A Brief Introduction to SEO for Creatives

SEO is often around a lot in the world of business and marketing. SEO editors. SEO analysts. SEO specialists. SEO strategy. The list goes on. But for many creatives who are just out of university. Or those who spend their time producing the best visuals, the most exciting article or churning out artwork at an design agencies. They can have lots of questions when it comes to world of SEO. What is SEO? Why is it important? Can SEO benefit my career? And most importantly why should creatives even care about SEO in the first place? So over the next 10 minutes or so, I aim to give you a little introduction to the powerful world of SEO and how to implement some core principles to help advance your creative career.

So, what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. With the main goal of getting a company to the number one spot of a search engine enquiry. It has been around for dozens of years and most search engines are constantly changing their algorithms for how they conduct a search and which results end up in the number spot. Whether this is what is the weather like this week? What are NFTs? Should I invest in Crypto? And so on. The search engines people use to ask this questions can be Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. but the main one most people talk about when it comes to SEO is Google.

Why is SEO important in business?

To go through every website page that google will scan during a typical google search would take an average individual over 110 years. How long does it take Google? Only a few seconds. Combine this with the fact that most people wouldn't go past page three of search engine results during a google search. Long before they implemented the never ending scrolling results and it's easy to predict that most people won't press the more results button more than three times during there next search either.

Why should creatives care about SEO?

Whether you are working on images for a clients blog. Writing an article as part of your businesses content marketing campaign. Or starting to build a website to display your work to potential customers. Knowing a few basic principles strategies of SEO and being able to understand the lingo or goals of others departments can help advance your career. When a client who works at a European tour operator ask for an article about the best travel destinations. You will have a better knowledge of how to sculpt that article. Or if your an illustrator who has decided to go freelance you will know how to get your artwork seen by more eyes leading to more opportunities. SEO shouldn't be a topic that creatives rolling their eyes at as it could turn out to become a great tool to help you achieving your career goals.

How can creatives harness SEO to advance their career?

As a London based freelance designer with plenty of experience in restaurants, hospitality, travel, tourism, finance, and entertainment brands. This post is going to focus on my ways to improve my SEO, however, the techniques are very simple and transferable to any company. Some people argue that the best person to improve SEO is the owner of the company. It is the business owner who knows the most about what service or product they sell and what the customers want from them. And this comes down to the simple choice of language. Without a doubt, learning SEO skills can rocket your career forwards wether through securing new clients through improving your own website's rankings to wowing clients when you understand there goals or spot areas you can help them improve.

Know your keywords

Focusing on your dream position, client, or customer. Then explore what skillset you have that can help you get closer to this dream goal. Once you have written down your skills focusing on how you can combine your dream job with that dream client. For example, if you're a marketing and branding designer who dreams of working in the theme park and experience industry shape keywords that would highlight this. Such as: Theme Park Designer. Experience Designer. Theme Experience Designer. Theme Park Branding. Thrill Ride Branding. Rollercoaster Advertising. Conceptual Theme Park Art Worker. And so on. But only use keywords of skills you can offer. Don't say printed theme park maps if you can't created printed map designs just with the goal of getting more eyes on your sight. Also, remember people search questions, sculpt your keywords to answer those questions.

Implement them on your site

Once you know the type of keywords you will want to use it is time to start implementing them on your website. This can be done though various methods. If we go back to the theme entertainment designer example. For them to start adding this keywords to there site they could build an about them section where they write the skills they offer such as "Experience design" or "Thrill ride branding development". They can create a blog section on their website where they write blog posts about topics that dream clients would find interesting such as "10 tips for building killer experience designer." Or blogs that show more detailed explorations of your projects like "An in depth look into my first theme park map design." Lastly, use these key words when writing meta tags, image descriptions, URLs, and headers. Remember good SEO is important but so is good B2B marketing and thoughtful content. Don't just create content to implement your keywords if it won't bring any value to the audience or client.

Don’t overuse these keywords

Search engines are clever, especially Google, and they will catch on if you are trying to play the system. If you dream of being the best designer in New York make every image name start with "best-designer-in-new-york-image-1." Or, cover your whole site in just keywords with content that lacks substance in an attempt to make you site score higher in search engines. It won’t work. Google will catch on and label your website as spam leading to a huge negative impact for your website. Meaning your site will be harder for future clients to find, losing those valuable freelance opportunities, and in this industry you need all the opportunities you can get.

Get a strong social media presence

Social media marketing is a whole topic in it's own that I plan to write future blog posts on. But a strong social media and SEO strategy can synergise perfectly with each, helping to increase follows, boosts engagement and drive you up the search engine result rankings.

This is something I am terrible at but I am aware of the importance of getting a strong social media following. If you start adding posts to your site and you have thousands of followers. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that your site is going to increase of traffic. With this increased traffic your site will become more popular. More people will search it and more people will visit it. Once again optimising your search engine results. Remember to follow the future clients, in my case, restaurants, food brands, and designers in the same field. Social media is something I will explore in one of my future posts.

Keep your site regularly updated

Remember the suggestion to write blogs to implement your SEO keywords? Well this can help hit this point in building a strong SEO strategy. Websites that are often updated will score higher in search engines. Google will know that the company is still active and push this to their audience. This is important with both your website and your social media account, especially if they are linked. If there isn't any activity then how will google know if the business is still in operation? So, it will just Not only will you move down the Google ranks but its clients might feel the same when they visit your page. Daily updates are always best but weekly is also fine. Just don’t leave it months without putting something on your site.

Increase site traffic through links

Along with a strong social media strategy and fresh content. Having a lot of site traffic is going to drive you up to that number one spot of any search engine. Which is one of the main goals of a strong SEO strategy. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site outside of search engines is through links from other websites. Whether this is sharing your blogs from your website on social media channels. Or paying for affiliate advertising with companies that your audience are liking to already be browsing.

It is also highly important to have internal links on your own website, taking the view from one blog to another or a product page back to the home page. The more time people spend on the website, the more they move around your pages, the more likely this will increase your ranking on google. However, like keywords too many links can have the opposite result. If the search engine thinks you are spamming links to keep users on the sight without providing much substance it will catch on. Be patience, take your time to follow a strong length SEO strategy and the results will follow.

Do not cheat the system

This is the last point I am going to discuss and it is one that I highly recommend. Don't try to cheat the system. If an SEO expert tells you that you can get your new website to number one spot in a week and that's not using pay per click advertising. Chances are he is going to cheat the system. With can work in the short term providing you with outstanding results. However, the long-term implications can be terrible. Leaving your website almost black listed and rarely appearing in search results. While others might try to cheat the system but due to constant changes to search engine systems and algorithms what would of caused a company to sky rocket to first position last year might not bump you up at all this year. The best option is to give your strategy time and adjust every quarter if you don't see any results.

...

Enjoyed what you read? Check out more articles on marketing, branding and design at JamesNealeCreative.com