Step 5: SEO – Simple - AE Media Inc

We’re here to help entrepreneurs to connect with their customers online! Our earlier posts in this series are there to help you make good decisions around setting your e-commerce site up for success. A beautiful and thoughtful look and message as well as a simple checkout process help you connect with your customers. But even after all of that, you won’t be able to connect with your customers if they can’t find you! This is the last in the series of 5 simple steps you can take to make sure your online store is as good as it can be!

Let’s talk about SEO…

Keep it Simple

Our focus across all aspects of website building is this: Keep it Simple! We want you to have a clean, simple website that is easy-to-navigate, and professional enough that you look like an absolute boss in your space. We’re not into fanfare and flashiness for their own sake, because, although that stuff is cool, ultimately it’s distracting. And while looks are important, your website needs to actually work to bring you paying customers.

The same can be said for SEO; there are many tricksy things you can do to try to dash your way to the top of the search engine results, but consumers are savvy and can spot the baloney a mile away.

As a disclaimer, this is not a thorough guide to ALL things SEO. If you want in-depth help and tweaking with your SEO you can hire a professional. However, some basics can be done DIY-style and these are our tips for that!

Customers want authenticity

Customers want to connect, and they crave authenticity. They want to partner their time and finances with an organization that speaks their language and shares their values. And customers can tell when your articles or page content is stuffed full of keywords not for their benefit, but for the benefit of the robots at google. If you build useful content or a great product that serves your audience and they have a good user experience on your site they will click, absorb, share, and purchase. These kinds of click throughs and shares are very valuable to your SEO, and search engines will recognizes this.

The bottom line is, focus on serving your audience by being useful and authentic without over-using any of the tools below and you’re good to go. Simple.

With that out of the way, here are some of the main tools that can help get you situated on the web so that people will be able to find you:

5 Simple SEO Steps

Keywords

Keep your key words handy on a list in your phone or google docs! What are your taglines, hashtags, brand words? What themes go across your business? Consider all of this through the eyes of your audience. What problems are you solving for your audience? What are their needs and interests? Look up what similar things people are searching for around your topic? Build yourself an extensive key words list so you can use these words easily in your content without sounding repetitive or fake.

You can also use other web services (like moz.com) to help you nail down your keywords and to see what is currently performing in your market.

Slug

This is what the link in the address bar looks like to your site visitors on each page of your site that they visit. Best practice here is to keep the slug short, concise, and for it to contain your keyword for that page.

For example: www.aemedia.ca/contact

Meta description

You know when you google something and the long list shows up on the search page? How do you choose which link to click? That first few lines of text under the title when your business shows up in search results gives people the first impression of who you are and what you do! Customers use this to determine whether they will click your link or not. You need to use this section to describe yourself to your audience as best as you can while keeping it short and sweet! Use your keywords here again, but make sure it makes sense!

For example:

Web Design & Print Studio | AE Media Inc. | Shopify …

aemedia.ca

We build E-commerce websites that allow Creatives to get noticed & sell more stuff with less hassle.Do you also need Brand design? We do that. Print materials? Yep, that too.

SEO Title

This is a title you give to your Web Page or Blog Page. This title lives in your back end Content Management System and is invisible on your actual blog post or page layout. But the robots know how to find it and it is an important part of directing searchers to your content! Choose your keywords well and be sure they match the content they’re linking to on that page. Matching your keywords in this SEO title to the content in the article/on your page will give relevance to your material and is one signal to search engines that you are who you say you are.

Alt text

This is the text that explains your images. The robots use this in addition to the things above to determine what your content is about and suggest it to searchers. Use your keywords here again to describe your images well. Do you want people to pin your images to Pinterest? The Alt Text here is what the default description will be as your image is pinned.

Customers First

When we work with our web design clients we always do our best to write content in a way that serves both the message and the SEO, but if you’re writing your own content, sometimes that’s too much to keep in mind all at once! Our advice is to write good content that serves your customers first. Keep it simple, play around with your key words and make adjustments to things if you need to!

SEO can feel a bit daunting in the beginning, but without it you might be losing out on the possibility of connecting with your perfect customers! If you’re working with a good Web Designer, they’ll take care of this for you, but make sure they’ve got a list of your key words. If you’re working with us, no worries at all, because since we’ve started with your words from the beginning, we’ll already know all of your key words!

Happy Connecting!

Step 5: SEO – Simple

You can skip to other articles in this series:

Keep it Simple

5 Simple SEO Steps

Web Design & Print Studio | AE Media Inc. | Shopify …

Customers First

Blog Series

Categories

Recent Posts

Step 5: SEO – Simple

You can skip to other articles in this series:

Keep it Simple

5 Simple SEO Steps

Web Design & Print Studio | AE Media Inc. | Shopify …

Customers First

Blog Series

Categories

Recent Posts

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