Omni-channel evaluation for Miam Clothing

Miam Clothing is a new Finnish fashion label whose team was planning to step up their sales and marketing game. However, juggling all the marketing channels was tedious and wasting the company’s resources. Together with the retail agency Werk, we rallied around this emerging designer and created an omnichannel evaluation with 2 clear goals in mind: Empowering Miam to create a profitable seamless customer experience and find the most cost-efficient strategy to get customers. Read more about this new project.

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39

WAYS TO BOOST YOUR BUSINESS

We discovered 39 opportunities for Miam to improve all the steps of the customer journey, from becoming more accessible to providing a stellar customer service.

41%

OF WHICH ARE LOW HANGING FRUITS

A big share of Miam’s challenges are easy fixes and require minimum efforts to boost the customer experience.

Context

A young fashion brand with an international and multichannel start

MIAM is a Nordic women’s clothing brand created in 2018. In only 2 years, the team has already been able to create a great marketing mix and a solid foundation for its future retail strategy. The brand has a good reach through its webshop, a design collective store, Dutch resellers and an active social media presence.

Problem

When web-to-store strategy is lacking of counterpart

However, despite having invested a fairly good amount of time, energy and resources in digital platforms, the physical shops were the only channels generating sales. Because of its recent creation, and the premium price range, MIAM team became convinced that the only possible selling points were contained within the walls of a good old bricks and mortar shop. And as the team had no control over the resellers’ digital presence, all they could do was promote the Helsinki store. This web-to-store strategy was considerably narrowing-down the potential reach, focusing only on people who can visit one shop in one city. It was time for this retailer to explore other ways to grow faster. And as multiple channels were already utilized, why couldn’t they enjoy the various benefits of omni-channel retailing?

Solution

A much broader and more integrated perspective

That is why Miia, the business owner and soul of MIAM clothing, was ready to meet up with WERK retail agency and myself to review and optimise her omni-channel retail strategy. We had 2 clear goals in mind for her company:

empower MIAM to create a seamless customer experience, which will increase the sales
and accelerate customers acquisition, in the most cost-efficient possible way

To achieve these goals, pysical and digital channels were investigated through different prisms

Analytics and performance
Omnichannel experience
Brand experience
Employee experience
Personalised experience
Shopping experience
In-store experience
Social experience
Organizational competence

In order to be as mindful of Miia’s time as possible, the process only comprised:

a 1 hour kickoff meeting
a mystery client survey
a final 2 hours meeting to present the conclusions of this audit and the top priority recommendations

As for the deliverable, the omni-channel retail evaluation, it encompassed:

a dashboard visualising the current situation of MIAM omnichannel retail strategy
a summary of the most challenging topics for the brand (the top 4 insights)
short-term, mid-term and long-term action plans, highlighting the low hanging fruits
and the full list of all the opportunities spotted and the concrete recommendations for each of them

This thorough analysis enabled us to easily pinpoint the gaps created between the different channels we observed. Many useful elements had been implemented on each marketing and sales arena, however the strategy was deployed quite scatteredly, often resulting in a waste of opportunities and resources.

Results

More clarity and a new mindset: the long-term rewards of the moni-channel evaluation

Even before starting to move to practical action, the client could enjoy a bunch of decisive ideas at the earliest stage of the project:

a Google Analytics account was implemented on the eshop
a list of micro-influencers were found among the existing clients
awareness about a set of actions that should be part of the company’s routines

Following a customised grid of assessment, MIAM got a seamless customer experience score of 27%. The audit revealed 39 ways to boost MIAM business, 41% of which were considered as really easy fixes with a real impact.

When the omni-channel retail final report was delivered, Miia gained more clarity and confidence about her business already. We asked her to rate from 0 to 5 how she felt about several topics during the kickoff and at the end of our mission.

After the last meeting:

She was able to define more clearly the areas of her business (sales and marketing strategy) she should prioritize (+1.5)
She felt much less overwhelmed by the process of designing her sales and marketing strategy (+2)
And she got a bit more clarity regarding what would be the next steps to take her business to the next level online and offline (+0.5)

Curious to know more? Here’s some excellent reading in Finnish. Grab a copy of the seamless customer experience guide or check MIAM case study on WERK’s website.

Groupe Routage’s ranking skyrockets from #90 to #7 on Google

A mailing house in France with several outdated websites had been in the process of centralising its online content under a new domain which they planned to revamp last summer. They asked me to prepare a SEO audit of the old version and share with them my recommendations to optimise the new one. After its launch in August 2019, the organic traffic boomed and has recorded an increase of +220% until the end of November 2019. Their main keyword, “routage postal” escalated from an average rank-90 all the way up to the first page, at the rank-7.

