I love to think that SEO for female entrepreneurs done by a female SEO specialist has something extra: the awareness that comes from discovering that often you have to struggle a bit more to achieve the result you deserve.
There are several reasons why many people still believe that women cannot be successful in business.
These beliefs come from the stereotypes that surround us.
Many people, even women themselves, still tend to associate female entrepreneurs with being weak and lacking confidence.
Indeed, many people (gender does not matter) don’t take risks when it comes to starting a business. This doesn’t mean they can’t be successful if they try, but it’s somewhat expected that women are more cautious.
We are often stereotyped as not having the ability to compete with our male counterparts, even in the world of online business. We’re also portrayed as being too emotional and unable to focus on things such as technical stuff, or making profits. However, this stereotype is far from being accurate. It’s most likely that you’ll always need to work harder to achieve all the success you deserve, though.
If you are a female founder or have an entrepreneurial mindset, likely, you’ve already had a blog. Then you probably know that it can be challenging to get your site high on SERPs. To rank higher than other sites in your industry, you need to optimize your content and create high-quality bonds among your online assets. Fortunately, the following tips don’t require you to hire an agency, which is useful in several cases, anyway.
When you are in the startup phase, though, I hear you when you want to do it by yourself. You lower the expenses while being in control of everything. It will be hard to manage every element of your strategy, but SEO for female entrepreneurs is extremely important, to build trust and authentic brand authority. Eventually, when your business will grow, you’ll start outsourcing or delegating some tasks. At that point, your knowledge of search engine optimization will help you choose the right partner to work with.
How can you rank better on Google? What you need to do is pay attention to your audience, and find out what will work for them. You can use the methods outlined below to help you get started.
The first thing you should look at is the user experience on your website.
Create a Website That Works for Everyone
If you want to create an online business, then you should make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. You need to make sure that your pages load quickly so that users won’t leave before reading the content. Remember that many people use public Wi-Fi connections: they could be significantly slower than the one in your office!
You also need to ensure that its UX remains good, no matter which device you are using, but responsive design is a concept that has changed and evolved.
Now, I still use the words “responsive design”, but their meaning has evolved past what customers mean. It’s not trying to fit or adjust web pages on any screen size anymore.
It’s building pages that are made to display properly on every session: an approach that is more declarative than imperative. Keep in mind this perspective while developing your pages, as it could affect the user experience throughout the whole website lifespan.
Focus on Your Target
If you’re trying to find a new product or service to sell, then you will need to do some market research. To get started, the first thing you should do is brainstorm a list of words.
You might consider asking yourself questions like “what is my niche?” What are my customers’ needs? Where am I targeting my audience? Who will be interested in what I’m offering? Why would someone want to buy from me?
Think about your customers.
Are they looking for products that will make them money or save them time? Do you provide products that help solve problems? If you’re providing services, then think about your clients and potential clients. Will they benefit from what you offer? Are there any common themes in their answers to the above questions?
Put yourself in your readers’ shoes and imagine what they might be searching for. Ask yourself why people search on Google or other similar websites.
Try to find out who your competitors are
You can start by doing some basic searches on Google or Bing (remember that they track you and this has an impact on search results). Or start a quick anonymous search on Duck Duck Go or Startpage.
Look at the top ten results for each search term or topic that you want to promote, and jot down competitors and terms. It’s time to create an account on an SEO tool.
You can start a free trial on SEMrush. It’s HUGE (and it can be overwhelming). Here, you can find out what people are searching for, and which sites are currently dominating their market. Alternatives: Sistrix has a free simplified plan, as well as Ubersuggest.
Create a profile, start submitting competitors and/or queries, and wait for the tool to work its magic… You’ll end up with new info, new queries and, hopefully, new ideas. Once you have defined who you’re going to target, you can begin to look for the best keywords.
Keywords are important when it comes to growing your online presence. Keyword research is an essential part of any SEO strategy. It will help you discover new ideas for content marketing.
If you’re looking to grow your organic traffic, then you need to make sure that you have a good understanding of keywords and their popularity.
You could have lots of relevant information to share, but you need SEO to let people discover them on search engines.
If you manage to rank better, you’ll attract more visitors who are interested in the products or services you offer.
To get more organic traffic, you’ll need to optimize your pages both from a content and strategic SEO perspective as well as a technical perspective.
