Join the class. The SEO guide for business in Malaysia at ACAT Penang, Wisma Yeap, 17th August 2016, 7pm to 10pm.

Hey, I’m running a class at ACAT Penang and will be sharing some SEO strategies in 2016 to rank your business website. This should apply for businesses in Penang, Malaysia or even if you’re targeting the world.

Date : 17th August 2016

Time : 7 – 10pm

Venue : @CAT Penang, Wisma Yeap Chor Ee

Get your tickets : http://seoguide4business.peatix.com/

What’s SEO & why do I need it for my business?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Don’t worry if this is all new to you, but as a business thriving in the technological world, you best get familiar with SEO quick. In short, it is a marketing activity done in attempting to get your website rank on the first page of Google, so that when a business prospect searches for a ‘keyword’ related to your product or services, they will find your website. This increases the chance of you getting sales through the internet.

In short, rank top in Google = make loads of money

This is SEO done for a local music school. Nothing big here. But you get the idea. You just need to rank your sites.

Different businesses address SEO differently.

Take my music school, The Cat Studio for example. It’s a brick and mortar business based in Penang and so, I’ve majorly worked on local SEO for the business. Most of our clients are parents of ambitious children who wants their children to learn music. They are located in Penang, so I only zoomed down focused to running local SEO in Penang, for Cat Studio.

Now, back to you. Your business might have a website that aims to get ranked in global searches. The SEO practices that should be carried out for a global business like yours will be different. First off, it’ll be harder to rank a global business. Why? Don’t forget that there are hundreds and maybe thousands of other websites, trying to rank the same as you. Next, the ‘keywords’ that is used to optimize a global business would be different from a business that only aims at local clients.

Imagine if Cat Studio is an online music school that targets clients who wants to learn music online, the keywords that most probably be used to rank the site, would be keywords such as ‘online music school’, ‘online guitar lessons’ as compared to ‘guitar lessons Penang’ shown in the example above.

Search marketing isn’t just about Google.

Most get it wrong. They think search marketing (SEO) is just about getting to the top of Google.

That’s a wrong way to approach it.

Imagine today, you dropped your phone and cracked your screen

To me, search marketing (SEO) is all about being discoverable. Imagine today, you dropped your phone while playing Pokemon Go and the screen cracked. It’s not the time for you to buy a new phone, so you probably will start to search for a place that offers screen replacement services.

What do you do? You’d probably search on Google like this:

You’ll probably search on Google like this and get these results.

Noticed anything there? iFix4You seems to appear everywhere. Their website is ranked, so is their Facebook and also you can see they appear in a forum.

Notice how iFix4You tend to dominate the market?

Upon searching on YouTube, I also found that they’re discoverable on YouTube.

They are also discoverable on YouTube upon more searching.

The point is this. Search marketing (SEO) is all about being discoverable online when there is someone searching with an intent. When a prospect searches for something online, he or she wants to find the results immediately – right here, right now.

It is more than only Google. If most of your target markets are hanging out on Facebook, then you ought to be discoverable on Facebook. If your target markets are spending more time on LinkedIn, then spend more time on LinkedIn.

Once you’re easily discoverable when a user searches for an intent, regardless of whether its a search on Google or on another platform, you would have succeed if they are able to find your business.

How do I rank my business on Google then?

The problem is SEO can be a little tricky. There is no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to SEO, however there are few guidelines you can follow when working on SEO for your website.

The main factor to remember however, is that it’s all about user experience now. Google favors websites that people like. For now, I’ll simplyfy the SEO process by breaking it into 3 steps.

1 – Website Auditing

Your first SEO optimization work should be on your website. Without a proper SEO-optimized website, you’ll have very little chances of getting your website to be ranked for the keywords that you want. Some factors that you can check on yoru website are things such as website speed, bounce rate, time on website, keywords, meta information & robots.txt.

Even then, those are only few of the many things that have to be optimized on your website.

2 – Creating SEO Content

Google hates thin websites. There must be content on your website.

You might already know now, that Google finds and ranks sites using keywords. That is yes, words on your blog/website. What Google does is it sends out robotos to audit your website and to check the relevancy for any search term that searches may be looking for. At the end of the day, it’s only great relevant search result that Google is after. They want to provide searches with a good experience.

So with your content, you want to be as targetted as possible. For example, if you’re trying to rank for ‘how to make coffee’, probably because you sell coffee machines, you want to think off the searcher’s point of view first. To the searcher, he or she wants to learn the way to make coffee right now and immediately. They do a search for ‘how to make coffee’ on Google and expect to find exactly how to make coffee. Then as a content publisher, you want to craft your content to show HOW to make coffee.

Makes sense? First, you want to think about crafting a great content that 100% shows how to make coffee. Next, you want to make sure that you have the keywords ‘how to make coffee’ and also its subkeywords added in your content, so Google can find your blog/website. Then after that, you want to work on some marketing outreach, in getting some other websites to link back to your website for ‘how to make coffee’. This shows Google that your website is the best place to go for when it comes to learning how to make coffee, thus it ranks your website top when searchers search for ‘how to make coffee’.

That said, content can be more than just articles. A blog/website with great content includes videos, infographics, photo albums and more. It’s good practice to have a variety of content on your blog/website.

More on this during the course, join the SEO Guide for Business course, Penang 

3 – Building Backlinks

You probably have heard about the importance of getting backlinks back to your website, to rank your website.

Backlinks are basically links that point back to your website. As with my coffee example above, building backlinks is basically the effort of putting links that points back to your website on as many places as possible on the internet.

Let’s compare two websites, both are trying to rank in Google for ‘How To Make Coffee’.

Site A has great content and have a video on YouTube with a link pointing back to it.

Site B has great content and also have a video on YouTube with a link pointing back to it. Additionally, some blogs really liked the content on Site B, blogged about it and pointed some links to Site B. Moreover, Site B is constantly mentioned & shared on social media platform like Facebook. Because of the great content, visitors tend to share it with their friends.

Which site do you think will rank higher in Google?

Got the idea? Okay, get to work.

Few last words, before you go 

I can’t think of any business that wouldn’t benefit from SEO and I personally feel all business should understand and practice it, even if your business don’t mainly gain customers through the search engine.

What have you done to rank your business website? Or perhaps you have a personal blog that you’d like to rank online? Share your comments below as I’d love to learn from you as well.

Otherwise, join me at the SEO sharing session at ACAT Penang. Grab tickets from Peatix here: http://seoguide4business.peatix.com/