Get Found in Search Engines

Billions of searches are happening online every single day, and you can show up for hundreds or thousands of them. Rising in the search engine ranks doesn’t require luck — it just takes a bit of strategy to ensure your business gets found.

Brenda Newhouse — owner of Newhouse Studios Web Strategy — brought her talk on how to “Get Found in Search Engines” to our screens to help you master search engine optimization (SEO) on your business website. Get her helpful tips and suggested tools below!

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SEMrush keyword research

If you’re looking to boost your content strategy, one powerful tool that Brenda recommends is SEMrush. To follow along with her keyword research tips on the platform, you can start a free trial on this SEMrush page (or wait until you really want to use it).

Once you’re in SEMrush, Brenda suggests getting started by heading to the “Overview” section of your dashboard and entering a site you want to learn about (i.e., your website or your competitors’). If a website doesn’t pop up, SEMrush likely isn’t aware of it, but your entry will flag it to the platform and information about it will likely be available within 30-90 days.

Then, tap on “Organic Search Traffic” and scroll down to see keywords searchers found the website through. You can take note of the search volume, level of competition and more for each keyword.

• Pro tip from Brenda: Don’t dismiss a keyword just because it has a low search volume. This can mean low competition for a keyword that can consistently get you views for years.

To better sort through keywords and get an idea of the words or phrases you could rank for, you can use the search bar tool toward the top of the “Organic Search Traffic” page. Enter any word and SEMrush will pull up phrases that the website has ranked for that include that specific word.

Next to each keyword listing, you can also tap directly on the link to actually read the article that ranked for that keyword. And if you enter a link back in the search bar, you can pull up all the keywords the article ranks for. This way, you can see opportunities for your next article to rank for multiple keywords at once.

Google keyword research

Jumping on the search engine itself can further help you understand your keyword opportunities.

One simple method you can use is typing in a general phrase (ex: “apple”) into the search bar and seeing what suggested search terms show up. This will help you learn more about what people are actually typing into Google.

Brenda also suggests using Google Trends, a free tool that can show you when certain keywords were searched the most. You can also compare the performance of multiple keywords at once.

Three SEO fields

You’ve narrowed down your target keywords and written your article. Before you publish the piece, Brenda said it’s important to fill in these three fields in the backend of your site:

• SEO title: This shows up as the blue hyperlinked text on search results and as the text you see on a browser tab. Most platforms allow SEO titles to be different from the title of your article.
• Slug: Your URL should contain your primary keyword.
• Meta description: This is the short summary that shows up under your title. Make sure to include a few keyphrases in here.

SEO tools

Pretty much every platform — from Squarespace and Shopify to Wix and WordPress — give you the option to input these three SEO fields.

For WordPress, Brenda recommends using the Yoast SEO plugin, which is reliable and used by many business owners. However, keep in mind that if you didn’t build your site, you’ll want to ask your developer what plugin they used first. Having two plugins active at once can cause website issues. Plus, if you want to switch SEO plugins, it’s pretty complex and you’ll want to have your website manager help.