A good website is more than just a business asset.

A good website is the employee who doesn’t take breaks. Who answers questions for potential clients at 4am or while you’re taking a much-needed vacation day. Who knows everything there is to know about your brand and can tell people just what they need at just the right moment. A good website is worth all the time and money and energy we spend making sure everything is just. right. Design. Copy. User experience. Layout. A good website takes it all into account.

And a good website is completely worthless if people can’t find it.

I recently wrote that SEO is BS, but that’s admittedly a bit reductive. It’s important that search engines can find your website, even if you’ve developed other sources of traffic. You may find that social media, incoming referrals from other sites, or email links make up a decent portion of your traffic, and once you’ve gotten a devoted following, readers will probably even come to your site directly. But in the past month, a bit over 50% of the traffic at TheVoiceBureau.com came from organic search, which means that a large portion of our readers are still coming to us for the first time, and they’re coming from search engines.

(We like Google Analytics for tracking these things, but there are plenty of options you might check out, if you want to give something else a try.)

So here’s the thing about SEO: it’s not rocket science. Don’t bother researching some clever way of gaming the system, because 99% of those tricks will end up working against you, when you could just spend that same time doing things the right way. Don’t create duplicate pages just to fake having more content. We’re past the days of keyword stuffing (and the junky spam websites it created). Meta tags and keywords are useful, but they’re not going to make or break your site’s search rankings. Incoming links are definitely important, and that’s something you’ll develop over time as you use social media and write guest posts and develop partnerships. (Don’t buy links. Don’t get junk links in bogus online directories. This is not a quick fix — you need to actually have real links on real sites for this to matter.)

You do want to use title tags and meta descriptions, but you don’t need to bring in a team of experts to do an analysis on that for you — you just need to clearly describe what’s contained on that page, and make sure you include them all the time.

It’s true: the best way to get your website to show up in searches is to have lots of high-quality content that naturally uses the terms people use when talking about what you do.

Tags and descriptions are great for behind-the-scenes SEO, but the real workhorse of your website is going to be the copy itself. So how do you write a website that search engines will love? Well, let’s keep it really simple.

Don’t bury the lede — start with what the page is about.

Come up with, say, five to ten keywords that you want to naturally highlight on that page. This is going to vary depending on the point of the page — your About Page needs to lead with your name, while a Services page is going to lead with (wait for it…) the names of your services. But, generally speaking, let’s say your keywords could be:

• your name,
• your business name,
• the “job title” of what you do,
• what a client would call your key services,
• your location if your business operates in-person,
• a need someone might have that would bring them to you,
• a key result someone might have from working with you.

For The Voice Bureau, my keywords might be: Katie Mehas (and/or Abby Kerr), The Voice Bureau, Copywriting, Branding, Brand Voice, Consulting, Courses. I might use the specific name of a course or product, if it was a page for that particular item. We wouldn’t use all of those on every page, and there are others we’d work in that would be specific to certain pages, but that would be where I’d generally start.

Use your keywords early in the page, using a header tag, if possible. Your main title should be H1. Subsections are H2. Important info that isn’t necessarily a heading could be H3.

For example:

H1 – The Voice Bureau’s Courses for Entrepreneurs

H2 – The E-Letter Atelier

H3 – Craft your solo-owned or small business e-newsletter from concept to content

Make it really, really easy for a reader to tell what your page is about, and what you are about. If a reader can see what’s going on at a glance, a search engine probably can, too. Fill out your tags and keywords so that the backend of your website is doing some work, too, but don’t try to get clever — these should match what you just put on the page.

And then…relax. Your page doesn’t need to cram in every keyword possible. You aren’t telling the entirety of your story on every single page of copy.

Something to keep in mind: you want to walk the line between being present in a larger pool of potential clients and standing out in your specialty. Think of it this way. Let’s say you have an in-person businesses with two locations, one operating in New York City and one in Tuscarora, PA. You want to make sure you’re advertised as being in NYC, because there are millions of people there who might benefit from your services. There are also a lot more competitors, so you’re going to get a much smaller portion of that market share. Now, you don’t want to ignore Tuscarora, either — you may well be the only business of your type there, and that means everyone looking for one of you is looking for you, specifically.

How does this relate to online businesses?

Well, let’s say you’re a coach.

(And please, say you’re a coach. “Joy consultant” or “lifestyle sparklepreneur” or “un-stuckening fixologist” are completely worthless in searches.)

So you’re a coach. Say that, and get yourself out there in the pool of “coach” search results. But do you have a specialty? Do you do career consulting? Wellness? Nutrition? Meditation? Touch therapy? Past life regression? Tarot? Don’t forget to bring that up early on, too. This is your Tuscarora — be the result when someone is looking for exactly what you do. A good website is going to tell search engines,“Bring me up when someone is looking for these things — whether I’m one of many, generally speaking, or the only one in my specific field.”

A good website is also going to speak to your Right Person when they get there…and this is where it can get a little trickier.

Speaking directly to that Right Person takes some work (I mean, it’s why we’re in business). Knowing — and using — your Voice Values helps. And the more you communicate with your readers, the more comfortable you’ll be speaking to them.

But, for now, focus on clarity. You can work on nuance and conversation and style later. A search engine isn’t going to be too worried about that sort of thing, and chances are, your Right Person is going to be using pretty vanilla search terms to find you. Get them in the door. And then you can show them why they should stay.

In the comments, I’d love to hear:

Do you feel comfortable working with SEO? What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about it?