SEO Workshop for Artists by Shea Bailey

Shea Bailey from Yellow Umbrella Events, a wedding and event planning husband and wife team in Austin, TX, and Wedalytics, a new start up geared at analyzing wedding vendor website’s Google Analytics, delivered a stellar SEO workshop on how we can all improve our Google search rankings. This was the first of our semi monthly business building workshops at ART.WORK AUSTIN. Here’s what we learned!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Basically, it’s an acronym that describes how you can optimize your website for communicating with digital spiders crawling your website to figure out what questions your website can answer. Over 200 factors go into SEO and ultimately where your page shows up in the search results. It would take weeks or months to dive into every single aspect of SEO, which is why firms get paid quite a lot for good SEO work. We went over the basics of what we can all start doing today to improve our rankings.

Quality content

This was the clear winner when it comes to what you can do immediately to improve your search rankings.  Google wants to be able to answer any question quickly, clearly, and fully. If your content helps them answer a question, they will tell users to look at your site for the answer. You need to write a lot and break up chunks of images with more text. Text is king when it comes to talking with the Google search bots. Post frequency is not as important as post quality. Good websites still dominate rankings by posting as little as once every 6 months. However the posts will need to be that much more in depth and helpful.

Off Page SEO

Authority is very important. It’s a measure of how serious Google takes your page. One of the way Google decides authority is by seeing which other websites point to you for answers. It’s important to have other reputable websites in your industry sending their viewers to you. Reach out to the most reputable sites in your industry and see if you can do a feature article for them, promote all of your informational posts on social media, and just generally try to get as many good websites pointing to you as possible.

65% of all Google users click on one of the first three links. Only .9% of users go to the second page of results!

Mobile First

One of Google’s biggest pushes right now is creating a mobile index. The realist that most users are or will be viewing websites on mobile devices. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile.

On Page SEO

The most important factors to consider when making a post are the URL, title, image sizes, and amount of content

Technical SEO

Take a look at your Meta data for pages and images, page speed, and redirects.

WordPress > SS when it comes to SEO.

If you want to get serious about SEO in a competitive market you will need every possible advantage and there are a few things you can’t do with Square Space.

Not over optimizing –

It’s important to not get dinged by Google for OVER optimizing. Don’t try to trick the robots. Focus on creating quality content that helps the average customer answer questions quickly and clearly. Do NOT stuff keywords throughout your site. Google is smart and you don’t want to get on their bad side.

Here’s your SEO Workshop Tool Kit!

1. Google analytics – One of Shea’s major recommendations is to get Google Analytics installed on your website. It’s a tool that will allow you to monitor site traffic and check for errors.
2. Google Search Console – Info, tools, and analysis required to make and keep Google-friendly sites and apps
3. Ewwww images – This one is a WordPress plugin that allows you resize your images so you don’t waste user bandwidth and time with oversized images.
4. Page speed – Use this tool to identify ways to make your site faster and more mobile-friendly.

Thanks again to Shea Bailey for instructing the SEO Workshop

Our next workshop is covering legal information. We will dive into member’s contracts and see what we need in there to keep our selves safe and discuss what to do in the unfortunate event of a lawsuit.

If you’re looking for a place to get serious about growing your business and hang out with creatives all day send us an email at info@artworkaustin.com !