How to Increase Sales Through SEO

Shanté chatted with Zhe Scott, the owner, and CEO of the digital marketing agency, The SEO Queen about how to increase sales through SEO. Through her agency, Zhe helps businesses get more clients and revenue without paying for advertising. The SEO Queen helps its clients by leveraging the power of search engine optimization (SEO), website design, and mobile app development. 

HOW TO GET SALES WITH #SEO | GUEST ZHE SCOTT | SHE BOSS TALK

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What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Zhe explains that SEO is simply, “Search engine optimization is just getting your website into compliance where Google will give you free traffic from search engines based on the products and services that you have.”

Zhe continues to explain that people use Google every day to look for answers. Chances are there are people Googling the types of products and services you have to offer. Using SEO techniques will increase your chances of showing up in the search results. 

The Importance of Having a Website 

While your social media profile and sometimes the content can show up on search engines, you need a website. Approximately 23% of small retail businesses don’t have a website and that doesn’t even take into account service-based businesses without websites. Therefore, many small businesses are missing out on free web traffic. 

In addition to that, Zhe puts it, “A website gives you credibility. When you have an active .com (domain), it is a 24-hour open virtual storefront. That allows people to shop at their convenience and research you at their convenience. I don’t think I would do business with anybody who doesn’t have a website.”

Zhe isn’t alone in this. According to research, 84% of consumers think having a website makes you more credible. 

A website will bring your business, credibility, visibility, and profitability. Zhe says, “if you add a call to action to that website and some SEO, you really can scale your income and your revenue with your business”

How to Increase Sales With SEO

Now that you have a website, it’s time to start making some money. Here are some tips on how to increase sales with SEO. 

Use a Call to Action in Your Meta Description

The meta description is a short summary of the webpage you see on the search engine results page (SERP) when you search. 

Zhe is encouraging small business owners to use calls to action to compel people to take action when you pop up on the SERPs.

That means including words like “buy now”, “read more” or “shop our website”

In addition to that, you should be using your website for not only sales but lead generation. Therefore, you can have “sign up for my newsletter” as a call to action too. That way you can have more people on your email list which is super important. 

Make it Easy to Buy From You

People clicked on your website, great! However, if you don’t make it easy to buy, people may not buy, no matter how great your products and services are.

 You have to realize people are smart but distracted. People are also pressed for time. If they have to decipher what the next step is to purchase your services, they’re going to move on to the next site.

So you need to have a call to action that encourages purchase such as:

• Book a call
• Buy now 
• Shop now

You have to use a call action at every step of the buyer’s journey.

Zhe says, “ Whether you’re a towing business, selling instruments, caterer or a personal chef, it doesn’t matter what you do. There has to be a clear path to purchase and that path to purchase can be automated. Keep it simple.”

Don’t Confuse Your Audience

Shanté admits that when she audits websites, she notices people have confusing brands. She has seen people sell various unrelated things on the website. Doing this can hurt your brand and your sales. 

If you’re a business owner with several talents and ideas, you can still excel. However, you have to pick a focus. Take Zhe for example. She’s a violinist, runs SEO Queen, is an author, and is a mental health advocate. However, she only takes about one thing per website therefore she has separate websites for each endeavor. 

She made an excellent point, “You don’t see Proctor and Gamble, putting Crest and Colgate on the same website. They have distinct brands, different looks and feel on different websites. Same company, similar product, but completely separate.”

Therefore she encourages you not to be cheap with branding and SEO.  Finally, Zhe says, “My recommendation is to pick one to focus on. Once you get that brand to seven figures, then shift your focus to another, another brand.”

Use Tools and Resources Available to You

There are many free resources that you can use to up your SEO game. Zhe suggests:

• Following John Mueller, Google’s search expert.
• Google My Business
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics

You can use these tools to get information to better inform your SEO strategy and content creation. 

Zhe shares that she has a client who is focusing on organic search traffic. Here’s how she helped him.”I turned on some Google ads to gather some data. And I was able to see which keywords had a zero bounce rate. That means people who came based on those keywords to that particular page stayed, stuck, and stayed. And so now we’re adding those queries to his organic campaign.”

