If you’re looking for a simple SEO guide to walk you through what SEO is, why it’s important, and how to start, you’re in the right place!

Picture this: you’ve invested in a beautiful website with the hope of attracting dream clients. Three months later, your website has barely had 10 views, and isn’t being found…frustrating, right?

SEO is the missing link between a great website and one that actually shows up when potential clients search. 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google results. Without SEO, your website is like a beautiful billboard on a deserted street. Let’s change that and get you in front of the clients already searching for what you offer. 

In the simplest terms, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of making your website easy for search engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) to read and understand. This helps your site appear in search results when someone types a query into the search bar. 

Your web design, brand elements, and your website copy are what help you speak to the humans who visit your website, and the optimizations you make on your website are meant to speak to search engines, like Google and Bing, helping them understand your website. A great, converting website that does its job of reaching the right people, and converting them into leads, has to balance both. Appeal just to humans, and your site won’t be found on Google; appeal just to bots, and humans will not stay on your site.

In this SEO guide, I’m going to break down the basics of SEO for service providers so you have a solid understanding of how it works. And no, it’s not as scary or complicated as it seems!

How Do Search Engines Work?

The goal of a search engine, like Google, is to help users find relevant information on the internet. It uses an algorithm to determine which sites should appear for different searches. The idea behind this is that the more helpful and useful information, the more searchers use and stay on Google, which means people will continue to advertise on Google. But that’s not super relevant. What matters to Google is that quality content is showing up when someone searches for a term. 

The most recent Google core updates are a cause for concern for many people who don’t follow best practices, but the goal of these changes are to reduce the number of spammy, harmful, unhelpful sites showing up in search results, which is good for people like us who just want to reach potential clients and serve them!

So how do search engines decide which sites to rank?

Glad you asked! There are three steps search engines take to sort out all the information and sites out there: (1) Crawling, (2) Indexing, and (3) Ranking.

Crawling

Search engines have bots (aka spiders or crawlers) that crawl the web, exploring webpages. These crawlers follow links from one website to another, reading them as they go and looking at the content, images, and links to understand what the site is about.

Indexing

After the crawler visits a website, it indexes (stores) the information and content in a massive database. It is cataloged based on its content, relevancy, and trustworthiness, so that the search engine can find the best match for a search.

Ranking

Finally, after the search engine crawls and indexes a website, it uses algorithms to determine which pages are most relevant, trustworthy, and helpful based on a variety of ranking factors. The pages that score the highest are ranked and are shown at the top of search results.

To summarize, search engines crawl the web to find and gather information on websites, index that information to organize it in a database, and then rank the pages based on relevance to show the best results when someone searches for something. This process helps satisfy its ultimate goal – for users to find the most useful and relevant information quickly and easily.

Why SEO Matters for Service Providers (or Why You Need SEO for Your Service Business)

Everyday, an average of 8.5 billion searches are processed by Google. That comes out to about 99,000 searches per second! Think of how many times you search on Google. For me, it’s multiple times a day for anything I need!

Of those people searching, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. If you’re not on that first page, it’s like being the credits at the end of a movie—no one’s sticking around to watch. SEO puts you in the opening scene, right where your audience is most engaged.

SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate. Compare that to the 1.7% for cold calls and 1.63% for social media leads. In a study done by Bazaar Voice, the company quoted “The average Conversion Rate for the top-performing brands on Instagram that we analyzed is 1%.” And that’s for top performing brands, not the average small business or agency. When people find you through search, they’re more likely to be ready to book services. After all, they were the ones who typed in a search query like “minnesota wedding photographer” so you know their intent is to find a professional to work with!

Get Found by Ideal Clients

When you optimize your website for both humans and search engines (SEO), your business is more likely to show up at the top of relevant searches and be shown to hundreds, if not thousands, of new potential clients. In addition to more traffic to your website, you’ll also be reaching people who had the intent of finding your service, making it easier to close the deal.

SEO is organic and free

Unless you hire me or another SEO expert to work on your SEO, it is a completely organic way to reach new people. In our day and age, people are overwhelmed by ads, trained to ignore them, so what better way to reach them than by organic Google rankings, instead of paying for ads or relying on constant posting on social media.

