Last week it kicked off on my social media. Someone had heard from someone else that SEO is basically dead. Time was when I would read these kinds of things and go OMG my career is over. I’m dead. How will I ever recover. OMG, I’m off to ask for a job at my local coffee shop. Goodbye cruel freelancing world. So, this kind of stuff happens most weeks and I’m sure in hundreds of other conversations that I’m not privy to. See also: a beer out with a friend a few weeks ago where they told me that they didn’t think people were using Google in the same way any more and that I needed to find something else to do. The thing is, is SEO dead?

So often people come to me and say “But XYZ is the thing now”.

To them I say this:

The thing is, SEO isn’t dead. People (i.e. your potential clients) are googling stuff just as much as ever.

As a small business owner, you probably think SEO is a luxury. But to make more money from your website, you want more people to see it. To get more people to see it, you need to increase your rankings on search engines. To do this, you need to work on your SEO. You may have heard that SEO is dead and past it, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. My personal opinion is that people just say that so that they don’t have to work on their SEO. (Or worse yet, and this is truly cynical, that they are working on their SEO but don’t want to let on that they’re not doing well with it).

I hear every day that the market is saturated, but no one is talking about the really obvious solution: promote why you’re different. The way to do this is to work on your SEO. It really isn’t as dry and dull as it’s so often made out to be. Let’s pick it apart like a Terry’s chocolate orange (too early?) (for more on what is SEO you can check out my blog post here)

If you hop on to Google Trends or Google Adwords keyword research and start searching for your type of business and commonly asked questions you’ll find out how many people are looking for you….

which finger does a wedding ring go on – 12,100 people a month on average are searching for the answer to this worldwide! A perfect opportunity for you to showcase engagement photos, the I do moment in your favourite venues

london wedding photography – 1300 couples a month are searching for you, yes it’s competitive, but it’s not impossible

wedding songs 2019 – a whopping 18,100 a month and not enough people are embedding Spotify playlists and Youtube videos in blog posts in my opinion!

I could go on – London wedding venues 8,100 a month, Cornwall wedding venues 2900 a month, calligraphy wedding invitations 1600 a month

It’s not just wedding suppliers either, 40,500 people a month are searching for a chocolate brownie recipe, 210 people a month are searching for the answer to “how do i know what to do with my life”, 1900 women are searching for “dating advice for women” and 2160 people are searching for gifts for newborn babies.

So what can YOU do with this information?

It comes down to three very practical tasks:

1. Creating content (blogging on your website (read: do I really need to blog) + then promoting on social media – here’s my tips on how to use social media for SEO)
2. Tracking how well that content does (checking your Google Analytics + insights – here’s how to set up Google Analytics)
3. Create more content based on the results (it doesn’t matter if it overlaps because people aren’t paying nearly as much attention to us as we’d like them to.)

It’s up to you to remind them you exist. So plan some blog posts to publish between now and the end of the year, share them strongly on social media. Don’t hold back (for tips on this check out my blog post “Six ways to put yourself out there“)

If you work on it from now on and you’re consistent, your efforts should pay off in enquiries. You can’t just turn up and expect to get lucky on the first date i.e. stop publishing one blog post a year and expect to get bookings from it. I wrote more about dating + SEO here.

Useful? Hit me back and let me know your favourite bit. I love hearing from you!