I have been asked this question more times then I can count.  Usually, we are just finishing up with a client’s web design and they email or call and ask “when will I show up on Google.”  The easy answer is “soon”, depending on when we loaded the site and setup your domain, you will show up in Google for your url or store name.  The hard answer is that showing up for your keywords is much more complicated.  It also takes work.

Many people think that if you setup your store, add your pretty things and go live, that you’re finished, people will find and shop at your store.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Just like a brick and mortar business, you have to start marketing and getting the word out if you want customers.  There is a mix of advertising, social media exposure and search engine optimization that must happen to start getting clients and traffic.  In terms of whether you will show up for Google, if you are actively working on your SEO strategy, I think you can get listed in the top 10 – 50 under some of your keywords in 4 – 6 months (did she just say months????).

My short list of beginner SEO strategies is this:
1) learn the basics of SEO. I highly recommend getting an easy to read manual on SEO, I like SEO for Dummies, it’s easy enough to read and will give you the basics.

2) do some keyword research.  It’s hard to get your site to show up under search terms if you don’t know what those search terms are.  Don’t guess…it’s a huge waste of your time.  Here is one method of finding your niche keywords and phrases, but a quick Google search should provide you with some more tutorials.  I think it’s absolutely essential that you know what search terms you want to be found under and that you have researched to insure that those terms are relevant.  Just because it’s a keyword, doesn’t mean people are searching for it.

3) name your pictures correctly.  Picture names are searchable, so you’re wasting an opportunity if your picture is DC0125.jpg instead of holiday-baby-tutu.jpg.

4) update your content to reflect your keywords.  This is especially true if you are wholesaling or drop-shipping and have taken pictures and descriptions from your vendor.  Start with a couple of products a day and rewrite them to make sure they are unique and they have your keywords.

This is a quick list, it is by no means exhaustive and does not represent everything you can and should do for your SEO.  But if you are just starting out, it may be all you can handle.  Take it one step at a time, and if you can afford it, getting an SEO consult or hiring and SEO company to do it if or you is a great idea.  Just make sure to do your research and know ahead of time what you are getting for your money.  Also be wary of anyone who makes guarantees about being number 1 in Google.h

Running an Adwords campaign can be a daunting and confusing task.  I’ll admit that when I first started with Adwords I couldn’t get past the setup page.  Even after using it for awhile, it’s hard to really know if you’re using it effectively and efficiently.  Starting on October 4th, Google will hold it’s Train and Gain challenge.  The challenge features a weekly list of steps to improve your campaign.  You’ll sign in just twice a week to work on the steps, about 30 minutes each time.  At the end of the challenge, if you’ve completed the steps and answered a short questionnaire you’ll be entered to win an android phone and SEO consultation in Sydney, Australia.

You can sign up for Train & Gain here.  It sounds like a great way to get more out of your Adwords campaign.  This is a good opportunity for businesses that want to try Adwords but don’t know where to start or for people who are using it but aren’t maximizing it.  Adwords also has a new Small Business Center which Google describes as “The site is a one-stop shop for small and medium businesses. It allows visitors to explore beginner, intermediate or advanced AdWords topics and connects you to the latest AdWords news and best practices.”

The Always Be Testing webinar from HubSpot has some great ideas for marketing your business. It’s geared toward smaller businesses with smaller budgets and does a great job of breaking down the jargon. Want to know the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing? The webinar starts out with a clear discussion of the terms and moves into explaining how to get the most out of a smaller budget. Specifically the webinar gives you ideas for maximizing your landing pages to increase your conversion rates.

If you’ve ever asked yourself the following questions: How well is my website doing? Is it getting traffic? Does it have SEO problems? How popular is it in social media?
Then Hubspot’s Website Grader is for you. Just type in your URL and if you’d like, one of your competitors, and get a customized website grade along with tons of useful information about how your site was doing and how you can fix problems if you have them. I had a lot of fun and learned a couple of things along the way. The best part was that many of the tips were easy things that I could quickly implement. Have fun!
http://websitegrader.com/

If you haven’t already done it, or you haven’t updated in awhile, adding a sitemap to your google webmaster tools will help get Google to crawl and index more of your boutique or website, more often.  It’s super easy to do with xml-sitemaps.com. Just follow their “4 Easy Streps” on the front page and in less than 15 minutes you can get your sitemap set and ready to go. Remember, any time you add more content to your site, update and re-load your sitemap.

