Your website is the only 24/7 365 day employee, I mean sometimes we as entrepreneurs have to sleep right?! So when we finally lay down and rest our eyes your website is still working to bring in new organic traffic or free traffic. How?

Through your websites SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Having an optimized site helps search engines rank your website and gets it in front of your ideal customers. To learn more about SEO check out my SEO decoded posts here.

Now the only way to help your website rank in the search engines is to make sure it is optimized for your intended audience. Every blog post you publish, every page you publish, every product and every podcast needs to be optimized for your intended audience.  

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Now I didn’t say some of the things you publish or even the things you feel are important but everything you post needs to be optimized for your audience. Yes, somethings may overlap in your SEO but it may also help serve another part of your audience or your ideal customer avatar. Some people try and discount SEO because they don’t understand the importance that SEO can make in their business but they are missing out on prime free traffic.

With that, if your website and blog are not optimized it cannot do its job properly and efficiently. If you haven’t had your website optimized or done it yourself; are 3 areas to start with.

But first…

Narrow down on your Intended audience

Before you can start optimizing your website + blog you need to know who you are trying to target. Start broad and then narrow down; remember you can have more than one ideal customer avatar.

When crafting your ideal customer, answer these questions:

1. Male or Female

2. How old are they?

3. What does their family life look like?

4. Where do they shop?

5. Do they have kids?

6. Are they married?

7. Education level?

8. What influencers do they follow?

9. What is their primary social media platform?

Narrowing down your audience helps make it easier when creating content and products and when you are selling them.

Where do I start?

Having your ideal customer(s) down on paper helps to remember who you are targeting with each piece of content that you create.

Here are 4 things to start optimizing on your website:

Page Titles + Descriptions

Page titles and descriptions may seem a bit obvious but there is definitely some factor to keep in mind when updating your page/ blog/ product titles and descriptions:

1. Be sure to add your keyword or keyword phrase to your title and description. This is the only thing you will see in the search engine results, no matter what you search for you will see the page title and the description.

2. Keep your description engaging and clearly states what is on the page, this way your visitors know when clicking on your result that it is what you described.

3. Keep your page titles below 60 characters and your descriptions below 160 characters.

4. Each description should be optimized for your keyword or keyword phrase.

Page Content

After you optimize your page titles and descriptions you need to review each piece of your website and blog post. Each page should focus on 1-2 keywords or keyword phrases maximum. This really affects your blog posts because the selected keyword or phrase is what the search engines will focus on. You don’t want to “stuff” your posts with keywords you think your audience may search for to be at the top of the search results/ That will have a negative impact on your search engine ranking.

Images

Optimizing your photos that are found on your website makes them searchable in the search engines. When you search for a specific type of photo, search engines will look at the image file name, URL, image description and ALT text to find the selected keyword or keyword phrase. All fields should be optimized with your intended keyword and an accurate description of what the image is, and if applicable the location. The more specific you are when you are optimizing your images, the better your chances of getting organic traffic to your images.  

Social Share

Lastly is Social Share, which if you use pretty much any type of social media you should be familiar with. A social share is the tidbit of information you see when you share a link on social media: in a post, in a comment and ad. It includes your SEO share image, page title, page description, and URL. It is very similar to the search engine results but they differ slightly. One displays an image the other is just text. When optimizing your link for social media be sure your image is optimized for its selected social media platform. Most social media image sizes are different; Pinterest is longer, Facebook is a rectangle, and Twitter is larger. Also be sure you add a general SEO image in case you do not add a specific photo per post.

After completing these quick changes to your Search Engine Optimization, you should start to see the changes take place immediately with your social share but on your search engine results, you will start to see changes in 20-30 days unless you send a manual fetch via Google which is covered in my SEO Essentials course.