche specific keywords (“GMB and HVAC SEO”) to their Name and Bio fields:
That’s it! If you implement at least 1-2 actions from this SEO list, you will be ahead of 90% of people.
You might also enjoy these podcast episodes on intentionally growing your impact and authentic self-expression on social media:
- 192 My Approach To Social Media Strategy in 2022 | Reframing “Social Media Growth” and Unleashing The Full Force Of Your Presence
- 151 Social Media Energy Download: This Makes All The Difference [Spirit of Content]