Visit website

220%

YOY organic traffic growth

Average organic traffic growth within the first couple of months after the first SEO implementation.

83

Number of positions by which the ranking on the main targeted keyword improved

The website’s global ranking, comprising a list of 25 keywords, increased on average by 40 positions.

80%

keywords ranking

During the first ranking analysis, before implementing the new SEO strategy, only 14 keywords were ranking somewhere in the first 100th positions on Google. The new version almost doubled up (+80%) the number of keywords tested on which prospects can now find the website.

Context

The client, Groupe Routage, is a mailing house offering a wide range of services from design and printing to mail distribution, including emailing and order preparation for e-commerce businesses. They used to have different websites for each main branch of their activity but decided later on to simplify the strategy and group everything under one brand, therefore, one domain name.

Scope of the mission

The scope included an audit of the main website and recommendations that would be integrated to the brand new version they would launch in the summer.

However, the focus couldn’t be only on the most recent domain if we wanted to make the most of all their existing resources: older domain names with loads of content known and served by Google.

SEO strategy

The SEO strategy relied heavily on content segmentation, internal linking, classic on-page optimisations and 301 redirect management to avoid all waste of resources and visibility on search engines.

This SEO action plan allowed us to enjoy the following benefits:

The juice and SEO potential of the outdated websites which were doomed to perish (the organic traffic was drastically decreasing constantly) was redirected to boost the main domain;
The content has been enriched to better present the services and sub-categories of services;
Guidelines were established as well in order to maximise the connections between the secondary type of content (blog posts, customers testimonials and case studies) and the key pages;
All the above actions led to grow the number of pages indexed by +343%, a higher ranking (40 positions higher on average for each keyword of the analysis) on a broader set of keywords (+80%), which ultimately produced a +220% increase of the organic traffic in the following couple of months following the SEO intervention;

How a local pastry catering service tripled its organic traffic

Sebastien Lorentz, a pastry chef located in the south of France launched a website promoting his catering service in February 2018. He addresses the B2C market and has a regional reach.
After a trimester, the organic traffic was booming. On average, the site has tripled its organic traffic ever since.

214%

YOY ORGANIC TRAFFIC GROWTH

Average organic traffic growth within the first sixth months after the first SEO implementation. The growth is sustainable because of the business seasonality and thanks to the transfer skills which allowed the clients to take over.

31,40%

YOY QUARTERLY REVENUE GROWTH

Revenue growth in the first quarter of 2019 compared to the previous year. The SEO was implemented the quarter before. The website was ready for the wedding high-season.

Context

The client launched a website promoting his catering service in February 2018. He addresses the B2C market and has a regional reach. It’s a young and very local business with limited resources but, together with his wife, they’re willing to roll up their sleeves and participate as much as possible. It’s the best foundation to establish a partnership. We collaborated for a trimester to kick start the SEO trafic and set up a few online marketing guidelines that would allow the client to be more autonomous in the future. SEO-wise, the clients have bought a nice domain name but it’s brand new. Besides, the clients are feeding the blog at a high cadency. They don’t have a journalism nor a literature background but this doesn’t prevent them from going full speed on the content strategy.

Scope of the mission

The scope was pretty broad as I wanted to do as much skill transfer as possible, in order to get the best results. SEO, social media and email marketing were part of the overall strategy. A list of tasks and inspirations that the client could undertake was created, and I implemented the missions I considered the most sensitive. By delegating and giving feedback as much as I could, the client got a hands-on experience of some SEO and SoMe best practices.

SEO strategy

The SEO strategy relied on 4 pillars that are described below: optimisation of the content, improvement of Google My Business account and their local SEO and development of the internal linking.

Basic SEO on the existing pages: The whole website enjoyed a SEO friendly pampering, targeting the all the main HTML tags.

Local SEO: The Google My Business account was optimised (more categories, longer descriptions, renaming of the business, more pictures) and the client was encouraged to try out different features as well as reply to every customer feedback (reviews or ratings on Google Maps).

Internal linking: Most of the work was done in the blog section. Categories and tags were cleaned up and new rules were defined to avoid redundancy or empty/low-quality lists.

Inbound marketing: The business is very much event-oriented. Therefore, landing pages dedicated to each main type of event were created to attract a specific target groups and collect qualified leads. They are included in a more complex cluster of contents that are developed on the blog section or on the “portfolio” pages.

Social media strategy

For that aspect of the mission, the clients received SoMe guidelines in the form of Trello tasks encouraging them to invest their time on 2 channels (Youtube and Instagram), to benchmark their competitors, and to interact with and contact influencers.

