When it comes to “marketing things” that are super important but also misunderstood to the point people think it’s kind of a pain to learn, we’d put search engine optimization (SEO) at the top of the list. 

There are so many factors involved when it comes to SEO, and unfortunately, a lot of the information floating around on the internet makes it seem like it’s way too complicated for the average small business owner to learn. 

But when it comes down to it, you can totally do SEO as a small business owner—and the best place to start is with your website. Here are our eight tips to help you optimize your website with confidence!

• Step 1: Review your website analytics
• Step 2: Research your SEO keywords
• Step 3: Decide which keywords to use on each page
• Step 4: Optimize your website copy with your keywords
• Step 5: Use your keywords in the file names of everything you upload
• Step 6: Optimize your URLs
• Step 7: Complete the SEO settings on your website
• Step 8: Submit a sitemap

Don’t worry—we’re going to break those steps down in a lot more detail below.

Step 1: Review Your Website Analytics

Before we even get into SEO optimization, let’s take a look at your website analytics. After all, metrics or it didn’t happen! If you’re not looking at your analytics, you’re not going to know where your traffic is coming from and which pages to optimize. 

Within your Google Analytics account, take a look at: 

• Total organic sessions through Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition - Understand how many people find your website through SEO on average
• Top pages by organic traffic through Engagement > Pages and screens - See which pages get the most traffic through SEO
• Site speed through Behavior > Site Speed - Get a better understanding of your website’s technical performance, which impacts your SEO

Step 2: Research your SEO keywords

Now that you know where you’re starting from, the next step of any SEO project is to research your SEO keywords. Because SEO keywords are the “labels” or “markers” you put on your website to help search engines like Google understand what you’re all about. 

And btw? That’s super important because if Google understands what your website is about, it can put it in front of people looking for a product or service like yours.

Now let’s talk about what you need to do to choose the right keywords.

First, use an SEO platform like Ubersuggest or Semrush to start your keyword research. When it comes to finding the right ones for your website, you want to start with the foundational keywords that describe what you and where you do it (for services) or what your product is (for products). 

Here are a few other things you should know:

• You want to end up with a mix of keywords focused on what your product or service is
• You also want to make sure your service area is clear by incorporating your location (if geographic location matters for your business)
• Keywords can be short (1-3 words) or “long tail” (these are longer phrases and/or questions)
• You want to find a mix of keywords with a large monthly search volume (how many times people are typing it into Google in a given month) as well as lower search volume (the low search volume can mean there is very high buyer intent)

Pro-tip: Create a doc or excel sheet to organize your list of SEO keywords. It can be hard to remember all of them! 

Step 3: Decide which keywords you are going to use on each page

One of the biggest misconceptions about optimizing your website is that you should use the same (or all of your) keywords on every page—don’t do this! The reason is, you aren’t working to get your entire website to rank for certain keywords; rather, you’re actually trying to get the pages of your website ranking for keywords. When you try to keyword-stuff on every single page, Google (and other search engines) end up confused and your entire website will suffer.

So, after you have your list of keywords and phrases, the next step is to decide which ones you are going to use on which pages. The key here is using the ones most related to what potential customers will learn about or find on the page.

Let’s talk about what this looks like, using a wedding planner as an example.

• Home page: [Your City] Wedding Planner
• About page: Best Wedding Planner in [Your City]
• Services page: Wedding planner package (or full-service planning, or day-of coordination… you get the idea!)

Pro-tip: You can use more than 1 keyword per page. In fact, we often use 3 or more! Just make sure only one is marked as the main keyword (H1 and the tail end of your url—more on that in just a bit).

Step 4: Optimize your website copy with your keywords

Now that you’ve done your SEO research and planning, it’s time to sit down and write. In a perfect world, you’ll want to naturally weave your target keywords into the page copy.

Even though it’s popular and easy these days, we don’t recommend relying on AI to optimize your website copy. That’s because you still want to include your brand voice, tone, and personality in your website copy—even if it is for SEO. 

