SEO for Authors: 6-Step Guide to Page One in 2024
Once upon a lifetime, in the throes of my days leading a marketing agency, I had a rather bullish client come at me demanding I explain the “magic beans” of the SEO work they’d engaged us for. They were upset that they didn’t understand the root of the success we were seeing together, and they were fairly adamant there had to be some kind of secret sauce. Something they could quickly bottle and recreate on their own. I walked this client through the many tools we were using to track success, several strategy documents that supported our content calendar rollout, and the backend of their own website, where we’d implemented tons of on-page site health fixes.
Again, they demanded to see the magic beans.
Now, I’m no farmer, but I can tell you with the utmost certainty: There are neither beans nor magic to SEO. My team and I spent hours showing this client the science behind SEO because we believed in sharing knowledge. We never hid what we were doing. We wanted our clients to be as excited as we were about the power of SEO.
No secrets. Just sauce.
In the years since that experience, I regularly found myself telling clients, colleagues, and anyone who so much as mentioned marketing around me:
“There are no magic beans to SEO.”
Even now, with my agency days behind me, I still love helping people demystify those three little letters. I’m happiest helping my writing community. The entire reason I pursued a career in marketing over a decade ago was because I struggled to figure out how to market myself as an author. Flash forward 10+ years, and I’m keen to share what I’ve learned with the community I love.
So I’ve created this step-by-step guide to SEO for authors. These best practices are updated for 2024 and can be applied to any genre of writing. Whether you’re a witchy queen spinning up a romantasy trilogy or an empowered memoir writer ready to break readers’ hearts, this SEO guide will help you organically market your book.
THE BASICS OF SEO
SEO takes time and effort, and as you begin this journey, you may find yourself disappointed that it isn’t “working” right away. Just like writing a book, getting to Page One takes time. Getting indexed by search engines takes time. The very first step in mastering SEO is simply to understand the basics of how SEO works, which is why I’m beginning this guide with a series of SEO FAQs.
Even if you’re somewhat SEO savvy, I encourage you to not skip over this section. Why? Because SEO is not a stagnant science. It evolves with each algorithm change, and the best practices of today are not the same as those of 10 years ago.
What is SEO?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, SEO is how you make your website visible to search engines and the people using them. When implemented correctly and with best practices in mind, SEO allows your target audience of readers to find you organically.
What’s a Search Engine?
A search engine is an online software that allows users to quickly find what they’re looking for across the web. There are tons of search engines, but the major ones most marketers are optimizing for are Google, Bing, and Yahoo, with Google being the most popular.
This guide will be tailored for Google optimization, but most of these best practices are still applicable regardless of which engine you’re trying to get in front of.
Why Should I Care About SEO?
I got this question a lot in my early days of advocating for SEO. The best way to demonstrate the value of SEO is to put yourself in your own shoes, just for a moment. If you’re like me, when you’re looking for something, you go to Google. You type in something like “worldbuilding tools” because, again, if you’re like me, you love worldbuilding.
You hit “enter” and, voila!
WHOA! Nearly 10 million results?! How the heck are you supposed to know which one’s right for you?
Well, fortunately, Google does the legwork for you. It looks at anyone competing for the keyword “worldbuilding tools” and ranks the most relevant results on the first page. It’s done such a great job that less than 10% of Google users are willing to go to the second page!
How Long Will It Take to Get to Page One?
I wish I could answer this one with a straightforward “two weeks, tops” kind of response. Really, I do. Alas, SEO takes time, and your success will vary based on the difficulty of the keywords you’re going after, how competitive your market is, how many backlinks you earn, the domain authority of your website, and all sorts of things completely out of my control.
What I can tell you, with the utmost confidence, is that SEO works. If you build it (well), they will come (and stay). The reason companies invest so heavily in SEO, despite it not returning on investment overnight, is because when SEO is done correctly, it creates a stable, ongoing stream of qualified traffic. In other words, if you optimize your content so it reaches the right people at the right time, it will drive traffic without you ever having to invest another dime into it.
Getting to Page One is hard. It is doable, though. Competitive keywords with higher difficulty and greater numbers of domains competing for positions take longer to rank for, while less competitive keywords tend to gain rank and traction for domains more quickly.
If you’re sitting there scowling at these words, grumbling “Dang it, Fitz. Just give me a ballpark,” then I can give you the same back-of-napkin numbers I’ve given clients in the past. These estimates are for individual, optimized blog posts and hinge on the rollout/distribution strategy (newsletters, social, links, etc.) being airtight.
