Are you looking for effective ways to create or enhance your personal brand? In the current digital world, possessing a strong online presence is no longer a frivolous luxury, but a necessity for survival.
Picture this: Google’s search engine received an average of 8.5 billion searches a day in 2023, an increase from the 7.81 billion reported in 2021.
In other words, online activity is only becoming more vigorous, and maintaining a robust online presence will determine whether or not your personal brand will remain relevant in the future.
The way to do that — Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! That’s right!
So, how can you use this powerful tool to build and maintain a solid personal brand?
That’s what this article will be tackling. By the time you get to the bottom of today’s coverage, you’ll have mustered all the essentials you need to kickstart or amp up your SEO efforts for your personal branding.
Let’s get started!
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Before we dive into how you can use the power of SEO to build your online reputation, let’s begin with the basics.
So, what is SEO?
SEO, in the simplest of terms, refers to a set of techniques or strategies used to achieve a higher rank for a website in search engine result pages (SERPs).
It basically encompasses optimizing your content so it appears at the top of search results when people search words related to what the content is all about.
In search engines, the higher you rank, the more organic traffic you attract. In fact, the top result on Google accounts for a whopping 27.6% of all clicks, while the top 3 results get more than half the total number of clicks!
And you know what that means — more visibility, more traffic, and ultimately, more leads and conversions for your personal brand.
In other words, to increase your chances of success, you’ll want to control what search engines show to people, at least as much as you can.
You can do that by yourself as long as you have the skills. However, if you lack this expertise, opt for a white label SEO service. This way, you can focus on growing your personal brand while experts handle the technical stuff.
Key Elements of SEO
If you are intending to use SEO to sponsor your online success, then there are three main pillars you need to consider:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves optimizing the elements of your personal website that you have control over.
Now, there are several areas that you need to focus on when doing On-Page SEO: Keywords, Content Quality, and Internal Crosslinking.
Conducting Keyword Research
Keywords in SEO are simply the search terms used by internet users. Search engines use these keywords to determine the user’s search intent and provide results that match that intent.
That means in case you get this part of SEO wrong, your fate of joining the 96.55% of content that never gets any traffic from Google will be sealed!
So, what is the secret to creating great and relevant keywords that get the job done?
Well, keyword research!
But how do you go about it?
It’s simple:
- Brainstorm a list of topics related to your personal brand.
- Use keyword research tools to know what internet users are searching for related to your brand. Tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMrush do this part of the job exceptionally well.
- Examine the competition for each keyword. The goal is to handpick those with lower competition but still with high search volume.
And that’s it!
But as you use keywords, avoid overdoing it. Stick to only a few relevant ones and ensure that they come as naturally as possible in your content.
Meta Title and Description
The meta title and description are the first things users see on search engine result pages. They play a critical role in drawing clicks to your website and should never be taken for granted.
Make sure that they accurately reflect the content on your page, use relevant keywords, and entice users to click through.
They also have to be of the ideal length. Rank Math recommends a length of 50 – 60 characters for meta titles and 50 to 160 characters for meta descriptions.
Content Quality
Search engines want to offer the best to their users, and doing that means availing them high quality content that best aligns with their search intent.
That’s why, as you invest in other SEO efforts, remember that the content you create plays a significant role in defining your overall success. In fact, Google revealed that content is among the top 3 search ranking factors!
So, how do you create content that’s sure to scoop top search engine rankings?
Here are a few tips for an effective content strategy:
- Focus on creating content that exhibits high levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT).
- Format your content for better readability using headings, bullets, and numbering is one of the best practices in SEO.
- Supplement your great content with multimedia like images and videos.
Remember to always put yourself in the shoes of internet users. Ask yourself if you would find value in your content and adjust accordingly.
Internal Crosslinking
Internal linking is connecting one page on your website to another page within the same site. Using internal links appropriately helps improve the crawlability of your site by helping search engine understand your website’s structure and hierarchy.