SEO Works for you 24/7

Instead of daily or weekly posting on social media, SEO works day and night, driving traffic to your website and reaching people without constant effort.

Return on Investment (time or otherwise)

Compared to other marketing channels, SEO often has a higher return on investment and has a higher close rate since it targets people actively looking for what you offer.

Website User Experience Improvements

As techy as it sounds, SEO is really just improving your website so it improves a user’s experience, making it more helpful and relevant to those users, which ultimately signals to search engines that your site is the answer to the searcher’s query. SEO optimizations can help with website speed, navigation, mobile-friendliness, all of which make your site more appealing to its human users and crawler bots.

Simply put…

SEO ➡️ higher rankings ➡️ increased traffic ➡️ more leads ➡️ bookings!

Where to start with SEO

Now that I’ve convinced you that SEO is the best marketing tactic you can implement to grow your business, you’re probably wondering how to get started. Here is my recommendation for getting started with SEO.

Understand Google’s Ranking Factors

Google uses over 200 ranking factors when it comes to showing up on the search results. While I wouldn’t dwell on each one of them, it’s important to understand what is prioritized by Google. One of the biggest ranking factors to note is E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This ranking factor along with relevancy and other signals makes up the bulk of my SEO strategy.

Technical SEO

One of the most important steps to take when starting your SEO journey is to make sure your website is crawlable, secure, and loads quickly. Making sure to choose the right website platform for SEO is a great place to start. Without good technical foundations, you’ll end up with a site that isn’t even in Google’s database or one that searchers will immediately click out of.

Keyword Research

It’s not just about getting more traffic, but about reaching the right people. With good SEO and the right keywords, your site shows up for searches that are relevant to what you offer. More qualified visitors means more chances to convert them into clients. Use keyword research tools like SEOmator and Google Keyword Planner to find the best keywords to embed into your website. It’s all about finding keywords that are a balance of high search traffic and low competition (depending on your specific site), and keeping in mind search intent. Keyword research should not be skipped.

On-Page SEO

This is the process of optimizing your website content with your selected keywords. Use keywords in your page titles, headers, and meta descriptions. Make sure you have enough helpful content on each page and it answers users’ questions well. Improve your website structure and make sure headings are in hierarchical order. Your images should be optimized for page speed as well as accessibility. I also recommend learning about internal linking, as this helps connect your pages, keep the user moving in the right direction, and is crucial for SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is all about the signals other sites and social media platforms send about your website – everything outside of your website. In addition to the optimizations we place on-page, such as keywords, image optimizations, and our content, Google’s ranking factors include signals that have to do with online reputation, credibility, and relevance. Key components to improving off-page SEO include high-quality backlinks, social media signals, and local citations and directories.

Local SEO

If you own and/or operate a business that works within a local area, local SEO is something you’ll want to focus on. Essentially, the goal is to optimize your website so it shows up in local search results. Some helpful strategies include optimizing and consistently updating your Google Business Profile, ensuring that your Name, Address, and Phone number (aka NAP) are on each page of your website and online platforms, and gaining reviews and local citations.

Content SEO & Blogging

Many people say that blogging is important for SEO, and while it can help improve your search rankings, I believe the focus should be on creating quality content instead of just churning out lots of posts. Blogging boosts SEO by providing fresh content, which search engines love, and helps target relevant keywords for organic traffic. When done effectively, quality posts can earn backlinks, improve engagement, and establish your authority in the field—all of which contribute to better search rankings.

Evaluate your website to make sure you’re not making any common photography website SEO mistakes.

Hire an SEO expert…like me!

I know how it feels to be stretched thin, trying to juggle all the things – marketing, sales, content creation, all while trying to serve your clients well. You’re busy working for your clients and growing your business, so I totally get it if you just don’t have time to learn or do your own SEO. 

I’m Taylor, and I’m here to simplify your life and handle all things SEO! With years of experience helping service providers and creatives get found online, plus four websites of my own—including my photography business that generates nearly all its leads and bookings from Google—I know how to turn your website into a client magnet. I’m the SEO expert you can trust to make your business visible!

Reach out if you want a custom SEO strategy to help your website get visible online!