Brand-New Sites
These are sites that are just starting out, have zero to a few backlinks, and single-digit domain authority.
Estimate about 1 year for competitive keywords and about 6 months for non-competitive keywords.
Established Sites
These are sites with low spam scores, dozens of backlinks, and decent domain authority.
Estimate about 6 months for competitive keywords, possibly longer. About 3 months for non-competitive keywords.
How Do Search Engines Rank Websites?
Search engines crawl, index, and rank every domain they can access. Because each crawler’s behavior is unique and quite technical, and I’d like to keep this guide actionable for authors working on their SEO, I’m going to focus only on the factors Google ranks. I will likely get into the guts of the technical SEO sauce in future articles and update this post with links as they’re available.
Of the hundreds of factors Google considers when evaluating your site’s SEO, these are the top three. Each is VITAL to your SEO success and will get its own section further on in this guide.
Quality Content
Once upon a time, you could get to Page One of Google by stuffing keywords into every possible crevice of your website. Literally, stuffing. Alt text. Heading. Captions. Body. Title. EVERYWHERE!!
Guys, I played this SEO game. It sucked. It was 2011. I was a content manager at an agency in LA. I got to my desk, and my boss was just groooooaning with his boss because half of our sites (the neglected half) got their traffic gutted overnight. Fortunately, some of us had been secretly rolling out a quality content initiative on a few of the bigger sites, and it EXPLODED our traffic! There have been so many algorithm changes since then, but quality content remains at the core of any good SEO strategy.
The saying “content is king” comes from marketers who survived the Panda Algo rollout with scars and teeth. Heed our stories. Apply our lessons.
Quality content is more than just pretty words, though. It’s making sure your pretty words are relevant and optimized around a relevant set of keywords. When gauging the quality of your content, Google focuses on E-E-A-T signals: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Technical Health
In order for Google and other search engines to access your site, its technical SEO must be healthy. You can post the shiniest, most gloriously optimized blog ever and it will NEVER see the light of organic day if search engines can’t access it. Even if a search engine’s crawlers can access your post, you need to make sure they can read it the way you intend it to be read.
Fortunately, technical SEO for authors is a lighter lift than it is for businesses and services. This is because, as an author, your website is likely straightforward and requires fewer sitewide updates. Put simply: if you build it correctly right out of the gate and work through a few simple checkpoints, you should be able to go into “maintenance mode” going forward.
I encourage authors to utilize a service like WordPress or Squarespace that comes out-of-box ready for you. They are SEO-friendly website builders that require no coding expertise. Additionally, they have template libraries, guides, and plenty of community boards to help you through any issues you might encounter.
Personally, I’ve built on Squarespace and encourage you to do the same. Why? Because I’ve built websites from scratch and used just about every CMS out there, and this platform is the easiest for a website that’s more-or-less static. It also lets me manage my email newsletter, which is a fun little marketing tactic we’ll unpack in a later post.
Oh, but on the subject of newsletters, please sign up for mine! I’m not the spammy type and promise to only fill your inbox with relevant marketing goodness.
Links (Internal & Inbound)
An internal link takes readers (and search engines) deeper into your site. When used thoughtfully, internal links can create topic clusters, which is valuable to your larger SEO strategy and overall user experience.
In contrast, inbound links take readers (and search engines) from other parts of the web into your site. Inbound links are also referred to as backlinks, and they are incredibly powerful. It can be very difficult to cultivate good backlinks, but they lend a lot of credibility to your domain authority and can help you quickly climb through the SEO ranks.
While there are ways to pay for backlinks, this post will focus on the organic approach to backlink building and provide tips on how to secure good ones by leveraging your writing network.
STEP ONE: GETTING STARTED
Now that we’ve unpacked the basics of SEO for authors, it’s time to move on to the step-by-step guide. Remember, you don’t have to do all of these steps at once, but you should do them in order.
Before you dive in, take a moment to make sure you’ve bookmarked this guide. That way can refer to it as you progress through your own SEO journey!
Securing a Domain
First things first. You need a website to play SEO.
As an author, aspiring or published, you should have a website. An author’s website allows their readers, fellow authors, and other members of the publishing industry to easily find you. Your website should be easy to find, and if you have the opportunity to claim your name as a domain (as I did) then seize it!
