So, you have my own idea for a business and now you need to get it on paper (or on a screen in this case). Here’s what you should start doing…
Best business names
Obviously, a name needs to be memorable, catchy and in some cases descriptive of your service/product. Viewing this from an SEO standpoint it doesn’t matter too much, a lot of great ranking websites are able to rank without any keywords in their names.
Best domain names
Similar to the business name, having keywords in the domain name isn’t the ‘be all or end all’ to your overall SEO. Matt Cutts from Google actually confirmed this back in 2012.
Personally, despite what I have just said, I would try and incorporate keywords into my domain, only if it is natural. For example, if I were a dental practice, including ‘dental practice’ into my domain name. This looks natural and if Google do consider any of the keywords in a domain name to be relevant to the searcher then it would certainly help me.Having keywords in the website meta descriptions (the description that appears on search results) are proven to increase your click-through rate (CTR). For this reason, I don’t see how keywords in the domain wouldn’t do the same (although they aren’t highlighted as the meta description keywords are in the results page).Another thing to bear in mind is having a domain name too long. It is recommended to keep domain names under 15 characters, especially to stay memorable.In summary, don’t worry about adding keywords into the domain name if you can’t naturally incorporate them, or if it makes the domain name too long.
Hosting
Your choice of hosting company is important to get right early on. As your website grows and your visitors grow, something going wrong becomes more likely and more detrimental to your business.Hosting is also very important for SEO reasons. Here’s a simple equation:Slow server = slow website loading = bad user experience = bad signals to Google = lower rankings.For hosting I would recommend SiteGround, I’ve recently started using them and their support has been great. (for the record, I am in no way affiliated with SiteGround, they’ve just had great reviews and I haven’t had any issues with them). I recently transferred a website over to SiteGround and ran multiple website speed tests from before and after the transfer. With SiteGround, I instantly saw a 1 second drop in load time due to a faster server response, which is huge when we’re talking about website speeds. Then again, I could have just been with a slow hosting provider to begin with!There are other factors that affect website loading time, see the section ‘Website Speed’ for more details.
Initial Keyword Research
Generally, keyword research can be a long and gruelling process. The initial keyword research is usually easier. (For a more in-depth study on keyword research visit the section: Keywords).To begin with my initial keyword research, I would start with the search phrase I would personally use to find someone like me. I’d then put this search phrase into Neil Patel’s tool, Ubersuggest.
The tool then creates a massive list filled with other search phrases related to ‘SEO Freelancer’ that can be easily exported into a spreadsheet:
Accordion test
View example
This is a lot of keywords to go through individually though (646 to be precise). After a quick scan, it also shows two other keywords that I am interested in ‘Expert’ and ‘Consultant’. So I will need to segment the data to find the relevant search terms for me.So I use these formulae:
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“freelance”,A638)),”yes”,”no”)
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“expert”,A638)),”yes”,”no”)
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“consultant”,A638)),”yes”,”no”)This asks the spreadsheet to display ‘yes’ whenever it detects the word freelance(r)/expert/consultant in column A. From there I use a simple filter to display all of the ‘Yes’ fields and hide all of the ‘No’ fields.When using this formula remember to change the word “freelance/expert/consultant” to match the word you want to search for, and also change the Axxx number to the A column reference to search (once you’ve inputted it correctly for one cell, just do a drag and drop down the spreadsheet and Excel should match the new A column reference to the correct line).This gives me a whole bundle of related search data, but I have high ambitions with my site. So I am going to aim for the long-term highly ambitious search terms:
Freelancer Search Phrases
seo freelancer | 1000 |
freelance seo consultant | 260 |
freelance seo expert | 110 |
looking for seo freelancer | 90 |
best seo freelancer | 90 |
freelance seo rates | 70 |
hire seo freelancer | 70 |
Consultant Search Phrases
seo consultant | 4400 |
seo consultant services | 1000 |
seo consultant uk | 320 |
local seo consultant | 320 |
consultant seo | 260 |
freelance seo consultant | 260 |
seo consultant london | 170 |
best seo consultant | 170 |
Who knew!? The freelancer search terms are actually bringing in the least amount of traffic. This can go into my Content Strategy.
Many SEO’s are probably reading this and screaming “What about long tail keywords!?!?” Don’t worry about this just yet, there’s a chapter on Content Marketing later on in this guide where you will read all about Long Tail Keyword Targeting. From the get go, I want to build my optimisation on the main pages on my most valuable search terms.
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