How to hire for help with setting up SEO on your blog and website.

Welcome to the world of SEO! If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur stepping into the digital realm with your first website, you might find SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a bit of a maze. But worry not! This guide is designed to walk you through the process in a simple, warm, and approachable manner. Let’s unravel the SEO puzzle together, making your website a beacon for your ideal customer.

The ABCs of SEO

Imagine SEO as your website’s best friend, helping it to climb up the search engine ladder. In essence, SEO is about making your site more visible on search engines like Google. Why does this matter? Because higher visibility means more visitors, and more visitors mean more opportunities for your business to shine.

Key Ingredients of SEO:

Keywords: These are the terms your potential customers are searching for. Including relevant keywords in your content helps search engines match your site to users' queries. Need help in determining these? A professional can help you with it, or you can do a little DIY work and head over to Moz Keyword Explorer. You’ll want to have this work completed to hand over to a professional if you don’t want to add this into your budget.
Content Quality: The better your content, the more likely search engines are to rank it higher. Quality content answers your audience's questions and keeps them engaged. Google cares about something here– how long someone stays on your page when they click there from Google. If it’s really low, Google knows that they just bounced because they didn’t find the source reliable or maybe the post itself didn’t match what the search query was. So, keeping content quality high makes readers want to stick around longer, and that’s good for moving you up in search rankings.
Site Speed and Mobile-Friendliness: In today's fast-paced world, a slow or poorly functioning website on mobile devices doesn’t support rankings moving up. First, make sure your site is mobile optimized. That’s a built in ingredient in any website platform like Squarespace, Showit, Wordpress or Wix. You can check things out over on Google Page Speed Insights.
Backlinks: Think of these as votes of confidence from other websites. More quality backlinks to your site can improve your search engine rankings. Back links are links to your site that are posted on someone else’s site. So it’s like if you wrote a guest post, were a guest on a podcast or maybe your product was listed on someone’s site. Making robust professional connections and offering high value through your own content is how you’ll start adding backlinks to your site.

Planning Your SEO Project

Before diving into SEO, set clear goals. Do you want to increase traffic, boost sales, or improve online visibility using SEO? Knowing your destination will help chart the course.

Research and Budget:

Do you like hiring someone to just take this kind of work off of your plate? Then just make sure you’re not shocked by a potential proposal. There is likely much more involved than you realize, if you’re new at this. If you want to pay less, go ahead and do all the research and provide all the keywords to your Virtual Assistant or SEO professional. And you can have them integrate the keywords into your website. But also, make sure that you’ve got all your blog posts written and images chosen, too.

Finding Your SEO Partner

These are the types of folks you can expect to do well in this partnership:

Virtual Assistant or Retainer Professionals who you are essentially purchasing hours of time from to complete work that you decide and direct.
SEO / Website Professionals who have specific packages for your type of site. Likely they’ll have a process to help you determine what you need to provide for them to offer a quote.

Optimizing your website with SEO requires a bit of a multi-layered approach. Knowing more about what’s involved will help you hire the right professionals and determine the budget, tasks, and timeframe that work for you.