Starting a business is on the bucket list of many men, but to successfully create and maintain a profitable business is more challenging to accomplish than one would think.
Considering that people who start a business are within the age group of 40 and 60, it’s safe to say that many men have once thought that their marvelous idea could have been their full-time job.
Despite what the economy has recently thrown at you, today, we will discuss how to properly situate yourself so you can get that business from thought to profitable actions through the means of Search Engine Optimization amidst a pandemic or not.
53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), if executed correctly, is the holy grail of many successful online businesses today. SEO done right will increase your website’s organic search rankings, allowing more customers to land on your website and hopefully make a purchase.
The first step to starting your online business is to choose what you want to sell. Now, I can’t make that decision for you, but think about what your peers and others around you have noticed that you’re good at?
Once you solve that, considering most businesses are created to make money, have more freedom to do what you want — you’ll ultimately want to think of a name to turn that business into reality.
Below are the three steps needed to succeed online using SEO. If you follow them, your chances of getting ahead on Google will be at least 50% greater than most individuals who start a business without any blueprints on hand.
1. Choose your business name.
As the great Uncle Ben would say, with great power comes great responsibility. The same holds true when choosing your business domain name. Choosing a business name, nevertheless, finding the right domain name can be a daunting task, especially since, as of January 2020, there are over 1.74 billion websites on the Internet.
But fret not — it’s really not a big deal when you have tools like Namemesh.com and many more that can quickly generate a name without any headaches.
While picking a name that sounds catchy is one thing: choosing a domain name with the right keywords is crucial. In the world of SEO, exact match domains or (EMDs) are precisely what it sounds like, a domain name that matches a search query to a T such as hotel.com.
Exact match domains have been highly abused in the past by spammers trying to manipulate the SERPs (search engine resolutions page), but they can still be quite valuable in 2020. Although your domain name doesn’t have to match your “niches-keywords,” it does help attract users initially (and to this day) has been shown to outrank many other domains without exact match keywords in their domain.
To make your life a lot easier, the industry leaders of SEO, Moz.com, clearly defined the types of exact match domains you can select without making your domain too long and coming off as spammy, as seen in the diagram below.
And what about my business name?
A good rule of thumb to follow when choosing your business name is that it matches your domain name so that the very keywords you want users to search for appears in your domain name. Keep it short, preferably 2-3 words and try to stick to a .com, .co, .net, and even .io are quite valuable these days.
2. Research your competitors and keywords.
When positioning yourself online, you want everyone to know that you’re subject matter expert at what you do, but how can others know that you’re the best when they can’t find you?
Doing keyword research is often a missed step that many overlook simply because they don’t know where to begin. A paid tool such as Ahrefs.com can help you solve that; there are other tools that you may sign up for the free trial version and still do your initial research at no cost.
By taking a deep dive into what your competitors are already ranking for, then filtering keywords by their difficulty, this can help you determine the keywords that you, as a new business owner, can easily rank for, given, of course, you properly optimize your pages and articles.
For example, if you want to start a handyman business, you can search for keyphrases that you know your prospecting audience might be looking for, such as “garage paint colors.”
Although this keyword is a bit broad, if you created an article such as “Top Garage Paint Colors for All Year Seasons,” not only would you be attracting 1,000 potential local clientele but also national clients.
By optimizing your content for a keyword that you’re more likely to rank for, your chances of being discovered from the get-go significantly increase. Both local and national users who happen to discover your new business article will be educated on how to solve their problems and know what you do best.
As time passes, those local users turn into leads, and the national ones can always be upsold a digital product such as an ebook or course, and if you are really after the money, you may even sell the lead to another company locally depending on where they’re located. By having consistent traffic each month on your articles, your website can even perhaps be used as a lead-gen tool, and that alone is worth thousands depending on the quality of leads that are created.
If you take anything away from this whole article, the key is, don’t create content without proper keyword research in place, or else you’re creating content that no one will ever read.
I cannot begin to explain how many businesses from small mom and pop sites to Fortune 500 corporate companies who have pages of content and hardly any of it gets reads — all in the name of insufficient keyword research.
3. Create content.
90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google. Does that scare you? It should. As with the previous section covering keyword research, creating your content is just as important. Creating your content is, in my opinion, the best part of using SEO to scale and grow your business.
It’s fun, and you can let your entrepreneurial creativity run wild as you develop and create new content ideas. With the proper keywords in place, organic growth is soon to come, and you can start to see results in a little as 30 days — if you really optimize properly and aim your scopes at low, competitive keywords.
With that said, don’t ever fall for quick-ranking schemes often offered by many shabby agencies who promise to rank for your keywords in several days. If anyone makes promises like that, run for the hills!
As you build up your domain authority, you can then target higher competitive keywords over time and expand your content strategies furthermore. Creating content should always be started with your users in mind. Try to be as helpful, descriptive, and include as much information, such as high-quality photos and videos in your articles as possible.
Google will always favor well-written and optimized content over other websites that are lacking in its content marketing departments. Believe it or not, you can even outrank major sites worth millions, simply by creating better content and optimizing your on-page of your articles better than theirs. That and a little of link building goes a long way.
If you follow the steps above, you are guaranteed to generate organic traffic in no time and get your business in the eyes of your customers!
* * *
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
Photo Credit: on Unsplash
The post How to Use SEO to Start or Build a Business appeared first on The Good Men Project.
