Happy Monday! I hope you had a lovely short week last week and a great weekend! I enjoyed experiencing Eid in a different city from Nairobi it was really interesting to see a different kind of celebration.

So today I wanted to talk about SEO because I am working on an SEO project for a client. SEO always sounds so big and scary and yeah sometimes it can be this elusive, black hole but getting started is actually very simple. I wanted to share some really important and rewarding but simple things that you can do yourself to get started with SEO before you reach out to the technical SEO experts and pay the big bucks.

So first of all I have assumed that we all know what SEO is - but just in case we all don’t know:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is an area in marketing where we employ tactics that will help our websites and businesses rank at the top of Google’s search engine result page when a user searches for specific words we call ‘keywords’. So for example, if I have a toothache and I want to find a dentist - I will search for ‘dentist in my area’ and the results that come up on Google first will be the ones I will look at. As a dentist, you want to be in the top searches so that I, the user can see your dentistry and potentially take up your services.

Alright, now that we got that out of the way, here are some simple tactics you can employ that will automatically put you on the map - literally

Have a complete and verified GMB - Google My Business profile: The search results of places that come up that show, location, reviews, operation times, etc that’s the GMB profile and you want to have yours complete and Google verified so that Google can show your business easily to searchers. Unverified profiles and incomplete ones never make it to the top of the search page.

Still on the GMB profile:

• Make sure that under the primary category, which is where you define the main product or service your business gives, to include your most important keyword you want people to find you for. i.e. a dentist will put ‘dentist’ as the primary category. A bakery will put ‘bakery’.
• Additional categories - there is a section to add ‘additional categories’ - don’t leave this blank - add other keywords that will help widen your result potential. What I mean is, you want people to find you even when they use similar words and not the exact word that you have in your primary category. i.e. a bakery can have ‘cakes’ or patisserie shops as additional categories.
• Reviews. When I am in a new town, I highly depend on reviews for places to tell me if a place is worth visiting. Reviews are important not just to potential customers but to Google too- a high average rating will help you rank highly because Google wants to offer its customers the utmost value. Getting Google reviews - especially positive ones is not easy but it’s not impossible - make it a daily task in your business to get Google reviews from your customers who have just bought or used your services.

Keywords: I have talked about keywords on your GMB but the first thing really is to identify your keywords. For the examples I have given, it’s very straightforward, but in reality, for some businesses, it takes some time and effort to identify what keywords are the most important for your business and rank them in terms of priority - this is especially for those with a wide variety of services or a complex product or service. P.S What makes it a bit challenging is also coming up with searchable words - it’s one thing to say you offer financial services - but you know your audience will not be googling financial services near me 😆 so it’s important to break it down, and rank your services in order of priority to you.

Now your website: If you have one, please please go through it and make sure your website is mobile optimized - meaning if someone is on their phone and they go to your website, they will have a great experience navigating your website as they would if they were on a desktop. Work with your developer to ensure the following:

1. Loading speed - The website needs to load quickly and should not have heavy files that slow it down
2. There are no broken links, 404 errors, or any errors for that matter
3. You have clear and concise headlines and meta descriptions for each page so that crawlers can find you easily
4. Your images and videos have alt text
5. And your keywords feature in your headlines and descriptions that way google can easily associate your website with a search request.

Bonus tip: If you have the capacity to have a blog - please do so and write about the industry you are in making sure that your articles as SEO optimized - your content creator can do this but if you don’t have one - let me know and i can do a piece on SEO optimized content - it’s a whole thing as you can imagine!
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Anyway, I hope this helps you get started with SEO and if you have any questions, or thoughts hit the reply button, and let’s have a conversation!
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Adios!

My favorite things this week

• I finally got an instant pot - and I don’t know how I have lived this long without one. Hot Point has a sale until May and I love me a sale
• I got my Wilson yoga mat out of storage and man that mat is so comfortable- highly recommend if you need something softer for yoga or exercise
• Song: Atoti Watendawili​

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P.S: Great satisfaction comes from sharing with others

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