It never fails, a client contacts me in October asking how they can get good SEO rankings for their online boutique in time for the Christmas season. Breaking the news is never easy and I always feel like I should have done more to let people know that good SEO takes time; while there are things you can do in October to help, you will not see the traffic your site deserves if you don’t start planning months in advance.

With that in mind, now is the time to make a plan. I like to use a 5 step boutique SEO process that includes:

1. Goal Setting
2. Keyword Analysis
3. Crafting Meta Titles and Tags
4. Content Review/Rewrite/Add
5. Measuring Success

Step 1: Goal Setting – if you don’t know where you are going, you’re likely never to get there.  The first step to planning for SEO is to decide what you are measuring.  Are you trying to get more sales, more visitors, more newsletter signups, more leads?  You have to really decide what you hope to accomplish through your site optimization.  Then you have to take a close look at where you are at now to decide where you want to be next month (or next year).  If your goal is to have more visitors, make sure that you  have some way to measure your visitors, and then track it over time.  A goal like this is most easily accomplished with visitor tracking tools like AWStats or Sitemeter and a spreadsheet to see the change over time.  With both of these, you might not even need the spreadsheet, because both tracking tools keep records of past months, but keeping the data all together on a spreadsheet makes analyzing easier.  Whatever your goal, state it clearly and then setup a way to measure over time, keeping notes about changes you made.

Step 2: Keyword Analysis – We discussed this thoroughly in SEO First Steps – Finding Your Niche Keywords and Phrases, but in a nutshell, now is the time to take a close look at your targeted keywords.  Jot down the 8 – 15 keywords or phrases you want to be found under.  Use Submit Express or another keyword tracking tool to find out if anyone is searching for those words and phrases.  Compare this to the number of pages that show up for those keywords and phrases in Google.  Weed out to find keywords and phrases that have a good searched for/competition ratio.  Find substitions or closely related keywords for any that don’t have a good ratio.  Voila!  You have an overall keyword list for your site.  Huh…overall…what’s that you say?  Why wouldn’t it be inclusive of my whole site?  Well, that would depend on how big your site was and how many products you were selling.  If you have a small site, with under a 100 items and only a handful of categories, yoru initial keywords might cover everything.  If you have thousands of products, then you might need to have different sets of keywords for categories or sections of your site.  But, take a deep breath, and start with your initial set.  SEO is continuous and ongoing, not everything has to get done at once.

Step 3: Crafting Meta Titles and Tags – Unless your boutique or website is brand new, you should already have meta titles and tags for many of your pages, at the very least for your index or home page.  Now is the time to take a close look and make sure that your titles and tags are still in line with your newly updated keywords and phrases.  This is the phase to tweak your tags and make sure that they still represent your site.  There are 3 main tags that you want to look over, and all three belong in the head section of your site, but often your CMS (content management system) or cart will allow you to enter them in through your admin, rather than into the coding of your pages:

1. Meta Title – looks like this <title>Baby Girl Tutu Pink Ballerina Skirt</title>
2. Meta Description – looks like this <meta name=”description” content=”Sweet baby girl tutu in couture pink.  A ballerina double layerd tulle skirt with full satin sash and plenty of twirl.  High quality boutique tutu.”>.  The description should be between 100 and 150 characters.
3. Meta Keywords – looks like this <meta name=”keywords” content=”baby girl tutu, pink ballerina tutu, double layered tulle, tulle skirt, boutique tutus, ballerina skirt”>.  I know that google doesn’t look at keywords anymore, but if you’ve done the research for them, might as well get them in there.

You might not be able to control each of these tags for each page – but you should update them anywhere you can.  If you do one a day, between now and October you can get a couple hundred done.  There will be overlap, which is ok – you don’t want to start from scratch every time, because you expect that your items are related and share keywords and some part of the descriptions.  But, you should strive for unique tags and content on as many products and pages as possible.

