The thing no one tells you when you write or self-publish your first book: most of your success is contingent on how well you market it. Yeah, sure, you wrote a great book—but so have thousands and thousands of other people, and you’ve never heard of them either, much less anything they’ve written.
No, for better or worse, it’s your job to sell your first book by yourself. This means hustling, building interest around your book, and showing people the type of author you can be for them. The easiest way to do that is to apply proven SEO techniques.
And luckily, SEO—search engine optimization—is a proven system for gaining followers before (or alongside) your new book. When you rank high in Google for topics you want to be an authority for, new people find you every day without you doing anything. It takes work on the front end, but trust us, it’s worth it.
In this article, we’ll look at ten SEO techniques that can set you up for success with your first launch.
1. Make Sure Your Site Is Fast
There’s no shame in admitting that you’re at the mercy of Google when you optimize your website. They are the internet powerhouse, and you must play by their (or at least their algorithm’s) rules if you want to be successful.
One necessary component of SEO is making sure your website runs quickly. If load times are slow (or worse, non-responsive), Google will not rank you no matter how good your content is. Delete unnecessary things taking up a ton of bandwidth.
2. Link to Other Sites
As writers, we love to think we’re the authority on a topic. It can feel daunting or even stupid to point people reading your stuff to another author, blogger, or expert in your niche. But Google doesn’t think so.
It’s kind of like the ultimate power move—Google sees your committed to making your site valuable for other people. Yeah, they might leave your site, but by being a site that links to that site, that makes you more valuable.
There’s a fine line here. Obviously, you don’t want to become a portal for linking to other blogs. Your content should reign supreme. But, it doesn’t hurt (it actually helps) to spread the wealth.
3. Use Power Words
There are plenty of ways to attract attention to your site, but none more important than creating powerful headlines. Tools like Headline analyzer from CoSchedule will help you know if your headline is good, but there’s more to consider.
For example, how many power words are present in your title? When it comes to self-publishing, that’s one way to stand out for both books and blog articles. People want to know what they’re getting into before they give you any more time and attention.
Your title matters. Use words like truth, secret, and love. Be powerful.
4. Use Yoast SEO
If you are in the dark about Yoast SEO, you probably haven’t been in the blogging world long. Yoast is the best all-inclusive SEO WordPress plugin out there, and it’s free (though there is a premium option, too).
Yoast ensures that everything you post is set up to be found by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
5. How Long For SEO?
There is not a hotter topic related to SEO optimization tips and blogging than length of blog posts. It seems like the SEO gurus say one thing (short, short, short) but real authors say another (it’s as long as it needs to be).
The answer, in terms of SEO ranking and teaching Google to like your website so you grow, is probably somewhere in the middle. Yes, a shorter post is going to be read to the end. But if the content is good and you need 3,000 words to make it that way, they should all be in there.
Keep in mind that you’re trying to build SEO around your book. Anyone that’s buying it is surely signing up to read more than 3,000 words anyway.
6. Set Up Google Analytics
You’d be surprised how many professional bloggers, authors, and artists don’t have Google Analytics set up on their website. This is a shame because the best day to get Analytics set up was yesterday. The longer it’s on your site, the more valuable of a tool it becomes.
Basically, Google Analytics gives you insights into that game you’re playing with Google. They will actually tell you what you need to do to fix your site and rank higher. If you want the cheat codes to help your book rank higher, get this set up ASAP.
7. Build a Consistent Brand
Google’s SEO crawlers don’t have time to play games. They want to know what your site is and who you help. If you’re a writer trying to sell a book, you want Google to know exactly the niche topic you are writing about and trying to provide a solution for.
This is why your blog or book page should be considered and build as a larger component of your brand. It would behoove you to spend an afternoon looking at both long and short tail keywords that fit your niche so that you can craft content that will line people up to discover you and your work.
Seo Techniques, Wrapped Up
The SEO techniques you need to adopt for your blog all revolve around playing Google’s game. Like it or not, this is a proven way to sell books and to have new people find you and your work.
For more tips on how to make money online, check out the rest of our blog.