Email marketing

Among the deliverables, the clients were also provided with a list of ideas of email campaigns they could set up together with recommended emailing marketing tools and instructions regarding the customer data they should collect.

+100% YoY organic traffic for AVIS

I started to work on Avis’s French platform dedicated to van and truck rental last year. The website was losing organic traffic compared to the previous year.
After 3 months, it regained as much traffic as the year before; in the following period, the organic traffic had grown progressively until it reached a +100% improvement.
And it was not the only good surprise!

Visit website

100%

YOY MONTHLY ORGANIC TRAFFIC GROWTH

40%

YOY QUARTERLY TRANSACTION GROWTH

30%

YOY QUARTERLY REVENUE GROWTH

Context

The client is a worldwide brand of car and vans rental. In France, the client has a dedicated website for the car rentals and another one for the vans and trucks rental. The target of the latter entails both professionals needing a vehicle for their business, and individuals mainly to organise a moving. The high season starts in spring and last until the end of summer, with micro seasonal peaks after that.

The domain name is only 3 years old and SEO has never been at the core of its digital strategy.

Scope of the mission

An audit and a complete action plan were prepared during the 1st trimester; Then, we followed the technical implementation of the SEO strategy by another team, observed regularly the performances and added one batch of intervention after the 2nd trimester. Monthly reports were also delivered to the client and the technical team.

SEO strategy

In order to get the website’s potential flourish, whereas it was mainly based on an internal search engine (a type of content which is very much SEO unfriendly), the content strategy and its structure had to be completely redesigned so as to provide to the Google bot a nice and rich material to crawl in. Along with the classic SEO that needed to be done on the existing pages, many new lists of vehicles were created. In addition, the website is also now welcoming a cluster of pages evolving around the moving topic, together with a calculator tool, which is meant to meet the end users’ needs.

As a result, we gave Google +51% of content to chew on while we increased the internal linking, to lead the bot to this new content.

Getting into the SEO mindset 3/3

Welcome to the third blog in a three part series about how to get more qualified traffic to your website with the 3 main pillars of SEO. This entire series is about mind over matter, and to emphasize that you don’t need technical training to implement SEO! A Search Engine Optimization approach is more a mindset than a technical framework, and it comes down to being user-centric and keeping your users at the forefront of your mind.

I’m leading with the mind over matter idea today because in this blog we’ll be covering the final pillar of SEO – the technical details of your website. For entrepreneurs and small business owners who might have the feelings of overwhelm start creeping in at the first mention of tech, no worries, this blog is for you! My intention with this series is to help encourage the SEO mindset and provide practical tools that can easily be used by all right away.

As a helpful reminder, boosting your website traffic does not only reply on these technical details of your SEO strategy, the 3 main pillars of SEO really build upon one another to create an amazing experience for your users, so if you haven’t checked out the other blogs in the series covering the first 2 pillars, you can do so here and here.

Review

A quick in-a-flash rehash of the 3 key pillars of SEO that will help get more qualified traffic to your website.
— Keywords – The more the merrier! Generic keywords vs. long-tail keywords. Choosing Understandability over originality.
— Architecture of the Website – Detailed articulation. Mirroring your Sections. (Pro-tip: the SEO mindset is REALLY utilized here).
— The Technical Implementations – URL Rewriting. Crawlable content. Etc (keep reading for more!

Let’s Get a tiny bit Technical

When you have a product or service you’re proud of, and you’re just starting out in your business, it can feel disappointing when you aren’t able to share your product with people simply because it’s not getting enough visibility on the web to get the word out. To boost your visibility with SEO, you don’t need to be a robot, but you do want to pay close attention to the technical details of your website so your work is getting the views it deserves.

The tech details of your website make a huge difference, so I advise you to check out this simple tool you can use to find the technical errors on your website:

https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome

This tool is invaluable in guaranteeing your visibility success and is easy to use even if tech stuff doesn’t normally feel like it’s something in your wheelhouse.

Solopreneurs and small business owners often ask, “How can I get featured on Google?” The answer is that you can’t! Google decides whether or not they want to display your website as a featured snippet or not, which is what makes it even more important that you’re putting a focus on developing a fully functioning SEO implementation for your website. In addition to your keywords and architecture, the technical details of your website will make a major difference in how visible you are, as well as how user-centric and accessible your website is.

Here’s a few common technical errors that can happen that will be fairly easy to fix:

URL Rewriting

If we think back to the first two pillars of SEO – keywords, and the architecture of the website, you’ll recognize that one of the main goals Search Engine Optimization is bringing to your website is more pages overall (that hopefully eventually leads your users back to your money pages!) With all of these nicely crafted pages on your website, you’ll want to ensure that each and every page has a unique and user-friendly URL – that includes your smartly concocted keywords.