Just ensure that you do this properly to avoid creating a negative user experience. Use relevant anchor words and only link to content that is related and adds value to the user.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO, also known as off-site SEO, are measures outside of your website that you can deploy to impact it’s overall performance on search engines. It involves actions like building backlinks and social signals.
Backlinking
Backlinking, or link building, is simply creating a hyperlink from another website to your own. Search engines interpret these backlinks as a vote of confidence for your website, making the search engines establish trust and more confidence in your site.
But then, it’s worth mentioning that the credibility of whoever is backing you matters a lot! Search engines place more value on a vote from a credible website than one from a site that’s barely known.
So, how do you get these backlinks?
Well, here are some tips:
- Offer to write guest posts for authoritative sites in exchange for a link back to your website.
- Create high-quality, share-worthy content that naturally earns backlinks from other websites.
- Identify broken links in authoritative sites and offer to replace them with links to your own content if relevant.
Social Media Signals
In today’s digital age, we can’t talk about SEO without mentioning social media platforms. Social signals such as likes, shares, and comments won’t directly affect your site’s visibility.
However, the more people become aware of your site through the social platforms, the more they’re likely to search for your site.
So, having a strong social media presence helps improve your personal brand by enhancing your site’s online visibility.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is basically the “behind-the-scenes” elements that can define whether or not your website performs better than your competitors. This SEO pillar captures aspects like website crawlability, indexability, website speed, and mobile-friendliness.
Website Crawlability
Search engines use crawlers to read and follow links on your site. Picture it like how a spider follows tons of links on webs as it tries to find its way around. You want to ensure that your website gives these crawlers an easy time, because the easier they find the job when navigating your site, the friendlier they’ll see your site.
To improve crawlability, ensure that:
- Your website has a sitemap. This is simply a file that lists all the URLs on your site (like a map)!
- You have no broken links on your website.
- Use internal links appropriately.
Indexability
Indexing is simply adding web pages into search engine databases. Always check if you’re indexed because sometimes search engines may fail to do it.
Here’s how you need to check if you’re indexed:
- Type the following into your Google search bar: “site:yourdomain.com” and hit enter (without quotation marks). Then, check if every URL has been indexed.
- If nothing comes up, check just in case your webmaster tools have signaled any indexing errors. If so, fix them.
Page Speed
Slow-loading websites are a turn-off to most internet users. In fact, 47% of users won’t wait longer than 2 seconds for a website to load, with other stats showing that slow-loading websites cost retailers $2.6 billion U.S. dollars every year.
What does that mean? Website speed is vital! Ensure that your site loads within 2 seconds on desktops and 4 seconds on mobile devices.
To do that, use CDN, work with reliable web-hosting services, and minify CSS and Javascript files. Using website caching and compressing images can also help minimize loading speed.
Mobile-Friendliness
Do you know that 61.95% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices? That’s right!
Even more, Google is currently using mobile-indexing, which means that they prioritize using the mobile version of your website to determine where it ranks among your competitors.
This means if you ignore creating a mobile-friendly site, chances of strengthening your personal brand online is very minimal.
So, create a mobile-friendly site. Then, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to see how friendly it is to mobile users. It’s a free tool, so you won’t need to pay even a dime to use it.
Monitoring and Analyzing SEO Performance
Don’t just implement everything we’ve said and sit back, hoping that it will somehow work out. Instead, check to see if your deployed efforts are bearing the desired SEO results.
SEO analytics tools will come in handy. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the most popular SEO performance monitoring tools, but SEMrush and Moz are also great.
Using these tools, check for key performance indicators (KPIs) like bounce rates, organic traffic, keyword rankings, and backlink profiles. With these insights, finetune your SEO strategy for better results.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if you want to become a successful business owner, SEO is a very powerful tool for building your online presence. However, carefully execute it to reap results. The On-page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO are all vital pillars for a successful SEO campaign, so pay attention to all of them.
Then, ensure that you regularly monitor your SEO performance using an analytics tool. This will help you improve your performance effectively by highlighting areas where you can tweak and fine-tune your efforts for the desired results.