Why? Because you are building your brand. My brand is Fitz Cyr, not Acrobat Who Makes Words And Knows Marketing Things. When people want to find me, Fitz Cyr, they Google “Fitz Cyr” - and there I am. I own that domain and I control the brand I put forward on it. For this one fundamental, when choosing your domain, lean into credibility over creativity. It will help with SEO in the long run, too.
Building a Website
Once you have a domain, you need a place to put it. As mentioned above, I prefer Squarespace for several reasons. It’s SEO-friendly, secure, and easy to use, and it provides several marketing tools I rely on to grow my brand, including call-to-action forms and email newsletters. WordPress is a fine alternative if you’re DIYing your site.
Engaging a designer to build your website can be VERY expensive. Even a simple site can cost thousands of dollars to get live, and depending on how you engage a developer and how that developer chooses to build your site, you may find yourself stuck in continuing to work with them for simple things like updating a page.
Sites like Fiverr and Upwork offer good freelance solutions for building a website. Just make sure that you can actually access and dynamically use the finished product!
Organizing Your Content
Author sites should be straightforward. They don’t need bells and whistles. They need to be a static space for you to present your brand, link to your books, encourage newsletter signups, showcase reviews and upcoming events you’ll be at, and host your blog.
My site, as of writing this, consists of an about page, a blog, an FAQ, and links to my Instagram and Goodreads. Reviews are featured on my homepage. Things are simple and easy to find. That’s for the benefit of visitors as well as search engines. Google looks at my sitemap and knows exactly where everything is.
You don’t have to be a mirror of this format, but you’re welcome to use it. Don’t overthink things. Look at other author websites. Write down the parts you like. This is your sandbox. You can do what you want. Just make sure people don’t get lost in it.
Starting a Blog
Blogs are where SEO war is waged. You can’t stuff insights and hot takes into your About Me page. I mean, you can, but should you?
A blog is the modern-day equivalent of “from the desk of” authority. It’s your soapbox. You stand upon it and look out at the world, clear your throat, and say… what, exactly? What could your audience possibly want to hear? And how do you overlap that with what Google wants to see?
I always encourage writers to begin with an origin story. This is the story of how you got to where you are today. This is not SEO content, but it is valuable in building your brand and helping your audience feel more connected to you. Here’s my origin story (and a bit of drama).
I’ll do a follow-up post one of these days about the ins and outs of branding, but for today, we’re going to keep our focus on SEO.
This post? The one you’re reading, right here and right now? It’s part of my SEO strategy. I’m optimizing for the primary keyword of “SEO for Authors” and a few secondary keywords throughout.
Here’s a snapshot of some keyword research I did using an SEO tool called Moz, which gave me confidence this is a good keyword for me:
It’s a high-volume, low-difficulty keyword. It’s a subject I know TONS about. It aligns with my personal brand as an author and a marketer. You’ll never see me optimize a post for “skydiving survival guide” because I, frankly, am not at all qualified to write that.
Your blog should reflect the things you are passionate about, topics you are qualified to speak on, and subjects relevant to people who will visit your site.
Start with your origin story. From there, start thinking about what you care about. What’s the overlap between you and your readers? Once you have that, you can begin your keyword research, which is essential to fleshing out a content calendar for your blog.
STEP TWO: TECHNICAL SEO
Technical health is one of the MAJOR things search engines consider when deciding how to rank your site. The good news is that technical SEO is entirely within your control. The bad news is that technical SEO can be somewhat tricky. I ended up teaching myself how to code by breaking tons of websites.
Fortunately, if you go the route of Squarespace or WordPress, most of your technical SEO work will be ready and tidy right out of the box.
Implementing SSL
An SSL is a layer of protection between a server and a browser. When an SSL is invalid or out-of-date, a user who tries to visit your website will get a big “this site is unsafe” error that encourages them to not continue.
Search engines consider SSL when awarding rankings because a bad SSL indicates a site is unsafe, and visitors are more at risk of being hacked or infected with malicious bugs.
If you’re not building on a ready-made CMS like Squarespace or WordPress, getting your SSL in place takes a few steps. Your best bet is to Google “website-builder-name SSL implementation” and follow a guide from there.
Optimizing Page Speed
No one wants to wait ages for a blog to load. Neither does Google. In fact, 1 in 4 users will abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load. Most of the top-performing pieces of content featured on Page One load in under 2 seconds!
