How To Become An SEO Rockstar

If you run your own website or are thinking about starting one, then no doubt you've come across the term SEO. But what does SEO mean, and why is it so important? Well, SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and it can make or break the success of your website. Implementing good SEO strategy can mean the difference between your site getting tons of traffic and ending up on the dreaded second page of a Google search results.😬 In order to give you the tools you need to become an SEO rockstar, we've recruited an expert. Devon Heck is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in giving fashion sites & startups the tools they need to succeed in the digital world. She'll be teaching a full breakout session on optimizing your SEO at our LA Conference so you too can become a pro at SEO!

Get your conference tickets HERE, then keep scrolling to learn some of her SEO tips!

SS: For those who may not know, can you explain what SEO is and why it’s important for brands & bloggers? SEO is the process of ranking and displaying your website within organic search results in order to drive free traffic to your site. It’s important because it’s free! That's the #1 reason why it is important, but it also helps when you run paid searches because it helps boost your quality score and thus lowers your cost-per-click. Win-win!

SS: What is the #1 SEO mistake you see companies making? Having a “set it and forget it” mentality. Google is constantly making changes to the way they determine ranking and the way, and what, people search changes over time. If you don’t continue to monitor and optimize, you will most likely find that you drop in rank. Review your SEO every quarter to determine if you need to make adjustments to your strategy.

SS: What are 3 tips you would give to companies looking to improve their SEO?

Have an idea of keywords you want to show up on and how competitive they are. There’s a SEO joke that says “The best place to hide a dead body is on Page 2 of Google search results” and it’s very true. If you don’t think you can get to page 1, find a similar target keyword that you can.
Use your target keyword in the page title, h1 tag and content on the page…but don’t make everything the exact same thing, switch it up. These are all important signals to the search engines telling them what your page is about.
This isn’t a "build it and they will come” scenario. Of course you should aim to have an optimized site, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have traffic coming to your site your rankings aren’t going to change significantly. Google looks at external linking as well as domain history when factoring rankings, so getting traffic to your site is key.

SS: You’ve worked with a lot of fashion-based companies like BCBG and Chinese Laundry. Are there any specific SEO challenges that e-commerce sites face? The major challenge I see with e-commerce sites is duplicate content. E-commerce platforms allow your products to appear under multiple categories, collections, and filters which can result in the same content and meta information across multiple urls. Duplicate content is a “no-no” in the eyes of the search engines, but more so it creates confusion when they are determining which pages to rank for specific keywords. You want to have one #1 url out of all the duplicates that you can funnel SEO juice into by ideally using canonical url tags.

SS: What led you to make the leap and start your own business? I was in the corporate world for over 7 years and I really learned a lot from my experiences and the people I was surrounded by. When I left my job, I travelled for 2 months and realized that I wanted to be able to do that whenever I wanted so I decided to start a consulting business. The beauty of digital marketing, especially in this age, is that you can do it from anywhere. Plus, it allows me to work with so many different companies, in different industries which keeps me constantly learning.

If you're ready to learn how to step up your SEO game, get your tickets to #SimplyLA to attend Devon's breakout session HERE!

Featured image via Death to the Stock Photo