Linking

While designing your SEO approach, you want to make sure that the links throughout your website are not hidden; as well as ensuring that the links are explicitly designed for the dear Google bots. The most definitive form of a link is the text form; though it may seem more interesting to use an image or some animation, the text form is ultimately more user-centric and therefore more beloved (and noticeable) to the Google bots.

Mobile Version

One of the biggest pro-tips I can encourage while addressing the technical details of your site is to make sure your mobile version is optimized for Google because the mobile version is Google’s favorite version now.

It’s no surprise in 2021 that many people have moved primarily to using mobile devices for a majority of their online business, shopping, searching, and connecting. The tendency that has been observed, is that many businesses simplify the mobile version of their website, but by doing so you may be hiding or getting rid of SEO elements such as the internal links you’ve carefully crafted. Be aware that doing this will have an impact on your SEO. Google will prioritize the content that is displayed on the mobile version of your website, and will index that in priority. Keeping the SEO mindset strong while creating the mobile version of your website is going to be super beneficial to your user’s experience, and to boosting your traffic!

Speed Racer

Tying in with the times, the page speed of your website is also very important. Just to reiterate, Google is extremely user-centric, so if the experience on your website could be likened to a natural disaster because the pages take ages to load, then Google will not rank your page highly.

A fantastic free tool to use to check the speed of your website is PageSpeed Insights. Pro-tip: when using this tool you’ll want to check ALL your different types of pages because they will have different technical elements, so make sure to do a quick run through of not only your homepage, but also your product page, blog, testimonials, etc.

Bonus points

Another question I get asked often that goes hand-in-hand with your technical implementations, and all 3 of the key pillars of SEO, is what platform to use in creating a website. I recommend using WordPress as it is really SEO friendly and is going to help highlight your user-centric mindset and all the good work you have put into your Search Engine Optimization implementation.

I’ve personally found that SquareSpace and Wix can be very limited in their internal linking. Whichever platform you choose, remember to keep an SEO mindset front and center as you are researching the different elements and design of the platform.

Keep going

One of the coolest things I’ve experienced in my own journey as a solo entrepreneur, is to see how all small business owners and solopreneurs are bringing their unique stories, talents, and products into the world. I hope these simple steps to focusing on your content strategy have helped encourage you to start thinking in the SEO mindset in order to boost your visibility and share your story with the world. The longer I’m on this adventure, I realize a lot of life is about the attitude we approach it with, and this can be applied in every aspect of the way you build your business from the ground up. Thanks for being on the journey with me.

Getting Into the SEO Mindset, PRO-Tips Take Two (2/3)

This is the second blog in a three part series about boosting your website traffic with SEO from a recent webinar I presented for Entrepreneurs of Finland and for Your Digi Guide. I’ve seen time and again that there is a lot of enthusiasm for this topic, so I’m hoping to provide some easy to implement SEO pro-tips that will help motivate your SEO attitude. My intention is to create a resource business owners and solopreneurs can easily refer back to as a reminder of some simple practical tools that can be used every day to boost your website traffic as you are building your business.

In this blog, we’ll be covering the second of the three main pillars of SEO – the architecture of your website. However, I want to call out that the first pillar of SEO, identifying your keywords, really helps to inspire a user-centric mindset for your SEO approach, and leads you more naturally into addressing the architecture of your website. So if you haven’t checked out the first blog in this series yet, you can do so here: Getting Into the SEO Mindset with Entrepreneurs of Finland (1/2)

Recap

As the founder of Frank’r and a solo entrepreneur myself, I’ve made it my mission to help other startup founders and biz dreamers get more qualified traffic to their website to help build their business by using SEO. Search Engine Optimization has the potential to be beneficial to boosting your business growth on many levels, so let’s do a quick recap of the 3 key pillars of SEO that will up your optimization ethos. These pillars will build upon and compliment one another as you apply them in your SEO implementation.

Let’s start with the 3 pillars of seo

Keywords

The more the merrier! Generic keywords vs. long-tail keywords. Choosing Understandability over originality.

Architecture of the website

Detailed articulation. Mirroring your Sections. (Pro-tip: the SEO mindset is REALLY utilized here).

Technical implementations

URL Rewriting. Crawlable content. (This part is actually extra important, you may even want to consider it the backbone of your SEO strategy! If the technical implementations are done incorrectly, then all the energy you’ve put into the first two stages is wasted).

Architecture – how to ensure your website is not a house of cards

Much like the importance of the architecture of a building, the architecture of your website is pivotal in determining the integrity and structural soundness of your website. While designing the architecture in your mind, and in real life on your site, you really want to check your SEO attitude as this is where the mindset is really utilized. The architecture of your website is an easy, and almost universal way to articulate your content in an optimized way; and is probably the part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy where you’ll get the greatest added value.