So, how do you make your site load faster? Simple! Keep it simple!
Don’t bloat your website with code like chatbots or auto-play animations. Messy and unnecessary code can seriously slow your site down.
Compress ALL of your images. Wherever you’re getting the images to support your homepage, blog, etc. - you need to downsize them. Not in scale, but in file size. There are tons of ways to compress an image without quality loss. Personally, I use the way my favorite boss (the groaning one) taught me. Open a picture in Paint. Hit save. Close. That’s it. That’s the trick.
Go easy on the plugins. In addition to slowing your site down, plugins rely on 3rd party maintenance, which can sometimes be unreliable. In addition to slowing your site down, dated plugins no longer current with security best practices can make your site vulnerable to hackers.
Creating a Sitemap
A sitemap is NOT a user-facing structure. It’s specifically built and updated for search engines. Not only does it give you the opportunity to tell Google where everything is on your domain, but it also allows you to tell Google where to NOT look!
For example, my sitemap showcases all of my primary navigation pages and all of my blog posts. I’ve instructed my sitemap to IGNORE - aka “noindex” - my blog tags, blog categories, and a few other non-essential things. Here’s a guide on how to hide blog tags and categories from search engines!
As a general rule of thumb, you should noindex any page of your website that doesn’t add meaningful value. Categories and tags are nice for a user experience, and users can still see and access them. My noindex simply keeps them out of sight from Google, that way the search engine ONLY sees the most valuable parts of my domain.
If you’re using an out-of-box ready-to-go CMS like SquaresSpace or WordPress, your sitemap will be built and updated automatically. If you’re from-scratching a website, you’ll want to search for a guide on how to make sure your builder generates a dynamic sitemap.
Most sitemap URLS, by default and best practice, can be found in the same place. If you’re not sure whether or not you already have one, try searching for at “root-domain.com/sitemap.xml” - replacing “root-domain” with your website.
Once you have a sitemap that accurately reflects your domain, you’ll want to submit it to Google Search Console. We’ll get into the specifics on how to do that in Step Six: Housekeeping.
Making Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
As of March 2024, mobile devices contribute to over 60% of all website traffic. More than half the people accessing the internet are doing so through their mobile devices… So, yeah, it’s no wonder Google and other search engines penalize websites for not being mobile-friendly!
Fortunately, if you’re using any of the out-of-the-box-friendly website builders, they’re typically handling the mobile side of things for you. You’ll still want to do a preview periodically to make sure nothing’s wonky, but the hard coding work is done for you.
If you’re from-scratching a website yourself or working with a developer to make your website happen, MAKE SURE to test it on mobile! Google offers a free mobile usability testing tool. You will need a Search Console to use this tool. More on Search Console in Step Seven: Housekeeping.
STEP THREE: KEYWORDS & CONTENT CALENDARS
This is where quality content meets qualitative research. You can’t simply point at a topic and declare “people are searching for this, therefore, I will write it” and call that SEO. It’s not. It’s like playing pin the tail on the donkey at the edge of a pier, doomed to result in a flop.
I’m going to try to summarize a very complicated science into a few actionable steps. Before I do that, though, I’m going to ask:
Do you want to do this part?
Keyword research and building content calendars can be incredibly nuanced, and many of the best tools to do the research have query caps or monthly costs. You can very easily engage a one-time consultant to do this one vital step for you. Plenty of consultants on Fiverr specialize in this. Heck, you can even engage someone to build you an SEO-structured outline for the blog you’ll need to write.
If you don’t want to learn a complicated new party trick, and all you want to do is write the blog content and know you’re on the right track, consider engaging a specialist.
A Quick (Shameless) Plug
I’m currently available for one-time marketing projects and consulting with authors at every stage of their writing careers.
Want to get your brand dialed in before your debut?
Do you have a book coming out soon and are unsure whether your SEO is in fighting shape?
Are you scratching your head over what the heck you’re supposed to do with social media these days?
Then let’s chat! Fill out the form below, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Even if I’m not a good fit for the problem you’re trying to solve, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.
If you want to try your hand at marketing strategy, or you’re on the fence and want to see what you’re in for, then read on!
Keyword Research
Which keywords do you want to get to Page One for? How much search volume do they have? Who’s leading the charge, and how competitive will you need to be to beat them?
Keyword research helps you answer all these questions and gives you a pillar to build the rest of your strategy around. Remember when I said you need to find the overlap between you and your readers? Well, this is where that really shows up.
