I’ve been neglecting my blogs and websites for several years – I used to rank on the first page of Google for a bunch of things, but now I’m invisible on the 5th page of search results… so I’m spending this month in Saigon eating Vietnamese food and writing blog content to boost SEO.
I’m not an expert, and like I said I’ve been doing TONS of things wrong, but this is the strategy I’m using and it’ll probably work well.
1. Research keywords my target audience is using; it’s helpful to understand which stage your audience is in and what they’re looking for. Example: most authors aren’t looking for book design or publishing resources, they’re still looking for writing tips and prompts (because most writers never actually FINISH a book).
2. Google the keywords and see what sites show up. See if you can partner with them, or at least leave a comment. Find sites that allow guests posts and write a relevant article with an anchor text link back to the site you want to rank for (I plan to build 10 mega-long guides and resources on the main problems and challenges authors need to publish successfully).
3. I’ll also increase general SEO by adding featured images, youtube videos and infographics – to encourage sharing and make my site look better; also make sure to use alt text for the images and name them with keywords too.
This strategy can totally work for fiction: for example it wasn’t hard to get my “best YA mermaid books for teens” post to rank on the first page of Google. I try to do that for every book I publish.