If I had a nickel for every inaccurate statement regarding search engine optimization (SEO) that I’ve seen bandied about the creative entrepreneur scene I could be retired on a beach somewhere right now. Here’s a sampling:
SEO is too complicated and hard, it’s for techies only.
SEO is expensive, you have to hire a professional
SEO can be put on autopilot. I found this great program, if you give them just $49.95 they’ll submit your site to search engines.
No, no and HELL NO!
Look, SEO is not rocket science. Yes, it will take a little reading on your part to understand it, but since you’re here, I already know you can read, so I am 100% sure you are up to this. The important thing is reading information on SEO that’s accurate and easy-to-understand, even if you’re not very technical. The good news is I’ve gathered just that sort of reading and put it into a handy FREE guide. All you have to do is download and read. If you give SEO a few hours each week, you’ll be able to do SEO on your own and start seeing results. My handy guide breaks SEO down into 4 manageable pieces and provides expert advice on how to approach each component. I’ve even included links to several other SEO beginner guides, in case you find my guide isn’t working for you.
Here’s what SEO has done for my online retail business:
1. Helped people find my products
My online shop sells t-shirts. This is just the kind of product you see on a stranger on the street and think “I like that, I wonder where they got it.” So you go home and google a description of the shirt, and try to find what you saw. If the t-shirt designer is smart, they wrote copy about their design using language a casual observer might use to describe the design, so that when the potential customer searches for the tee, they find it.
One of the most popular tees is my collection is Fuzz Aldrin, and when you google his name, he comes up as the first match. As a result, I get a fair amount of orders from organic search traffic that searches on that phrase.
I know some designers prefer to give their products more whimsical names. If you feel strongly about doing this, you can use other pages on your site like blog posts or product category pages to help customers find your products based on their descriptions. Just make sure some page (or pages) on your site does the job.
2. Helped people find my brand
Yesterday, I talked a little about attribution management. The crux of what I wrote is that marketing is cumulative and many things lead to sales. It might take your customer seeing your company in a magazine, in a banner ad, etc. before they buy. When they’re ready to buy, their first step might be go just google your company name. If your SEO sucks, you might not come up.
One of the phrases that brings me a lot of sales from search engine traffic is “exboyfriend”. It’s my company name and people often search on it to find me. Thanks to SEO, they’re able to find me quickly when they search by my name.
3. Helped people find products they wanted
Sometimes we’re shopping for something specific but don’t already have a place in mind to find it. Since our collection of designs at Ex-Boyfriend is pretty extensive, we get a fair amount of conversions on what SEO professionals call the “long tail”. Long tail phrases are those that are low volume (meaning not a ton of people search on them), but fairly specific (meaning when people do search on them, they are likely to buy because they’ve found something very specific that they want). I get conversions on phrases like “kids luchador shirt”, simply because there aren’t a ton of those. People wouldn’t be able to even find those products on my site, if it wasn’t optimized for search.
The three examples above regularly generate thousands of dollars of revenue for my online business. This is why SEO is so valuable and worth taking the time to learn about. It’s an online marketing tool that can generate tons of sales, without any cash investment, as long as you’re willing to do the work of learning about SEO and implementing the strategies. If you’re ready to get started and need a jumping off point, download my free guide, it’s a great way to get familiar with SEO and start getting your own site optimized.