If you’re new to SEO, I challenge you to try this simple exercise. Try to get at least three for each. I’ve included my responses inline, for example:
Write down the things you love.
Writing, acrobatics, building community.
Write down the things you know a lot about.
Marketing, growing a business, poison.
Write down the things you write about.
Disaster gays, found family, sci-fi/fantasy.
Write down the things you think your target readers love.
Happy endings, sarcastic dialogue, authenticity.
Write down the things you think keep your readers up at night.
A good cliffhanger, anxiety, wiki wormholes.
Write down the things you wish someone told you about writing before you got this far.
No one is going to hold your hand and you are going to have to be a marketing powerhouse; the world of traditional publishing is slightly broken; you will not be prepared for your first bad review.
Can you see where my responses overlapped to make this post?
My deep knowledge of marketing makes me an excellent fit to write about this topic, which overlaps with my wish that someone had shared their marketing knowledge with me at the start of my publishing journey. I connect two threads in this exercise - any two threads - and I have the foundation of a theme.
Once you have about a dozen themes, it’s time to start looking at keywords. For that, you’ll need a tool.
I rely on Moz and Ahrefs for most of my SEO work. Moz has a free plan, which is decent, but I would suggest you sign up for the free trial of their Pro plan and knock out your keyword research in the 30-day window.
Theoretically, 30 days is plenty of time to get an entire year of content calendaring pinned down. Ahrefs is a much more sophisticated tool and much spendier. For what you need to accomplish, Moz should suffice. You can also sign up for a free Google Adwords account and use that to sift through keywords. Not my favorite experience, but it’s free and straight from Google.
What Makes a “Good” Keyword?
Relevance! Above all, relevance!!!
As you get into the tools listed above, you’ll notice all sorts of other metrics like volume, difficulty, and click-through rates - BUT RELEVANCE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR!
Here’s what I mean by that. Say you’re an author who wrote a memoir about your nightmarish experience working at Walmart. You want to share a snippet of your time there in a blog post. Rather than optimize for “Walmart” - a keyword with MILLIONS of monthly searches - you’re better off optimizing for “walmart horror stories” and its ~500 monthly searches.
Why? For starters, “Walmart” is an absurdly difficult keyword in addition to being a branded keyword. Branded keywords are considered right-to-own keywords for the brand they’re associated with.
Beyond the difficulty factor, imagine who is Googling “Walmart” and why they’re doing it. They’re looking to shop. The search intent is to find “Walmart” and nothing more.
In contrast, if someone is searching for “walmart horror stories” they’re looking for exactly what you’re selling! They see your title, something like “3 Walmart Horror Stories from Someone Who Barely Made It Out Alive” and click through. They read your blog, see you have an entire memoir available, and buy it.
While 500 is less than 5,000,000, you are going to have much better luck ranking on and converting with qualified, relevant keywords.
What is “converting” in this context? Converting means someone who organically came to your site completed a desired action, whether that’s signing up for your newsletter, purchasing a book, or some other trackable metric.
Beyond relevance, when you’re just building up your site’s credibility, you’ll want to aim for lower-difficulty keywords. You can aim high, yes, but it is an uphill battle. You’re much better off getting a foothold on a lower-difficulty keyword and using that to climb higher, building your site’s authority, and putting you in a position to compete with the higher-difficulty keywords in the future.
Tools like Moz allow you to build a “keyword list” to keep track of everything you want to target. Search volumes change periodically, too, so having a list like this can be valuable for tracking how traffic opportunity changes over time.
Building a Content Calendar
Once you have a good list of relevant keywords, it’s time to build a content calendar. This is where strategy starts to take shape into something familiar. We’re writers, after all. We want to write.
First things first: decide how often you’ll be posting. Monthly is a good minimum to strive for. That might not feel like a lot, but it’s important to be realistic with your time and not over-extend yourself. As I’ve mentioned, quality content is the game we’re playing here. Not quantity. Personally, I’m striving for 1/mo, and that feels sustainable right now.
Search engines want to see that you’re staying active. Sites that appear to be “dead” due to long stretches without any activity tend to rank lower and be overtaken by newer, more relevant sites publishing fresh content.
You don’t have to (nor should you) publish daily. Whether you can publish every two weeks or every two months, just stick with it. The more you build up the library of content on your site, the more internal and external link opportunities you’ll have, and the more Google will see you as a valuable trove of information!
