A Real-Life SEO Plan

When I visited Lancaster a few weeks ago, I caught up with my client Jeanette from Joy Renewed - a nonprofit she founded to help adoptive families get on the same team and create a joyful home.

She does family coaching and workshops for adoptive families in and around Lancaster. So naturally, the next step after getting her website up was to get some traffic on it.

Jeanette asked me the question every local business should be asking:

"How can we start showing up in search results?"

If you've found yourself asking that same question, I want to share with you the plan I gave her.

First, I took a step back and researched what keywords people are already searching for.

Keyword research is so important because guessing will only get you so far. I would have assumed "adoption services Lancaster" was the first keyword to rank for, but actually some of the top ones were:

• adoption counseling

• adoption counselor

• adoption therapy

• adoption therapist

• adoption podcast

Finding keywords is just the first step. Next, you need to decide which ones you want to try to rank for and create a plan to get there.

There's some helpful data that goes into this decision, like:

• Search Volume: How many times people are searching for this keyword each month

• Cost Per Click: How much you can expect to pay each time someone clicks on an ad for this keyword

• Difficulty: How much competition you're gonna face

• Relevance: How relevant the keyword is to your actual product/service

Once we decided on which keywords to target we broke that down into two main strategies:

1. Build landing pages to target top keywords and locations. Like "Lancaster, PA adoption counselor" or "Adoption therapy in Lancaster, PA."

2. Write SEO blog posts for the rest. What questions is your target client searching already? Answer that question in a blog post. Some of the top searches for Jeanette's audience were "foster care adoption statistics", "how adoption works", and "why adoption is important."

Here's what all that actually looks like:

To recap, the first three steps to ranking in search results are:

1. Research your audience's top searches

2. Choose which ones you want to rank for

3. Split those up into landing pages or blog posts.

From there, you get to choose whether to go the organic route, relying on expert-level page-building and copywriting to push your pages to the top of search results on their own merit...

...or the advertising route, where a search engine pins your webpage to the top of search results and you pay them each time someone clicks on it.

There are plenty of pros and cons to each.

It's usually best to start with organic since it lays the foundation for everything else.

I recommended four things to kick off this client's organic SEO strategy:

1. Creating a Google My Business Profile: You know when you Google a business and see their photos, reviews, and hours? That's Google My Business. Setting up and optimizing this one of the best things you can do for local SEO.

2. Keyword-focused blog posts:  If we create website pages answering questions like "why adoption is important" or "foster care statistics," Google will better understand what the website is about and display our pages to people searching those questions.

3. Building Location pages and Service pages: Build pages like "adoption counselor Lancaster" or adoption therapy Pennsylvania" so they show up when people search those terms.

4. Build citations and backlinks: Getting other websites and  online business directories to link to her site.

Most business owners can do a lot of this themselves with a strategic plan and a few hours a week.

Or you can pay someone like me to manage your GMB and write those posts and pages for you.

Normally I wouldn't have started paid advertising yet, but as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, this client was eligible for the Google nonprofit ad grant and just needed some help applying.

If you know of any nonprofits who aren't taking advantage of this, pass it on! They may be eligible for up to $10k in free advertising.

For the rest of us, paid search advertising is as simple as this:

1. Choose the pages you want to drive traffic to

2. Give Google an ad budget and it will send search traffic to your page, charging you per click

3. Optimize the ad and the page each month to get this best results

Almost every small business I talk to is overwhelmed and confused by SEO.

So hopefully this inside look at my process makes it a little less mysterious for you 🙂