Hi, welcome back. I’m sorry it took me a couple of days to write this follow-up article. I’m glad to see that the first Step by Step SEM article helped you. In this series, we’ll help you optimize your website for search engines so you start getting traffic.

keyword selection

Type the words from the Google ad into the search box. If you haven’t created an account, please do so now. It will only take two minutes. Once you are in your account, go to “instruments” at the top of the page. Click on “instruments” And go to “keyword planner”.

Now let’s say, for example, that I have a client who sells used cars. He has many Mercedes-Benz vehicles that he wants to move. The broader the search term or keywords you use, the more searches I will get. However, I want focused searches, so I don’t just put second hand cars, I would use “Second hand Mercedes-Benz for sale”. Or you could use “Used Mercedes for sale in Cape Town”. Doing your research, you can see that people use the term Used more than 2nd hand, and since it’s not an online business, I use the area to refine the search. People are not going to drive 200 km for a used car. They want you to be close. The goal here is to get relevant traffic that will convert into sales. You want to choose planner keywords that have decent search volume but little competition. You don’t want hundreds of people coming to your site looking for cheap Japanese cars. We’ll discuss this more when we look at pay-per-click advertising.

Optimizing your Article

So we have decided that we are going to write an article on “Used Mercedes-Benz Vehicles for Sale in Cape Town – Easy Buyer’s Guide”. This will be the header of your article. As you can see, we are packing a lot of keywords. Login to your WordPress site. Let’s go to “pages”. Click “add new page”. Put the article header above where it says “Enter title here.” On the right hand side, you will see a box that says page attributes. We will add this article on the main page “German Used Cars”. If you were selling computers, you might have different pages, like “hardware” and “software.” If you were writing an article about new Windows software. I would put the article under “software”. We want your site to be neat and easy for people to find information. This is also important to Google, as your URL would be computerssales.com/software/windows-review (this is not a real link, so if you click on it, it won’t take you to the page).

Article

Now don’t be intimidated by writing your article. Just imagine that a customer has walked into your store and asked you about a particular product that you sell. Write the article as if you were talking to the client. Explain the pros and cons. Comments from previous buyers. The price etc The good thing is that you only have to do this once. Not over and over again every day like you would with customers coming into your store. So do it right. You can possibly offer some alternatives such as a “Second Hand Audi” and give a link to that page if you have one. Use the keyword you have selected in at least the first and last sentence of your article and at least once in one of your article headings. The article must have at least 300 words.

Image

Now upload an image of the product and name the image the same as your keyword that we are using to optimize the page, for example, “Used Mercedes-Benz”. We also want at least one external link to a relevant external page. So we could put a link to topgear.co.uk/mercedes-slk-review. This way, your customer can get more unbiased information about what you have for sale. Click “save draft” at the top right of the page.

accessories

Now go to plugins on the left. Click “add new”. Type “SEO Yoast”. Search for “Yoast WordPress SEO”. Click “install now” and “activate”. Go back to the article you just wrote and click “edit”. Scroll down until you reach the new plugin. Fill in your target keyword, for example, “Used Mercedes-Benz.” Fill in your SEO title. This is the same as your article header. Now write a meta description like “The best deals on used Mercedes-Benz cars and German vehicles. Looking for the best prices on second-hand cars.” Try to use all 156 characters to give Google a lot of specific options. Click “save draft”, then scroll down to the plugin.

It will look like this:

1. Your focus keyword was found in:
2. Item Title: Yes (1)
3. Page Title: Yes (1)
4. Page URL: Yes (1)
5. Content: Yes (4)
6. Meta description: Yes (1)

Click on the analysis page. Green is good and red is bad. Try to make all the suggested changes so that you get as much green as possible. Remember to save after every change you make so the SEO is up to date.

Well done. That wasn’t so bad, right? It will be easier and faster, so don’t despair.

I will have more tips for you in SEM 3 step by step