Each blog post written for SEO should be 1,500 to 2,000 words in length. Longer is fine if the subject needs more words to cover it. This post tapped out at just over 7,000 words, which is A LOT. That said, I’m trying to make this a one-stop ultimate SEO for authors guide that does more than just explain what SEO is. This is a cornerstone piece of content for me, and, yes, my fingers are tired at this point.
Diversifying Your Content
You’ll never see me do back-to-back marketing-focused blogs. Not because I don’t have more in my back pocket, but because I like to diversify my content. I want to have marketing content, worldbuilding content, publishing lessons, and a few non-SEO personal posts sprinkled into my posting feed, because that’s me. That’s my brand.
If you are all-in on dragons. Like, if it’s dragons or nothing for you, and you’ve found enough keyword diversity to do an entire year of SEO dragon content, by all means, go for it! Just remember, a blog is part of your brand. It’s where you get to be more personal and show readers who you are behind the stories you tell.
I’m choosing to leave some SEO potential on the sidelines every time I post something that doesn’t neatly fit in with my keyword strategy. Personally, I don’t care. There’s no wrong. It’s your blog, and you can optimize it as much or as little as you want.
STEP FOUR: ON-PAGE SEO
In SEO, there are things you can control and things you can’t. On-page SEO is anything you can control because it exists on your site, such as meta descriptions, URL structure, page speed, and a bunch of other things we’ll unpack below. Off-page SEO is anything that exists outside of your domain, such as link building, social media, and guest posts. We’ll look at off-page SEO more in the next section.
Once you’ve written helpful, quality content that matches the E-E-A-T formula, it’s time to dress it up for search engines. Here’s how you do that:
Structure Your Content With Headings Subheadings
H stands for “Heading” in SEO. Headings allow users and search engines to see how you’ve structured your content and quickly see what’s important.
Your H1 should always be your title. H1s are the most important heading on the page, and there should only be one of them.
Your H2s should be subheadings that support your H1’s point. You can have as many H2s as you need.
H3s should support your H2s. H4s should support your H3s. If you’re unhappy with how your headings look aesthetically, you should fiddle with the design settings in your website builder. You should not simply get rid of the H3 because it’s ugly.
Place Target Keywords
Whatever your primary keyword is, make sure it’s included in your title/H1, meta description, within your first paragraph, and in at least one H2. Keep in mind that the ideal title length is ~50 characters (not words).
Optimize Your Meta Description
A meta description provides a summary of the page to search engines, telling both Google and users what your content is about. Meta descriptions should always include your primary keyword, ideally in the first sentence. They should be no more than 150 characters (not words) in length.
Optimize Your URL
Your URL should look clean and contain your primary keyword. What I mean by that is it should go something like: root-domain.com/blog/primary-keyword
It should not look like: root-domain.com/blog/month/day/year/primary-keyword
The closer you get your primary keyword to the root domain, the better search engines will understand it, and the more likely you are to rank for that keyword.
By default, most website builders give you the long, dirty URL example above. If that’s the case, you should go into your blog settings and update the default of your URL structure. If you’re on Squarespace, here’s a guide. If you’re building your site elsewhere, simply Google “website-builder-name change default URL structure for blogs”
Include Internal & External Links Where Appropriate
Do you have a handy post existing already on your site that ties neatly into the post you’re about to publish? Include an internal link to it!
Did you cite a source or another creator in the post you’re about to publish? Make sure you include links to them as well! They might just link back to you or give you a shout-out on social (both off-page SEO tactics, which we’ll get into momentarily).
Wherever you’re linking to, make sure you have your links open in a new tab/window. You don’t want your links to take people away from your post. Ideally, they click the link, read what they need to, and close it, returning them to your blog post.
The way you set up opening a link in a new tab varies depending on your CMS. If unsure or it isn’t immediately clear when you’re linking, just Google “website-builder-name insert links to open in new tab” and that should get you what you need.
Optimize Your Images
Using either your own photos or a royalty-free photo from sites like Unsplash or Pexels, find a photo that goes nicely with the words you’ve drafted. Save that photo as “primary-keyword” with a hyphen. Then, make sure you compress its file size so as not to slow down your website’s load time.
Once the image is on your site, you’ll want to make sure you include the primary keyword in your alt text. Alt text tells search engines what the photo is of and how it relates to the content it’s supporting. When including alt text, use “primary keyword” with no hyphen.
