This week I had a close friend pop up and ask me for my advice, as a social media marketer, on how to rank her new website as #1 on Google. And I thought I’d take this episode to share with you, what I shared with her – a simple explanation and intro to SEO, from a social media marketer. I’ll go into what SEO is, how it works, and provide pros and cons, and short cuts for application to your brand or business’ marketing as it pertains to Google rankings for the keywords that you wish to rank for. Let’s go already!

Her question was:

I’m trying to get a webpage to the top of google search results and I was wondering if you have any suggestions for resources I could look to? Thank you!

My answer: 

Just listen to this podcast episode! 

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Questions this podcast answers:

How to SEO

Intro to SEO

SEO for social media marketing

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Okay, your question is a big one and not my area of expertise. I know a little but I'm no expert.

But, basically what you need to look at is bettering your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) that will ultimately make Google look at your site as the best and most informative page to show people when they type into Google the keyword that you want to rank your page as number 1 for.

So, essentially you can rank for different keywords that are the best for what your business is. So, if someone types in a keyword like "social media" for my website to rank, I have to do a whole lot of “activities” to make my page the most "attractive" to Google, in order for Google to serve my page first, to their customers, so that ultimately Google can be sure that they are serving the best webpages to their customers, every time.

Those SEO bettering activities include things like the number of times the searched keyword appears on your page, linking to your page and the amount of good links that you have on your site to other helpful sites that also list that keyword, traffic and sites visits, time on site, shares, your social media including linked sites, multiple social sites, and good content that gets shared, …and like a 1000 other things.

The problem is that on that keyword I'm going up against a lot of big players like social media blogs, youtube channels with 1 million subscribers, media publishers, influencers in the space, bigger brands, other businesses, and anybody talking in that space. So to do better SEO I need to be creating more content on my keywords that I want to rank for... and do it more than my competitors, ...and do it better than my competitors so people visit my web pages, videos, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, etc.

SEO is essentially a marathon!

Especially for broad keywords like "social media"... but if I want to rank for "social media sutherland shire" or "social media Lauren Papandony" then, I of course have much better chances. But then you have to think about what you want to do the SEO for, for what end goal. Like, is it worth your effort? The first option, "social media" isn't helpful to me, even though it would be cool to be #1 for my ultimate keyword, I have no need for people in Chicago or anywhere else in the world to find my little Sydney-based social media agency... but "social media sutherland shire" is very helpful given that’s what someone close by would search to find my services in the area. That could win me business and be worth a year’s worth of time spent writing blog posts and social posts. And then for the third example it's a given that if someone searches me by name, I'd hope that they'd find my social pages and website before my competitors.

...answer continues in the episode! 

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