Craft Focus - Oct/Nov (Issue 63)

40 craft focus Michael O’Connor, PR & Marketing expert from Grey Sergeant, discusses some simple SEO techniques to get your message across A question I always get asked is, “As a small independent craft business, how can I compete with the big retailers?” One thing that really stands out in the craft community is that crafters want to learn and engage with a brand. They want the opportunity to learn new techniques and get tips on how products work. Having a blog is a great way to engage not only with your customer base but also reaching out to new prospects. But how do you optimise your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly? The truth is, many bloggers fail to take advantage of the enormous marketing potential of their blogs. In fact, a recent study by blogger.com shows that although roughly 60 per cent of businesses have blogs, 65 per cent of those blog owners haven’t even updated in the past year! By providing fresh, relevant content and performing basic blog post optimisation, you can take advantage of the many benefits blogging offers. Here are six easy search engine optimisation (SEO) tips to help get your blog noticed: 1. Do your research Keyword research is essential for on-page optimisation. Chances are you’re naturally including keywords without realising it simply by providing valuable content on a topic. However, there are a variety of tools and techniques for finding related keywords relevant to your blog post that you may not have considered. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool and semrush.com both offer great tools that allow you to find keywords related to your topic and even spy on your competition to see what words and phrases they’re targeting to bring traffic to their sites. 2. Utilise keywords throughout your post Once you’ve targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, it’s important to place them where they’ll have the most impact for humans and search engine crawlers indexing your content. Try to include them in the following places: • Title • Headings and subheadings • Introductory sentence • Concluding paragraph • Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site) • Title tags and meta descriptions Six tips to success with SEO