STEP FIVE: HOUSEKEEPING
Remember how, in the last step, I told you there were things you could control and things you couldn’t? Well, this is the section we do our darndest to control the things we don’t have full control over.
Additionally, this section will explore how to effectively measure the success of your SEO strategy. It is VITAL to track your domain’s performance over time to see how your SEO efforts are paying off, where your traffic comes from, which keywords you’re ranking for, and how many conversions (signups, book sales, etc.) all that work you’re putting in translates to!
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Before we get into off-page SEO, we need to talk about Google Search Console. This marketing essential is free, allows you to track your website’s performance over time, tells you when pages are broken, alerts you to new links, and gives you the space to tell Google how (and when) to read your content.
Search Console gives you enhanced visibility into everything that’s going on behind the SEO scenes. Rather than walk you through each of them, I’m going to direct you to one of the many amazing resources that already exist on this subject. It’s just too sprawling and not actionable enough to include in this post!
The big ones I want to touch on in this post are:
Submitting Your Sitemap
Remember that sitemap we made back in Step Two? Well, its time has come!
Once you’ve set up your Search Console, navigate to “Sitemaps” within the Indexing section. There you’ll want to insert your sitemap URL. This tells Google “this sitemap is how you should read this site” and makes sure the pages are indexable.
Tracking Impressions & Clicks
While not the most exciting in the early days of a website, the Performance section of Search Console can show you which search queries you’re showing up for and how many people clicked through.
Google Analytics is MUCH better at slicing up your traffic, but it is also a much more complicated tool. More on Google Analytics momentarily.
Indexing Requests & Indexing Problems
You can tell Google when you have new content to index! Here’s an example of me telling Search Console “I have a new URL, and I’d like it to be indexed.”
This is useful because Google is only intermittently checking your sitemap to see if there’s anything new. A manual request ensures prompt indexing.
Additionally, Google will tell you when it can’t index a page included in your sitemap, and it will tell you when a URL you’ve submitted for indexing.
Below is an example of what a good, indexable URL looks like when inspected. This is for my Writers Conference Guide, which I recommend checking out if you’re attending any writing conferences this summer.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Other analytics tools exist. Google Analytics crushes them all, though. If you’re a data-driven person like I am, you want to know what’s doing what and where it’s coming from. Google Analytics is free and easy to install on most major website builders.
You do not need Google Analytics to be successful in SEO. You do, however, need it to effectively measure the success of your SEO strategy. Between the granularity of Google Analytics and the keyword insights of Google Search Console, you will have what you need to know whether or not the work you’re doing is paying off.
I’ve been playing with Google Analytics for over a decade, and I can’t begin to tell you where to start other than:
Just implement it. As soon as possible, implement it.
HubSpot has a fantastic Google Analytics guide, but be wary of going too deep down that rabbit hole. At this point, your goal should be to get your tools implemented and start building. You can’t measure anything if you don’t have content to measure!
STEP SIX: OFF-PAGE SEO
Off-page SEO is anything that happens outside of your domain that affects your search rankings. There are a number of free ways to bolster your off-page SEO. While some of these methods can be quite time-consuming, I’m going to focus on the ones that tend to have the best organic impact.
By organic, I mean unpaid.
You can buy links, buy guest posts, and buy PR, mentions, influences, and all that, but my approach to marketing has always leaned on organic, unpaid tactics. They take longer, but they are sustainable.
Link Building
The quickest way to build your site’s authority and start netting more keywords is with links. When other sites link to your content, whether it’s a blog post or your homepage, it tells search engines your domain is worth looking at. The higher the authority of the site linking to you, the more powerful a backlink from them is.
I’ve mentioned “authority” a few times now, but this seems like the best place to unpack what that means. When a marketer says authority, they’re referring to a score the site is given based on its quality and quantity of inbound links, the rate those links were acquired, the overall user experience, the quality of the content on the site, and the age of the domain. Domain authority typically goes up over time as sites mature, publish good content, and secure links.
So, how do you get links? There are a few good, easy tricks I’ve used over the years that I think are incredibly valuable for writers:
HARO
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a free service through which journalists around the world send out calls for sources with unique expertise.
Anyone can sign up to be a source as long as they agree to follow HARO’s rules. If you get selected, you have the opportunity to secure a link to your website.
Blog Swaps
Almost every writer has a blog. Odds are, if you’re reading this, you know a writer or two. Odds are, those writers with their blogs are looking for guest content.