My pro-tip is to put an emphasis on the importance of an SEO mindset being applied here. No matter what your context; whether your business is B2B or B2C, or whether you sell a service or a product, whether you’re in the food industry or tech – you are very likely to be able to smoothly use most of the following types of content and segment them in an (almost) universal way on your website to optimize your SEO strategy.

Mirror, mirror

Here is where the pro-tip comes in, now that you have an idea of ALL these different types of content you can use on your website, the trick is to apply what I call a mirror structure. While implementing your SEO strategy, you’re going to mirror the way you segment your product and/or service; for example, if you split your product per characteristics of your audience, you will apply the exact same logic to segment your complimentary content – such as blog content, case studies, testimonials, etc.

For a nice architectural structure of your website – that is guaranteed to BOOST your traffic – you’ll want to have an almost identical structure between your money pages and all the content that is built to support your money pages. This will increase your visibility as well as giving you layers of options to use the keywords you lovingly developed in multiple places across your website, not just on your products and/or service page.

Building bridges

The next step, now that you’ve created this lovely similar mirroring environment, is that you need to build bridges between all your different types of content that lead to your money pages. This is called internal linking, and this beautiful tool is going to send juice to where the magic (your biz!) happens. Basically your blog pages, case studies, testimonials, and so on, are there to receive links that will point users to where your lead generation, or where your sales happens, possibly bridging the gap between potential client to actual client.

Show me the money

While planning your website out, and prepping your SEO mindset, I suggest exploring as much as you can, do some research on competitor’s websites, as well as websites of companies you like, because implementing this structure well is going to create a rich internal linking that will boost your money pages. A concrete example that I like to refer to is Jamie Oliver’s website, which is a good example of dense internal linking. Don’t be afraid to get curious!

Attitude adjustment

Applying an SEO-centered mindset and thought process to the architecture of your website is a clear path to success when it comes to visibility for your product. I hope these easy tips and tricks are helpful as you build your website and build your business. The added value to your biz will soon become apparent, brick by brick, or blog by blog if you will.

Next in the series, I’ll cover the backbone of boosting your website traffic with SEO – the technical details. This third pillar brings all your hard work together to perform best for you in harmony.

SEO mission for a training center in innovative psychology

CIPsy (or the Psychological Intervention Center) is a Psychotherapy Training Center in Paris offering short training sessions for Psychology professionals in new forms of innovative therapies. Prior to the pandemic, they mainly focused on their in-person training. In the post-COVID world, they have moved their sessions online and the center saw a lack of attention and interest. Cipsy enlisted my help with the goal of ensuring improved visibility on Google, and I’m glad to report we are seeing a healthy increase in organic traffic allowing easier access to view CIPsy’s offerings. Let’s take a look at some of the steps we took.

Visit website

+268.39%

organic traffic growth in 4 months

+733%

visibility on the top 3

+45,4

positions gained on average

Context

The CIPsy center started as a way to offer workshops on the evolving and innovative research being carried out in behavioral health. The center serves a small group of professionals, psychologists, and psychiatrists, and is based in Paris where they have previously offered in-person sessions. Since the pandemic, the center has had the opportunity to connect with more clientele by offering online workshops, though they were not easily accessible for interested users to find them online.

Challenges

The CIPsy training center was difficult to find online, even for people who knew them and had previously taken courses with them, so they were definitely losing out on connecting with potential new clients who may be searching for trainings and professional development. CIPsy’s founder, Benoit Henaut, recognized the importance of being easily accessible on Google, but was unsure how to attain this. Though the center was offering dynamic courses with well-renowned teachers, through some first step analysis I discovered their website had several issues with the main headings used throughout the website not containing needed keywords, and a lack of appropriate keywords in general that made the website inaccessible for most organic traffic. I found another issue that was decreasing CIPsy’s visibility on Google was a lack of a menu to organize the trainings in an easily searchable fashion. I also discovered a tiered breadcrumb on the website that had been set up incorrectly and was missing layers of the architecture of the website, therefore rendering it unhelpful in driving traffic..

Some Starting Points for Discovery

Feedback from current clients who could not locate CIPsy on Google
~100 organic users per month before intervention.
Based on 40 keywords, the website ranked top 3 on only 3 keywords.