Here’s how you can use these tools for your business.

Google My Business

Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar company or strictly online you can use Google My Business. It’s excellent for local SEO. Local SEO refers to optimizing for search traffic from a specific location such as your state. 

Google My Business is really helpful because you can verify your website’s ownership. You can do that through the search console as well. You can verify ownership once you have a verified brand with Google.

Google will send you more visibility and therefore more traffic. The other advantage to Google My Business is that once you have it connected to your website and verified, once you post updates, Google will start to push you up in those search results as well. 

You can also specify whether or not your business is veteran-owned, woman-owned, or Black-owned for the conscious consumers out there. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an excellent tool to help you measure your site’s search traffic and performance. In addition to that, it tells you how many of your pages are indexed by Google. If you notice you have pages that aren’t indexed you can submit them to be indexed. Having your pages indexed is important because if your page isn’t indexed it can’t show up on the search engine results page. 

In addition to that, you can see if your website loads fast enough. If your page speed is slow, people will leave your website and chances are they won’t buy anything.

You can also check how well your site performs on mobile which is important since many people search the web on their phones. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you awesome information about your website visitors that you can leverage to increase your revenue. 

This tool can:

• Show you where your audience is coming from. It can tell you what cities and countries people are coming from. In addition to that, it can show if your social media efforts are bringing 
• Demographics of your website visitors 
• Display how long people are staying on your site
• What search phrases are bringing people to your site

Zhe says, “Google analytics has a treasure troth of information, and you can also compare year over year, week over week, month over month. You can compare your traffic and performance in a multitude of ways.”

Make Sure Your Website is Optimized for Mobile Devices

You may be surprised how many people are coming to your site using a mobile device. You can actually use Google Search Console to find this out.

Zhe recounts, “I have one client who literally, because of the nature of their business, nobody searches on computers for their business. It’s always, it’s 100% mobile.” 

It’s important that mobile visitors can access your website seamlessly. Otherwise, this could impact your user experience and negatively affect your ability to rank. 

In addition to that, if mobile users can’t use your website properly then you can miss out on potential sales and leads. Therefore making sure your website is optimized for mobile devices can increase your revenue. 

Pay Attention to Keywords

Keywords are basically the search terms people type into the search bar of a search engine. If you can find the ideal keywords that your target audience is searching for related to your product, you can create content around it. 

Zhe refers to the keywords as the foundation of an SEO strategy. She said, “Without keywords, you cannot communicate accurately and effectively with your ideal consumer. So it’s really important for you to really get, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look at how they’re talking about your products and services. [Then] create content that answers questions that they have about your products and services”.

The more specific you are, the better. Therefore opt for long-tail keywords. If you’re selling shoes, instead of optimizing for “shoes”, “women’s shoes”, “men’s shoes”, get more specific. For example, “black patent leather shoes for men” or “red high heel shoes for women”.

Zhe says, “the more descriptive you are, the better”.

Use Your Social Media For Referral Traffic 

Your social media platforms are supposed to send traffic to your owned media such as your website. Zhe says, “We do not own any of these social media pages that we have at any time. Any of these platforms can shut down or they can shut you down.”

Therefore, create social media posts to send traffic to your sales pages and website. You can see whether or not your strategy is working by checking Google Analytics. Remember, it will tell you where the traffic is coming from. 

Here are Zhe’s tips for social media:

• You definitely want to have a verified URL
• Use generic and branded hashtags. Integrate your hashtag feed into your website to refresh the content. 
• Make sure that you’re sharing your content on a regular basis such as your blog posts. You also want to make a pin of all your pages on your website on Pinterest.

If you don’t have an engaged community on social media, chances are they won’t provide much traffic to your website. You can check out our Facebook Mastery Training Series to learn how to leverage Facebook for your business. 

Conclusion

As a small business owner, having a website is very important. With a website, you can leverage SEO to increase your leads and sales. You can increase sales through SEO by using the SEO techniques and tools mentioned above. 

Next Steps 

Want to further increase sales through SEO? You can connect with Zhe Scott at The SEO Queen. You can also grab her SEO book from Amazon. 
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