How to market yourself without spending a cent on paid advertising
Last month we wrote about what you can do to market yourself on a budget – little tips and tricks to save costs as you’re building your business.
This month we want to look at how you can double down on the pointers from that first article and do even more: in particular, how you can use content marketing to drive traffic to your website without spending a cent on advertising.
If you’ve yet to try content marketing on your site, go back to the post above and read about how we suggest you use freelancers to blog regularly (you can of course ignore this and blog yourself if you have the time).
Either way, anyone with a website who wants more visibility should sign up to Google Search Console, whether they’re actively marketing themselves or not.
Signing up to Google Search Console takes five minutes
Simply head over to Google Search Console and create an account.
Then, simply type in the URL of your website. For instance, www.gravityfunding.com
From there, you want to verify that you are indeed the site owner.
The two easiest ways to prove ownership are either to:
A) upload an HTML file to your site
B) Copy and paste an HTML code in your site’s homepage.
If you’re on Wordpress, option B is easier. Download the Yoast SEO plugin from the “Plugins” category, then click on the Yoast “SEO” icon in the left-hand toolbar, head to “Webmaster Tools” and paste the HTML code in the box provided. Hit “save changes” and leave the code there.
If you own the site but didn’t build it, email your developer. Tell him or her what you want to do and ask that they take care of the steps for you.
Once you’ve verified you site, Google will start crunching the numbers
Leave it a few days and upon your return to search.google.com, you’ll see how your site is performing: namely, are there keywords you’re showing up for?
If you’re blogging regularly, chances are good that you’ll be hitting the mark for one or two terms, whether that’s on page one of Google or page five.
Let’s say you are blogging. In fact, let’s imagine you’re ranking for a few terms that people commonly search for.
The next step is to capitalize on every article
Head over to Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest and paste the keywords in to the search box.
Ubersuggest will get to work. What it’s doing is looking for similar keywords that you can also appear in Google for.
The trick from here? Go back to the article you created and add the new words into the mix. You want them to be in a new section heading, a new subheading. Write an additional paragraph or two on the topic at hand.
What you’re doing is broadening your net; giving yourself the best chance to rank for the most number of keywords.
Remember: Google recognizes keywords most prominently when they’re included in a heading or subheading.
Also, avoid simply stuffing the page with favorable keywords. Google penalizes websites that do this. “Keyword stuffing,” as it’s known, is a no-no.
The golden rule of search engine marketing is that quality content rules. That’s also the topic of our next post.