Solution

I implemented an SEO for training center approach to the website in a few different ways. First, I optimized the existing content that had already been created, including the title info on each page, the main headings, and text throughout the website. I had identified a list of 40 keywords, that would be more competitive and relevant based on CIPsy’s content, and the optimization process included a focus on making sure appropriate keywords were amply used throughout all website text–for example including “training” and “psychotherapy” in many text headings.I also did a restructuring of the website content to give more depth to the catalogue section. A major outcome of this restructure was to create a menu that would more pertinently link specific trainings to their correct categories, as well as suggested creating additional categories. With SEO drive in mind, I worked on the internal linking of the website, with the menu being a component of that, as well as internal linking updates made to the breadcrumb to drive traffic to the appropriate section.

I wanted to make sure a spotlight was really on the fantastic workshops being offered, so I added extra linkings to the training pages, and basically organized the website in a way that all traffic is directed back to the training page so viewers are exposed to the training options. One method I used to achieve this was to add extra links to each instructor’s own bio page that directs users back to the trainings they offer.

Results

With the SEO marketing approach, CIPsy is seeing empowering outcomes:

Based on the created list of 40 keywords, the website now ranks in the top 3 on 22 keywords (+733% visibility on the top 3), and on the 1st page on 26 keywords (+236% visibility on the top 10)
The average position of the website is now 6.2 on Google (on all the 40 keywords): +45,4 positions gained on average.
These results led to an increase of +268.39% of organic traffic from mid-June until mid-October.

Let’s talk about your online marketing strategy

You don’t need extravagant resources to reach interesting results, relevant for the size of your organisation. The most important thing is probably your involvement in the project. If you want to collaborate with me, drop me a line.

Getting Into the SEO Mindset with Entrepreneurs of Finland (1/3)

I had the fantastic opportunity to present a webinar with Entrepreneurs of Finland in November 2020 about Boosting Your Website Traffic with SEO. Something that I love about Entrepreneurs of Finland is that they put an emphasis on the idea that everyone has a unique story, especially entrepreneurs, and so this was an awesome chance for me to not only share my expertise in SEO with other business owners, but I was also grateful for the opportunity to share my story while networking and connecting with such a cool group. Throughout the webinar, there were a lot of deep, insightful questions and follow-up, and I truly appreciated all the participation!

The enthusiasm for this content was so inspiring that I wanted to create a follow-up blog to use and share as a reference point. In this three part series we’ll review the pillars of a SEO strategy and give a deeper overview of each pillar. In this first article of the series, we’ll be getting deep into the first pillar: keywords!

Mind over matter

As the founder of Frankr and a solo entrepreneur myself, I’ve made it my mission to help other startup founders and biz dreamers get more qualified traffic to their website to help build their business by using SEO. I have over 10 years of experience with Search Engine Optimization, and my journey in the SEO world actually began at a web agency working on high volume websites with large amounts of traffic. For much of that time, I was surrounded by tech guys, and during this experience, learned to approach SEO in a very technical and automated way. I like to share this story because my background is actually 100% not technical, and really is the complete opposite of a technical background, so I think it’s helpful to highlight that you don’t need a technical background to get started with SEO.

My intentions I brought to the webinar were all about mindset and practical tools that can be used right away. The biggest goals I hope to bring to any solopreneur about their SEO strategy is to one, emphasize that you don’t need technical training to implement SEO! It is more a mindset than a technical framework, as the SEO implementation really relies on your mindset. And two, that all the SEO tricks utilized for your bigger SEO implementation, can also be efficient for smaller projects. SEO has the potential to be super beneficial in numerous ways.

Content strategy

The blueprint and the questions

Content is king and SEO is a way to get FREE traffic from Google! So as a solopreneur, you need to use SEO to help build your business! In my everyday work, I hope to bring out the relevance of this idea. I really love to see new solo entrepreneurs put a lot of focus on their content strategy — this is not about backlinking — but truly about the nitty gritty of ensuring your content is helping boost your web traffic. A great way to get into the SEO mindset, is to start by assessing the foundation of Search Engine Optimization as well as asking yourself a few questions.

Let’s start with the 3 pillars of seo

1. Keywords

The more the merrier! Generic keywords vs. long-tail keywords. Choosing Understandability over originality.

2. Architecture of the website

Detailed articulation. Mirroring your Sections. (Pro-tip: the SEO mindset is REALLY utilized here).

3. The technical implementations

Are you content with your content?

During the webinar, I went over some questions you can ask yourself to help put you in the SEO mindset mood and find out if your content strategy is serving you in the best possible way (i.e. is bringing you more qualified traffic) :

Do you invest a fair amount of time in benchmarking your competition?

Do you benchmark specifically for your competition on Google?

Do you know how much content you have, or how many pages roughly?

How much content do I need?

Pro-tip: It’s all relative! The goal of these questions is to help identify that your SEO strategy starts with assessing your competition’s marketing efforts on Google. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is! Comparing your SEO efforts with your competitor’s content strategy is key to a successful SEO implementation.