Step 4: Content Review/Rewrite/Add – I can’t stress enough that the most important aspect of your site’s SEO is the content.  There is no substitute for good quality content that utilizes keywords, is interesting to read and adds to the overall likeablity of your site.  If your product descriptions are just a sentence or a couple of words, or even worse, don’t exist – now is the time to start rewriting and adding to them.  Again, you don’t have to do everything at once – that’s the beauty of getting ready for the Christmas holidays in March.  Take one product or page a day, or every other day, and start fixing it.  These product descriptions don’t have to be beautiful or flowy prose, but they should be interesting and accurately describe the item you are selling using any relevant keywords.  In addition, start thinking about ideas for articles, newsletter topics or blog posts that will help bring traffic to your site – if you can squeeze in an article a month, you could add 9 quality pages to your website, full of content that will draw customers to your site  If you have more money than time, this is an area where hiring a copywriter definitely makes sense. 

Step 5: Measuring Success – If you aren’t keeping accurate records of where you started, what you’ve done and any gains or setbacks, you have no way of knowing whether your efforts are working.  Keeping a one page spreadsheet, to track your rankings with the search engines is one place to start.  Tracking your site visitors will also key you in on whether your efforts are bringing more customers and traffic.  If new signups for your newsletter is one of your goals, make sure to track those weekly or monthly.  Whatever you are looking to measure, make sure to keep a record over time so you can determine each month where you need to ramp up and where you need to scale back.

Doing a little bit every day (or almost every day) from now until the Christmas holiday season hits will go a long way in making sure that your site is optimized and getting traffic in time for the holidays.  Before you know it, Halloween will be here, and by then, you don’t have time to move up much in the SEO game.  If you start eating your elephant now, one bite at a time and he’ll be down by the holiday selling season.

I’ve heard this before, but was a little skeptical that it was true.  Now you can see for yourself – Google does not use your keyword meta tags in web ranking.  Great, now I can ignore my keywords, right?  Well, not exactly.  I think it’s safe to say that as far as Google is concerned you don’t need to add a keyword meta tag, but you still need to be concerned with your keywords in terms of figuring out and tracking how people are finding you and making sure that your content is rich with important keywords.  I know that people sort of get hung up in the importance of the meta tags, and in this case, the actual keyword tag is not important at all, but maybe what it represents is important.  It is still worthwhile to go through and decide on the keywords you are targeting for your site, as outlined in SEO First Steps.  It’s really going to be the backbone of your SEO plan – if you don’t know what your target search terms are you can’t effectively maximize your site to cover them.  But, in terms of painstakingly going through and trying to figure out your 10 – 15 keywords for each page – you’re off the hook.  Focus instead on your meta title and meta description, as these are looked at by Google and can even show up in your search results.

SEO is going well for me lately.  In just the last couple of weeks, since I’ve started paying attention again to marketing and SEO I’ve seen an increase in my traffic and my Alexa ranking.  I’ve also been trying to target my core audience of other WAHM’s. This has always been my niche market because I struggled for so long to get to be a WAHM and I truly want every mother to be able to work at home and watch her kids grow. So although I feel like I’m back on the right track, I sort of hit a wall while trying to decide what to focus on this week.  I’ve decided to keep moving forward with my content rewrites and do a little research on what else I can do.  My goal this week is 15 – 30 minutes of reading a day.  I started by going to the Small Business Search Marketing blog and was rewarded with the post “How to Get Started with SEO.”  Not only is this the perfect post for me to read right now, but it has links to other reading that will be helpful as I move forward.  I particularly like that the article spells out out when it is a good idea to hire an SEO consultant (you have more money than time).  I also like the suggestion to really research who you hire and to be careful of anyone who contacts you about SEO.  I know my inbox gets 4 – 5 hits a week from people who want to put me on the first page of Google.  Happy Reading!

I went through last week and used the worksheet from Your SEO Plan to take a look at my keywords and see how I compared in search engine rankings for each keyword.  Now I can chart my efforts as I make changes in the site.  Part of the key to this is not to make too many changes at once, or it’s hard to determine which changes worked. 