Reach out to your writing buddies and ask if you can do a blog swap. You’ll give them a piece of original content that they can put on their site in exchange for the same from them. You both get links, lift each other up, and share a new perspective with your readers.
Just make sure you don’t re-publish the piece of content you swapped! Duplicate content penalties can hurt you both!
Making the Ask
Did you include an external link to an author you admire? Let them know! Tell them you see them as a great source of information and let them know you gave them a link.
Make sure to share a link to the post you mentioned them in, and don’t be afraid to ask if they’re interested in maybe doing a blog swap or hosting guest posts.
The worst they can do is say no!
Social Media
Social media for authors deserves its own standalone piece of content. Each platform varies slightly in what works best and why, and there’s no way I could cover all of their nuances in this post without completely derailing the whole THIS-IS-AN-SEO-GUIDE angle I’m working with.
Don’t worry, I’ll work up a social media guide this summer, I promise, and I’ll link it here as soon as it’s done. Until then, here’s my quick-and-dirty take on social media:
Don’t Be Everywhere
Pick TWO platforms and do them well. You DON’T have to be everywhere. You DO have to be where your audience is.
Be Consistent
Set yourself a goal. Say it’s one post per week, alternating between your platforms (ie: Facebook one week, Twitter next week, repeat.)
Social media shows your fanbase that you’re alive. The more consistently you post good content relevant to your brand and your audience, the more likely you are to see that traffic click-through to your content and, thereby, send signals to search engines.
Make Use of Tools
Utilize scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. Most of these have free plans you can link multiple accounts (ie: Facebook AND Twitter) to so you can manage both through one service.
These free tools also often have analytics tracking baked in, which gives you great insight into which platforms and types of content are performing well.
Maximize Early Engagement
Do what you can to maximize engagement within the first hour of posting. Each social media platform has its own unique algorithm, but they all want to see your content taking off early. The more traction you can get within the first hour of posting, the further you’ll reach.
How do you do that? Simple! When you post on social, send the link to your writing group, your Discord buddies, your family Slack channel - whatever! Let people know you’ve posted and ASK THEM to like AND comment. When they comment, you respond to their comment. It will feel like a game after a while, but that’s pretty much how you have to approach social media if you want your posts to take off.
Mind you, I don’t like to play this game. It works, but I don’t enjoy it, so I rarely do it. I should be better. Due to personal anxieties I have around putting myself out there in the world, though, it’s a struggle.
Recycle (But Diversify) Content
You should never spam the same blog post on social media back-to-back. You can link to it more than once, but give it room to breathe. Nothing says spam like getting the same message over and over again. Get creative with your captions. Tease out a new thing people will learn every time you share a link to an old blog post.
Sprinkle in content that isn’t about you! Showcase your cat. Share a review of a book you read recently. Talk about things going on in your writing process and ask your following to weigh in!
Be Personal, If Comfortable
This one is super tricky for some folks, myself included. People want to engage with people. The more you can show you’re human, the more people will rally around you.
Everyone’s comfort level for this is different, though. Go slow. If you’re a shy wine lover, maybe you share a photo of a bottle you’re enjoying and a snippet of the story you’re writing. Or, if not shy, a selfie of yourself enjoying a glass, as well as the story.
Above all, be true to your personal brand.
All of That to Say…
There is so much more to marketing than building a website or posting on Facebook.
SEO for authors isn’t too different from SEO for enterprises, but it can feel more daunting because, put simply, most authors aren’t marketers. We’re storytellers. We want to tell stories, not look under the hood of Google.
Alas, if we want our stories to reach the right audience, a little SEO is necessary.
Wherever you are in your publishing journey, I hope this guide has been helpful. After my debut novel came out, I was so wholly overwhelmed and anxious over the challenges ahead that I hard-pivoted into a career in marketing. I’ve learned so much over the last decade that I wish I’d known at the start of my journey.
Today, I want to share my learnings and my stories. I want to lift writers up and demystify things like SEO for authors.
(Yes, that was a deliberate keyword drop there. Because SEO. And because there are no magic beans.)
If you’ve made it this far and feel overwhelmed by the journey ahead of you, just remember:
You don’t have to go alone!
I’m currently available for one-time marketing projects and consulting with authors at every stage of their writing careers.
Fill out the form below, and let’s talk! Even if I’m not a good fit for the marketing challenges you bring me, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.