A focus on the first pillar

The strategy to ramp up your content, or, being a user-centric maniac!

Maybe the biggest pro-tip I can offer is that in order to ramp up your content, it’s all about being a user-centric maniac, instead of being like a robot with automated tricks. Think of it this way, you have this product, it’s yours and you care a lot about it, and you’re very used to pitching your product the very same way over and over. You may already have in your mind, consciously or subconsciously, who your user is and what they will use the product for. The drill now is to destroy that thought process in order to allow your perspective and point of view to see ALL your prospects. You want to be able to see ALL your users differences and ALL the different reasons users may be interested in your product or service. You need to embrace ALL the different reasons people may want your product.

One of your biggest roles as a solo entrepreneur, is to open your product and service up to possibility. As business owners, we need to be less self-centered and think outside of ourselves and outside of the one reason we may imagine users may wish to use our product or service. Going into your SEO strategy with a user-centric mindset is the best way to deploy a long-tail keyword strategy as it allows you to go down the keyword rabbit hole in search of all keywords that may be applicable, not just the generic ones.

The long-tail SEO strategy is extremely specific keywords that are searched once or twice a month. Long-tail is usually 5 keywords or more, and is a more articulated and complex search a user is making. Remember, the old adage in regard to keywords is the more the merrier.

While this may seem counter-productive at first, it’s actually very beneficial for you as it gives you the opportunity to be highly visible for super specific, (and maybe not as competitive), but very relevant keywords. When your business is new, it can be challenging to be visible with only the generic and popular queries associated with your product or service. When developing your SEO strategy, you’ll want to have your list of generic keywords, but in order to complete your keyword strategy you really want to dig deep and expand that out with long-tail keywords as well.

P.S. My dear google.com and page one on Google is really my fave place to get keyword ideas while creating an SEO strategy. Once I type something, I immediately get an idea of the number of results and number of competitions. I can go down to the bottom of the page and see other searches related to my query. This is a great space for new cool ideas, and a place to get inspired about my long-tail strategy.

You could call it a dreamer’s mindset

Benchmarking with your competition and starting with your keywords can really help you get into an SEO mindset. It’s almost as if the keywords themselves can be grounding, rooting you into the base of what your business is and the dreams you have for yourself as a business owner. Identifying your generic and long-tail keywords helps you become more user-centric, which will lead you more naturally into addressing the architecture of your website as well as the technical implementations, where the SEO mindset is extremely important. My wish is that my pro-tips can be helpful for others on their entrepreneurial journey and I’m so excited for orgs like Entrepreneurs of Finland that give us a place to connect and build our businesses together.

Stay tuned for the upcoming articles in this series that will cover the architecture of your website and the technical implementations. Spoiler alert: there will be plenty of pro-tips ahead!

Do you really need more pages on your website? All signs point to yes.

Yes, you need more pages for good indexation - SEO helsinki

Content is king!

Creating an abundance of well-crafted content through an SEO approach is an incredible opportunity for you to connect more directly and authentically with your consumers.

To truly benefit from the rewards of SEO, it’s important to have as many interesting and relevant pages on your website as possible. A typical implementation of a strong Search Engine Optimization approach consists in turning a one-page, 20 page, or 200 page website into a 10, 500, or 10,00 page – or more – website! This SEO strategy allows your website to profit significantly from organic visibility on Google.

Bounty for your thoughts?

A strong Search Engine Optimization execution can make your website truly stand out above the competition. It may be helpful to think of it in this way; the more applicable pages and information Google knows about your website, service, or product, the more opportunity you have to appear whenever a potential client does a direct Google search for something that you provide.

This is increasing your indexation on Google, as we say in SEO terms. It’s a way for you to basically create free advertising for yourself! However, always keep in mind that your content must be relevant for the end-user, indeed. Otherwise, even if you do increase your organic traffic, it won’t translate into cash! But most likely, a content strategy based on artificial and poor-quality content generation won’t work.

Let’s give them some SEO to talk about

You don’t just have to take my word for it, let’s take a look at the numbers.

Below you’ll see an example of the difference in the Google indexation (or how many pages Google knows about a website) for a website that has a solid Search Engine Optimization approach and one that does not. Let’s take the case of a former client, who’s invested in SEO for years, building a strong and deep architecture, with sub-domains and a wide variety of listings presenting their offers. In July 2020, they launched a new version of their website, with a complete different structure and a brand new domain name.