My first plan of attack is my content.  I believe that content is the key most important factor in good search engine rankings.  If you aren’t going to do anything else, just paying attention to your content will make all the difference in the world.  Content is important because it keeps readers (shoppers and clients) engaged and interested in your site, it gives information for the search engine crawlers to “read” through and it ups your chances of getting quality links from other sites.  You don’t have to be a great or even a good writer to make sure that your content is informative and utilizing your keywords.

The first place to spend time is your home page.  This is the first page people see and you want something on there that is not so long that it’s overwhelming, but long enough to include and target your most important keywords.  Although a popular trend is to put everything but the kitchen sink on the front page, I don’t think super long pages full of content are necesary to achieve your goal of utilizing keywords and attracting customers.  My first task this week will be to take a look at my front page copy.  It’s been awhile since I rewrote it so it could use a little freshening up.

The second thing to look at is your products.  I cringe when I see a site that has a two or three word title for the description and that’s it.  What a waste of a great SEO opportunity, and how frustrating for your customers that want and need information about your products.  Every item on your site should be related to one or two of your keywords.  Instead of “Baby Tutu” as a description, you could write:

Beautiful baby tutu, designed with every little princess in mind.  Yards of tulle, sparkly sequins and bodacious bows adorn this fun and funky baby tutu.  Each tutu is lovingly created in the USA and comes in sizes to fit babies 0 – 3 months, 3- 6 months and 6 – 12 months.  Bitty Baby Bow tutu skirts feature an elastic waist for easy on and off.  Have the most fashionable little tot on the block with this precious tutu made just for babies.  Make sure to check out our tulle tutus for toddlers and big girls too!

I think it goes without saying that the second description is much more interesting and informative for a customer, and it utilizes several keywords more than once – baby, tutu and babies, and throws in a couple of extra words that may be targets as well – toddler, big girls and tulle.

Another overlooked opportunity is having the same content for multiple products.  Although you might not be able to get away from this all the time, try to change up the content just a little bit.  Search engines can overlook pages on your site if the content is the same, so it’s worth altering it even if the item is similar to another one.

The second thing on my list this week is to go over my products.  Although I tend to have descriptions that utilize keywords for every item, I do fall into the trap of reusing content.  A couple of rewrites and I will be able to better utilize my keywords and help my client base understand my products.

Finally, articles are another way to add content on your site that draws visitors and adds keywords.  You can write an article about anything that will utilize your keywords and appeal to your audience, or you can hire a copywriter to write it for you.  Most copywriting services will ghost write an article giving you full rights to promote it as your own.  Pick one or two topics that your shoppers might be interested in, whether it’s the latest trends in dressing baby or invitation etiquette.  If you focus on one article a month, in a year you have 12 pages of great content that is keyword rich and interesting for your customers.  You can also post the articles on your blog and submit it to an article site, like e-zine articles, to get even more exposure.

Once again, I have my SEO work cut out for me.  I try to limit my SEO time, it is easy to get sucked in and spend hours rewriting, tweaking, checking my stats.  I find that if I limit it to 15 – 30 minutes a day I can get through my SEO to-do list and stay focused.  This week I’ll work on rewriting my front page copy, checking and editing my products and getting one article completed and up on my site.  If three “assignments” seems like too much to focus on, pick one task and make it a priority this week.  You will be amazed at how these small changes can really affect your rankings and overall traffic.

I feel like I’ve finally come out of the “new baby” haze.  You know that feeling you get when you’ve endured months of nighttime feedings combined with the hormonal daze that you’re in after giving birth.  Not to mention trying to figure out a new routine, which is impossible because your new little bundle of joy changes his mind every other week about what his routine is.  I vaguely remember being in this place with my first child.  It’s a space that I like; motivated, refreshed and possibly a little desperate as I imagine saving for two college tuitions instead of one.

Last time I had a new baby, I ended up with a new business that allowed me to stay home and work.  This time, as I start to look around I see that I’ve lost a lot of ground in that business and I’m ready to really get back to the grind and start building again.  I’m feeling like I need a bit of a jump start, but I’m not really sure where to start.  So, I’m taking stock.  I started by analyzing my sales.  Eeek.  My sales have dropped by 75% since the baby was born.  I knew we were struggling, just hadn’t really taken a look at it.  Sure, the baby coincided with a market downturn, people got more particular about where and how they were going to spend their money, but I’m guessing that it really has more to do with less hours at work, less focus in my marketing strategy and a total abandonment of SEO.