Remember the obvious: when you focus on your page content you’d want to make the meta description and title tags relevant to your keywords. I’m not diving into these elements, as there’s no question here: they’re widely recognized as important. They will help you rank higher in the SERP and increase your CTR.
How to Do a Simple Keyword Research
Keywords allow you to focus your online assets on a certain topic.
They are simply an expression used by a search engine when people type queries into their browser to look up something specific. When you write content, you need to know how to use keywords effectively so that you increase the chance that interested users found you on the internet and visit your website.
You can find good keywords using different tools such as Google Search Console. It is free and easy to retrieve the essential information you need to start.
Access it, then:
- open the Performance report;
- look at the queries that make your pages display on Google;
- export them and choose the most relevant ones.
- Open Google Keyword planner, to check out the frequency and the volume of these searches in the past.
- Copy and paste your list, start
- You can export the results in a CSV file, import them into a spreadsheet and start evaluating, deleting, adding…
- You can use Keyword Planner to get more keyword ideas and add them to your spreadsheet.
- Last, choose which queries suit better your topics, are the most popular and give you the chance to be competitive.
How to choose the best keywords?
It’s better to be rational, here. After all, it’s SEO for female entrepreneurs, and you want better and bigger numbers for your business, don’t you?
So, go back to the SEMrush/Ubersuggest/Sistrix part and import these queries to the tool of your choice. You’ll discover if your competitors use them (and how), who uses them, how they rank and on what pages…
Once you’ve done your keyword research, you will want to focus on creating content that relates to your specific niche.
Write Your Content, Not Everybody’s
You want to grow your organic traffic. You need to have a plan in place and write content that people love to read, then.
As a female entrepreneur, if you don’t know anything about SEO, you’re missing out on one of the most effective ways to:
- drive more targeted visitors to your website;
- become influential and authoritative in your field;
- have people trusting you and your products or services.
According to this study, organic search drives 53% of website traffic, and paid search drives only 27%.
Moreover, here we find that the 1st result in Google gets 34% of the organic traffic; it’s not surprising. And the #1 position is worth #2, #3, #4 and #5 combined. Stepping up from #2 to #1 will double your organic traffic.
But do you know what? The biggest jump (143%) is when you come from #11 to #10.
So, now you have to use keywords effectively. You’ve just:
- discovered your target;
- done your first keyword research.
To get the best results from your search engine optimization efforts, you now need your content.
An entrepreneur is a crucial part of their products
There’s no point in paying someone else to write your articles if you won’t put any effort into it yourself. It’s true especially if you’re a woman entrepreneur or a small business owner.
Why? Because your customers will get to know you and link you to the tone of voice of your content.
It’s difficult to be consistent and build trust when different persons write your content… Unless it has to be so technical and precise that you cannot afford to put any personal touch on it.
Publish regularly.
Google doesn’t just look at the number of words, but also at the frequency with which you update your site. If you post new material once every two weeks, then this will tell Google that your website is actively maintained. Do you plan to write new stuff every day? Good! Every month? Good! Regular is better than frequent if you can’t have both.
Remember: is way better to publish useful content every month than a poor article every week. Write some hundred words on each topic.
Once you’ve written around 400-600 words (or those you need to cover the topic), it’s time to edit. Edit until the post reads well and flows naturally.
Use keywords, but don’t be obsessed by them
Use the keywords that relate directly to your target. For example, if you’re writing a post about online accounting services, you’ll probably use “online accounting software” as a keyword.
Make sure that you have the right ones in place on the pages: start with those you’ve just found out. But there’s no need to be stuck on the exact queries. When you know what you’re talking about, keywords variations and synonyms will appear in your articles spontaneously.
Try to write an optimized article for one relevant query. Your knowledge about that topic will generate an “environment” where different searches from users could trigger your article to rank.
You can add different variations of the same keyword throughout the text, but be careful not to do keyword stuffing. Neither Google nor users will appreciate it: using too many keywords could result in a poor ranking on search engines.
Did you like “SEO for Female Entrepreneurs: 4 actionable tips”?
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A whole hour to find out what I can do to:
- technically optimize your pages, to make Google love them more
- grow more targeted traffic to your online assets;
- bring more people to ask for your services and products;
- show you what you can learn to keep your website SEO friendly, and grow the number of people choosing you.
