How to be Your Own SEO Consultant (for Writers)
If I can do it, you definitely can
In the early days of my freelance life, due to being broke, I did every little thing myself. For some things, it proved to be a blessing in disguise. One of those things: SEO.
This article is about some of the things I did to optimize and attract traffic to my ‘own name’ author website. One helpful thing I did early on was read ‘SEO Optimization: An Hour a Day’. Although it was geared more to the internal corporate soldier, the practical advice on blogging and not gaming the search engines was pure gold.
I used the basic optimization techniques — plus blogging regularly — to rank our web design website among top three results for ‘copywriting brisbane’ in 2010–12. Ironically knocking my own copywriting brand down to #4 — #5.
There are three areas of SEO: External, Internal and Technical. So let’s go over each with what I’ve done (remembering I’m not a SEO consultant).
External SEO Activities
It’s not savvy to rely 100% on Google search results for all your traffic — so these creative ideas help ideal visitors find your site.
When you use other ways of getting found online (called ‘referrals’), it ups the popularity of your brand (this brand can be simply you, the writer). And it may increase page rankings. Some of the better portals were:
- Google My Business, with services list and location to match all other location citations
- Carefully putting the URL and selective keywords in your LinkedIn profile
- Listing in directories under the right service areas
- Asking for reviews on Google
- Making case study YouTube videos
- Popping the blog feed into blog feed readers and auto-posting to Twitter.
This external SEO work can help in two ways:
1) increasing your URL (website address) visibility, and
2) ensuring you gain more visitors from a variety of sources.
№2 is especially important, due to Google algorithm changes every 18 months or so.
I learnt to be cheeky. If the local biz directory did not have a category listing for copywriters or editors or written communications, I asked the manager to create one. Then, I’m the first there. I always add a nice image and change the profile words to match the location or niche topic. That way it puts the keywords of the actual directory in there and seems tailored to their audience.
Technical SEO
Part of helping your website to gain visibility is to do basics… and manage these elements:
- Indexing of your current pages — is it even happening? Can they index through internal links?
- XML Sitemap found by Google bots
- Which key phrases are achieving the most good visits for you?
- Which search-worthy keywords in your niche are being left untapped?
- Is there a fixable reason if most people are leaving your site quickly?
If you care at all about this stuff, you will need to install Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Don’t Bounce!
It’s obviously really important that people stay around and read a few pages of your site.
Annoying as it is, a portion of visitors will ‘bounce’, or always leave your site having only read one page. As your own SEO consultant, you need to figure out whether your ‘bounce rate’ is normal… or way too high. Remember, high bounce rate=bad. So, what is normal?
Rocketful blog says:
As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.
At one time, my author site’s bounce rate was 5%, but recently it shot up to 80%, which was a shock. One reason: I saw that the main menu ‘decided’ not to show up for a while. It pays to regularly check your website from your mobile phone. There’s usually something to get in a tizzy over. Menu items being too small to click is one thing Google will flag for you (in Search Console).
Reasons for a high bounce rate could include: images are slow to load, pages are too lacking in detail, or the site is really not what they Googled for (a misnomer in the naming of a page’s title, for instance, could lead them astray). Another reason is a high number of spam bots, but these can be disallowed in your Analytics reports.
When you’ve got Analytics installed, look at Behaviour — Behaviour Flow and you’ll see where the visitor drop-offs scream the loudest. (Drop-offs are where they leave).
If you see that almost all visitors are dropping off your services pages (or ‘money’ pages), try my tactic of putting a loud, bright button inviting them for a short call or your most helpful report on there.
The rest of the items will be allowed through Google Search Console (ex-Webmaster Tools). Setting it up is a bit tricky, as you must put a tiny piece of code into the header of your website or else install a higher level tool called Google Tag Manager. Lucky for me, plugins exist that let you add code to headers or footers.
Looking at the Big Picture — Analysis
SEO Consultants often ask about how your web pages are “converting”. While you might be picturing your website changing colours, this really means looking at how many people sign up for your tips, ask by email for a service, or phone up. These are ‘goals’ that can be tracked, with the help of analytical software.
It pays to at least have a web analytics program installed, then glance at visitor numbers and the keywords they found you with on a regular basis.
You’ll see my site’s Behaviour Flow, with highlight of one page path, above.
By looking at my analytics, I was able to note that 94% of all traffic to my writing coaching page, a full 203 people, dropped off after viewing only one more page. It says just 6 of the starting lot looked at the contact page, while half of the remaining people either dropped off after page 2 or went through to page 3. (I got one enquiry for real).
Thus, it’s time to create an irresistible introductory offer right on that busy landing page. If that is what I want to provide of course.
What action will you take to get your SEO to-do list started?