insight : will hanke
Getting Your SEO Ready for 2022
T BY WILL HANKE
here’s a saying in the Midwest where I live: “Make hay while the sun is shining.” For many window treatment business owners, this year has been a spectacular season of “making hay.” Leads have been plentiful and many have experienced record harvests. And as often happens this time of year, we look toward next year— planting the seeds now that will result in an even better 2022. One of the best things we can do in this downtime is to get serious about our search engine optimization (SEO). Pages and product information that you update now will put you in position for more leads next year. Remember, changes you make to a website won’t register with Google for up to six weeks, so you’ve got to plan ahead and “send them the right signals” about your site before the selling season starts up again.
Review Your On-Page SEO The simplest way to start with your SEO is to get your page titles and descriptions in order, dispersing city and municipality names throughout. Make sure you use all 70 (or so) characters for each page and write a two-sentence description that explains what each page on your site is about. As a bonus, make sure each page has a custom heading tag, commonly called an H1 tag. While it’s a small change, Google tends to give more weight to heading tags and titles than most other items on your page. To figure out your current tags, download a free tool called Screaming Frog. Plug in your website and run the report. This will give you the head start you need to optimize those titles, descriptions and headings.
Get People Talking About (and Linking to) You In the world of SEO, links are very important. Every link from another website to your website is like a vote for your business— and the more votes you have, the higher Google will rank your business listing. Getting links is neither fun nor glamorous, but the benefits can be tremendous. One easy way to get more links to your website is to start creating content that people want to link to. For instance, an article on the top 10 window treatment projects your company did in 2021 would be a great promotional piece
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that would get some engagement on social media as well. Secondly, consider guest blogging. In this tactic, you reach out to other industry influencers and ask if you can post a wellwritten piece of content on their website. They get free content, and you get a link in the article footer back to your site, which is a win-win.
Optimize Your GMB Listing For our clients, we’re seeing cases where 60% or more of their leads are coming from customers engaged with their Google My Business (GMB) listing. A vast majority of these leads came from customers that never visited our client’s website. While your website is very important, your GMB listing might be even more important nowadays. To get started, make sure you’ve claimed your listing (Google. com/business) and then fill out as much information as you can. If you want to get a leg up on the competition, geo-tag your pictures before you upload them to your GMB profile using a tool like GeoImgr.
Diversify Your Content
Even though I’m an old-school SEO guy, I’ll admit it’s very important that you don’t keep all your eggs in the Google basket. Creating content that is fun for you to develop and reflects your brand will help you get you more views over time. As the second-largest search engine, YouTube cannot be ignored. The addition of video to our business arsenal has really helped us increase the number of people who see our brand. The same is true for any window covering company. Giving tours