Plus, some AI tools can end up keyword stuffing your copy, which is a huge no no! If you’re just using keywords left and right, Google catches on quickly. They still want your copy to be natural and helpful, first and foremost. 

If you are going to use AI to optimize your website copy, we recommend giving it detailed instructions to use your brand voice and tone and to make sure it’s not overusing your keywords. Plus, it’s always good practice to take a thorough editing pass and include more of your personality. Enji’s AI Copywriter is a great solution because it’s designed to use your brand voice. 

Here are some more best practices for optimizing your website copy:

• Use the main keyword for the page in a headline (heading 1 or H1 as you format it)
• Use your supporting keywords in sub headlines and the body copy
• A good rule of thumb is to use a keyword 1-2 times in about 500 words 

Step 5: Use your keywords in the file names of everything you upload

Most people overlook this step, but not you! Your website is more than just words on a page—there are usually lots of photos, videos or graphics too. And each of those should be optimized for search. Just be sure to use the main keyword for the page in the file names of whatever you are uploading to your website. 

For example, your images might be labelled something like: marketing-software-for-small-business-owners.jpg 

Step 6: Optimize your URLs

Next on the list, is your URLs. Perhaps the main “marker” search engines look for when they are trying to understand the pages of your website is the URL. Specifically, everything at the “tail end” of your URL. Here is an example:

www.yourwebsite.com/keyword-in-the-url

Go into the settings for each page of your website and customize the URL with the main SEO keyword for the page. Just make sure that if you’re editing existing pages you’re also redirecting the old URL. Broken links can seriously muck up your SEO. 

Step 7: Complete your on-page SEO

Your web page copy is one piece of on-page SEO, but the other half is a little bit more in the back-end of things. To finish optimizing, you’ll need to update your page meta data, which includes the title tags and page descriptions. 

These tags and descriptions are important because they’re what search engines show in the website previews they give people on search results pages. To update these, you can typically find an SEO section in your website builder, or you can use a SEO plugin like Yoast. If you’re savvy with html, you can also update them yourself in your web page’s code. 

As you’re optimizing your metadata, make sure to use your main page keyword in both the title and description. 

For example: 

Title: Website Copywriter for Wedding Pros

Description: TAYLRD Media and Designs is a website copywriter for wedding pros. Tayler has worked with people globally writing copy that helps them get found by couples.

Pro-tip: There is a character limit on both these fields! Keep your titles to 50-60 characters (with spaces) and the description to 160.

Step 8: Submit a site map

This might sound super intimidating, but the good news is, most website platforms take care of this for you! On the off chance the one you are on doesn’t, here are instructions from Google on how to submit a sitemap manually. 

Optimizing your website takes some planning but this is 100% worth it! Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to having potential customers and clients find you on the internet!

Now that you have traffic, what should you do with it?

Great work! As you continue to optimize your SEO, keep an eye on your analytics to see if you’re growing your organic traffic. Just keep in mind that SEO is more of a long-term strategy, and it can take several months for your pages to start ranking and traffic to start coming in. Good thing you have the KPI dashboard to track your progress (with an automatic Google analytics integration so you don’t need to do a thing!).

Once you do have more SEO traffic, make the most of it! Use Enji’s Marketing Strategy Generator to get actionable tips for maintaining and growing your website. All it takes is answering a quick questionnaire about your business and goals! 

Your marketing strategy should also include how to optimize your other marketing channels, which are all as important as your website. 

In fact, your customer journeys likely include these other channels. Your customers might find your website through SEO, click to your Instagram, then make a purchase from your link in bio. Or maybe they land on your blog, join your email list, and book with you from your email marketing! 

Don’t forget about the power of backlinks either–the work you do on other platforms like Pinterest can boost your SEO when customers find you there and click into your website. With a little consistency (and Enji’s help), you’ll be rocking on page one of Google in no time!