Be Found. Boost the SEO of your OfferingTree website.

Familiar with SEO? Skip ahead to the next paragraph. Not familiar? No worries, here’s what you need to know about Search Engine Optimization – aka SEO – to make the most of your OfferingTree website. SEO helps search engines like Google and Bing find your site and share it with the people who are most likely to be interested in what you offer. There are lots of technical details involving algorithms and web crawlers but we can ignore all of that for our purposes.

Keywords

If you have searched for something using Google, you already know a couple of things about keywords. If you teach a ballet fusion class located in St. Paul, Minnesota, including “ballet,” “dance,” and “St. Paul” on your home page, offering descriptions, and site metadata (more on this later) will help search engines learn about what you do so that they can direct people to your site. Think about what someone might type into a search engine if they are looking for the class or service you offer and then make sure those words appear in the text of your site as you describe what you do.

Top 3 ways to get started with SEO

After you have decided what search requests you want your website to show up for in Google and other search engines, do these 3 things to get a great start on improving your SEO.

1. Place a keyword or two in the main heading of your website. If you teach yoga and you want to show up for "Yoga in Bozeman Montana", you should put "yoga" in the main heading of your homepage on your website. You should also put Bozeman Montana somewhere important on your homepage as well. It doesn't have to be in the main headline but consider putting it in the tagline or another elevated part of your homepage. 
2. Place your keywords in the page title and page description of your website. You can edit this when editing your homepage.
3. Add your social media profiles to your website

Keep reading this article for more ways to improve your SEO.

Links

When you set up your OfferingTree, we recommended that you share your new site with family, friends, students and clients. That’s one way to let the people who already know you find you. Adding your OfferingTree website address to your Facebook page (personal or professional), LinkedIn, Instagram, and profiles on any professional associations that you belong to will increase your SEO which means that people will find you more easily.

Taking it up a level

Keywords and linking are the basics. If you have a physical location, you can set up a Google My Business account. Businesses without a physical location can also use this service but it is a little trickier. Learn more about Google My Business.

Behind the scenes

OfferingTree is always working on things like metadata and tags behind the scenes to improve your site’s SEO too. We want your teaching practice to grow too and that means making sure that current and potential clients can find you.

We wrote a blog article on this topic that you can check out here: SEO Basics for Small Businesses

Have more questions about SEO? Click on "help" within your OfferingTree dashboard to send us a help message.