The good news is that I know that it’s possible to get back – I did it in the first place.  And, I’m confident that the second time around, things can happen much faster – after all, I have been here before, I have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t.

The first thing I’ve done is take a good look at my website’s stats and rankings.  I always use AWStats – it comes with my hosting and gives me a ton of information, including how many visitors I’ve had to my site.  While my actual site visitors has not fallen as drastically as I expected, given the decrease in sales, it has fallen.  Looks like my site visits have fallen by about 30%.  This is a rough estimate based on comparing my site stats for a 6 month period last year – I chose April – September – to the same 6 month period this year.  The next thing I did was checkout my Alexa rankings.  If you have never taken a look at your site in Alexa stop what you’re doing and go there now.  It’s a great tool to see your traffic trends and compare your site to your competitors.  A quick peek at Alexa shows me that my ranking has gone from about 850,000 last year to about 1,900,000.  Wow, that’s a tumble.  And, when I look at my main competitors, their rankings seem to be even better than they were when I was at 850,000.  It’s no surprise either that my highest month in sales was when my Alexa ranking reached the 800,000′s.

Taking a look at AWStats, Alexa and my sales took me about 20 minutes, and really, what I can see very clearly is that I need more traffic.  One of the main things that I stopped doing right around the time the baby was born was using Google Adwords.  I fell into that trap of thinking it was too expensive, when really, it’s too expensive not to use it.  When I started utilizing Adwords effectively, for about $150 – $200 a month I saw my sales double.  Clearly, baby brain got the best of me, because I completely forgot how effective it was.  So, the first thing on my to do list is re-activiate my Adwords account, which is super easy, because everything is saved, so with one click I’m back in with Adwords.  For now, this is my marketing plan, I can add on later.

Next I need to look at my SEO.  This is a little more complicated, mostly because I hadn’t tracked my SEO very well before.  I had worked on it, and I know that I was on the first page of several categories, but I’m not sure which ones those were so I can’t compare.  Clearly I need a tracking system for SEO – something quick that will take me 15 – 20 minutes a week to run through.  Never wanting to re-invent the wheel, I seem to remember somewhere seeing some tracking worksheets for SEO.  Yep – here it is – Your SEO Plan, and they’ve got several worksheets to track your SEO, including one to track your keywords – beautiful.  I will begin filling that out asap – it’s something I can check once a week or bi-weekly and chart, which will be super easy since I tend to check my keywords on google at least once a week anyway, just not in any organized fashion and with no checkup of the data.  There is a ton more I could do with SEO, but I think for now this is a good start.

Finally, my schedule.  I’m constantly thinking in my head, I’ve got to work smarter not harder, but I’m not always sure how to do that.  Usually, like the mom in the illustration above (and probably lots of other WAHM’s out there), I’m doing 18 things at once, in hectic fashion.

Again, I’ve forgotten the things I learned before the baby, like scheduling.  I used to schedule my work day fairly well.  I admit, it’s easier to do when you don’t have a newborn in the house.  And, I did go from finally having a full day for work, because my daughter was in kindergarten, to having a new baby.  But, naptimes are more consistent now and my daughter is back in school full time now that summer vacation is over.  Before my daughter was in kindergarten, I used to work a lot at night and I created a schedule, making sure to give my husband some off time and keep some family time open.  I think if I add 2-3 hours 4 nights a week, combined with 4 hours of naptime on the day and one weekend, I’ll be able to actually concentrate on work when I’m working.  As things get back up and going I can always hire a sitter for a couple of hours a week to give me even more time.  I know from the past that if the time is scheduled, it will happen.  Just like when I worked outside of the home, I had stop and start times, and lunch time planned, if I stick to a more concrete schedule I’ll be more productive.

OK, so in 30 minutes I’ve come up with a plan to jump start my business out of this slowdown.  My homework for the week will be to get the tracking spreadsheets downloaded and started and to do a little research in maximizing google adwords.  Quick and easy, I’ve got a great jump start to building my traffic and business back up.