Indexation of the new website, 2.5 months after being launched:

Indexation of the old website, 2.5 months after launching the new websites and implementing 301 redirects:

With this example, you can see that in the first result, Google shows around 3000 pages to potential clients; whereas in the second result for the website that has gone through a thorough SEO implementation, Google knows and shares around 15,000 pages, on this one website, to potential clients! I mean, that is just really cool!

On this other project, the same catalogue after being restructured jumped from less than 1000 pages to around 16,000 pages:

Again, and I couldn’t stress this enough, you have to make sure that create value in the process by clarifying the most relevant characteristics of your products/services and by making them more accessible thanks to a dense and well thought-through internal linking.

The raison d’être

This is the goal of SEO, to broaden your reach and address many more keywords in order to increase your indexation. The purpose of SEO is to see the number of pages Google knows about your service or product go up exponentially.

Another cool thing about this SEO strategy: if the internal linking is tightly done, multiplying the number of pages will automatically strengthen your linking, which in return, will boost your key pages.

Tag, you’re it!

A few classic tricks to increase indexation in an SEO-minded way

After identifying your main keywords, use them amply across your website.

Get concisely crafty with the categories on your blog. They should reflect the way your services are segmented (but not only).
Utilize tags smartly to increase indexation by including complementary topics, to group your contents according to new and relevant angles.
Optimize your testimonials by applying the same categories and tags.

A fully realized SEO approach is powerful because it continues to build itself on this simple foundation. Increasing the amount of pages Google knows about your website will not only be improving your visibility, but you will also be building your brand, raising your credibility, and reaching your target audience on an elevated level.

3 Common SEO mistakes you can easily fix

1. Don’t mix 36 topics in one page

We know that an ample amount of content is the end goal in SEO, but a common mistake many make when first attempting to implement a Search Engine Optimization approach is thinking only about quantity of content, and not also quality of content. Each page should have a clear goal and a clear theme, as well as one main keyword. For each page created, there should be one target keyword and this keyword should be developed and used all over the page.

[For example, SEO SEO…SEO. Wink.]

But really, your target keyword on each page should be evident in the content that is created and should not be mixed up with several other keywords that you would like to develop on other pages.

For every page created you should know what your one true love, or one true keyword is, ‘til death do you part, 4-ever & ever, “I do”.

A real world example would be if you provide a service to businesses as well as individuals, for instance a career coach who provides a coaching recruiting service to HR Departments as well as direct coaching to solo clients. These are two completely different services (recruitment / career management) with separate sets of keywords, and they should each have their own pages where they are clearly identified.

For keywords, choose understandability over originality

Clients often want to sound like they’re revolutionizing their industry, and consequently, sometimes succumb to the urge of attempting to create a new and often, elaborate, vocabulary that defines their service or product.

The result is a poor choice of words no one knows and never uses that will tarnish the entire SEO content strategy; and could even leave users proverbially scratching their heads in confusion over what you do or what your service is when looking at your website.

confusing keywords bad for SEO and users

Remember the purpose of Search Engine Optimization is to improve your visibility on Google and reach your target audience by creating content that is identifiable to users who are typing directly what they want. While there are plenty of other ways to show how your service or product is innovative, using inaccessible keywords to explain your product is not the way to achieve the desired result.

Part of your SEO strategy will be not only about creating quality content, but also identifying clear and concise keywords that will reach your consumers.

Don’t fall into the UX > SEO trap

Many startups are falling into the UX trap, their desire to look sleek and *try* to be user-centric are over the top, and ironically, leaves them oblivious to the very first step in a true user-centric strategy – which is to be visible in order to meet your users! While there can be benefits to fancy UX for some websites, it should not be prioritized over SEO by default.

When you originally launch your website, when your brand is new and you are hoping to build a client base, and when you don’t heavily communicate in channels other than Google and organically, Search Engine Optimization is always going to be one of the most powerful tools to build your credibility and visibility. It’s a way for you to create free and organic advertising for yourself.

The most common issue with sophisticated UX is that it is not SEO friendly. While it may look cool, if it prevents you from being visible on a Google search, who cares what your website looks like? No one. Because no one will see it.

But, have you even seen my tabs and forms, bro!?

I regularly work on projects with thirty products or reference maximum. With this type of volume, it’s no big deal if you don’t have a search engine to browse your own content. Apply a solid SEO approach and then help users find your content by segmenting well your offer and designing the user journey smartly. The relevant content will be super easy to find once the user is on your website, but most importantly, the content will be able to be found when the user is searching on Google and doesn’t know the existence of your brand yet.

I believe truly in the influence of Search Engine Optimization because of the opportunities it allows you to connect with consumers who are actively looking for a solution. By steering clear of some of these common mistakes, we can really see how an SEO methodology will amplify your content and the prominence of your brand in Google searches.