Making your side hustle successful involves a certain amount of hard work. It doesn’t matter what your side hustle is, you will need an effective SEO strategy. SEO can mean the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one.
First Steps
Your first steps in setting up your side hustle should always be creating a logo, website, email, and any other promotional materials you want to provide to potential customers. Make sure that all of your branding is consistent on everything. Choose your colors, font, logo, and images, and use them consistently on all your materials.
You may also want to set up a signature that goes out on all of your emails.
Develop Your Strategy
If you haven’t already developed an SEO strategy, then you need to do it now.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the first, most important steps in the SEO strategy. You can begin by looking at the keywords you want to target. You should also look at your competitors’ keywords.
Keyword research is part of what will focus your content, and other factors of your website. Consider the intent that searchers will have when they use search engines, and don’t forget to target long-tail keywords as well.
You should also look for keywords that can be turned into questions. Look for the most searched for questions that are relevant to your side hustle. When you have them, you can use them to create content that specifically answers that question.
Content Creation
The first thing you should do here is to think about the content you want for your site. Content isn’t just written text, but should also include images, graphics, videos, audio clips, and case studies. Not all forms of content will be relevant for your side hustle, or suitable for your intended audience, so think about what forms you’ll use, and how you’ll use them.
You should first create a content plan, detailing what keywords you want to target with your content, and how you want to do that. You should also make sure to use a tool like Grammarly to check your content for grammatical accuracy.
You should also periodically analyze your content’s performance using analytic tools.
On-Page SEO Practices
When you are publishing anything to your site, make sure to follow on-page SEO practices. Pay attention to your page titles, meta tags, headings and descriptions. Make sure that you add new content regularly, and update your older content as well. Make sure that every piece of information that is on your page is accurate and up to date.
Link Building
Link building can be an important part of getting your website on the first page of the search engine results. If other sites and blogs link to your site, it shows the search engine that you’re a trustworthy source of information.
Link building does take time, and it needs to be done in a beneficial way. Using link building practices that are considered ‘bad’ can result in your site being penalized. So instead of choosing a quick fix, take time, and develop a full link building strategy.
Check websites for broken links, and suggest your content to the webmasters instead. Check where your competitors’ links are, and if you have content that is better, offer it.
Technical SEO
The technical aspects of the website for your side hustle business are also important. Make sure that the user experience of your site is easy and seamless. Make sure that it’s optimized for mobile. Visit your site as a visitor would, navigate it, and if it needs any changes based on your experience, make them.