Why You Should Care About SEO & How To Do It

You may already know what SEO is, whether you’re actively using it for your content or have heard about it from other content creators, but knowing how to use it (and why it’s important) is key for taking your content to the next level. Here are some basics to know about SEO and how it can give you a leg-up in the future:

why you should care about SEO:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is an amazing way to increase organic traffic to your content on any search engine (Google, Pinterest, YouTube, etc). Although promoting your content on another platform can be helpful to get your current audience to check out your posts, SEO expands your audience to completely new people by pushing your content to the top of their search results.

SEO helps the search engine understand what your content is all about. The better the platform’s algorithm understands your content, the more it will push it in results to relevant searches. You want to make it as easy as possible for Google to know who would want to see your content, what it’s all about, and that you are a trustworthy source. SEO does all of this for you— it’s almost like free advertising.

SEO gives you a great competitive edge, especially if you have are working on growing your following, against other creators that may not be utilizing SEO. Someone with 1,000 followers and great SEO can sometimes rank much higher in YouTube search results than someone with 1,000,000 followers who isn’t using SEO.

It is the secret ingredient to long-lasting traffic and a growing audience!

so…How do you do it?

SEO consists of three key components: a keyword title, a keyword-filled description and keyword-filled tags. Here’s a breakdown of each one:

Titles

Titles are really important for your blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. because they have to be interesting enough to entice someone to click on your content and view it. However, it’s not just about having an intriguing title when doing SEO. You also have to think about key phrases that someone might search in relation to your topic and turn those phrases into a title. The closer your title can be to a phrase that someone might search, the better.

For example, let’s say you wrote a blog post about styling blazers. Brainstorm some keyword phrases that someone might type into search when looking for ideas to style a blazer.

Someone that would love your post might type into Google, “how to style a blazer,” or “ways to wear a blazer in the summer,” or “blazer outfit ideas.” Decide which keyword phrase would be highly searched, highly relevant to your post, and specific enough to compete with other similar posts and turn that into a title. A great title for this topic would be “5 Simple Ways to Style a Blazer In The Summer.” See this blog post for ideas on how to make your titles more clickable too. A great title is both searchable and clickable.

Descriptions

Your description comes next, and this gives your audience (and mostly Google) more detail on what your content is going to be about. Your main goal here, when it comes to SEO, is to fill your description with keywords similar to your title and relevant to your topic. Don’t be afraid to be repetitive here. Feel free to treat the description like you normally would— as a little preview of what your post is about, but they key to boost it in search is to do that using that searchable key phrase over and over.

In the blazer example, your description might say, “Sharing 5 ways to style a blazer for summer and links to a few of my favorite blazer outfits for summer. I love that blazers can be dressed up or dressed down, making blazers the perfect versatile staple item | Blazer ideas for summer, How to wear a blazer in the summer, Blazer outfits for warm climates, Casual ways to wear a blazer”

Notice how the word “blazer” was used 8 times, the word summer was used 3 times, and there are several variations on phrases someone might search to find this post. It’s a little repetitive for your audience, but most audiences won’t care, and this will boost your post a lot in search results!

Tags

Lastly, you’ll want to provide all of the relevant phrases you can think of in the tag box. These should, again, be phrases that you can imagine someone searching to find your content. For example, in your tag box, you might include, “blazer ideas for summer,” “summer blazer outfits,” “how to style a blazer,” etc. You’ll want to place the most relevant tags first (the order does matter), and try to avoid including irrelevant or unrelated tags. Although it may be tempting to include tags just to get the attention and traffic on your site, it will hurt you in the long run. If you add irrelevant tags to try to trick the algorithm, people might find your post but will quickly leave when it’s not what they were looking for— The search engine will notice this and start to rank your video lower, so make sure to stay away from clickbait tags that aren’t related.

That’s all on SEO for now! Hope you try this and find some great results!