How to use SEO for your Farm or Ranch Website

A lot of people treat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as if it’s some kind of mystical voodoo that only big companies or marketing agencies can use.

That is exactly why it’s such a powerful tool for you. Because most of your competitors (other producers selling online) won’t touch SEO with a ten foot pole because the idea of it is a little intimidating. This leaves a lot of great keywords wide open for you, especially to show up at the top of search results locally.

In this video guide, I’ll walk you through what SEO is and how you can use it to get more potential customers coming to your website. If you’ve never even heard of the term “SEO,” don’t worry! I’ll try and make things as clear as possible!

So anyway, without further ado let’s unwrap how all this crazy SEO stuff works. Also, below the video you can find a lot of the resources I mention in the video, as well as some checklists to use when searching for keywords or when optimizing a post/page/product.

Watch the video below!

One quick note that I really should’ve mentioned in the video: DON’T keyword stuff! Use your keyword a couple times in the content where it’s natural to use it, but don’t use it so many times that the content sounds unnatural. Google will actually flag keyword overuse, and besides, it sounds stupid.

One other place you should definitely include your keyword that I forgot to mention: the meta description. This is the text that will show up in Google. There’s often a box for you to add a meta description when you’re creating a post/product on pretty much any platform you might be using. If you’re not sure where to find the meta description, search “meta description -your platform name-” in google and see what pops up!

Details + Links Mentioned in the Video

Your Website Needs to be:

1. Fast. Load time preferably under 3 seconds (sometimes if you have a lot of images on your site, this is impossible to achieve and that’s okay). To test your website speed, go to this page.
2. Your website needs to have a security certificate and have “https” in the URL instead of “http.” Learn more about this here.
3. Your website needs to be linked to by high authority websites (example: known businesses & publications, .edu websites, news, info sites, .gov sites, etc). This is something you can work on over time. Sometimes you can get linked to for guest posts, sometimes for magazine/news features, sometimes for any contributions for academia (links from .edu websites are very powerful), etc. Look for opportunities to build your authority by getting linked to by high authority sites.

Keyword Research Tools

1. Wordtracker (useful for finding keywords, but they’ll only allow a few free searches)
2. Moz (very powerful tool, offers a 1-month free trial. I’d strongly recommend if you’re just building your website now. You can use for a month while building your website, then cancel)
3. Google Keyword Planner (Google’s keyword research tool. Only accessible if you have an ad account).
4. Ahrefs (a lot like Moz, offers a 7 day $7 trial)
5. Answer the Public (shows you what people are commonly searching in Google and gives you more ideas for keywords. Doesn’t give you much number data, just a lot of keyword ideas).
6. Yoast SEO. Not a research tool, but if you use WordPress, this is a checklist plugin that pops up every time you’re building a post to remind you to include your keyword in certain places in the content. Very handy. If you don’t use WordPress, don’t worry! There’s probably an app or plugin for your particular platform. Just search “SEO checklist -your platform name-” and see what comes up!

…And if you don’t want to do all this yourself:

Melanie and I can do a full SEO audit for your website and find areas that you can improve and give you a list of keywords you can use so that you don’t have to figure it out yourself! Then we’ll give you a Zoom consultation on how you can improve both the SEO and technical aspects of your website…and if you want us to do SEO on your website for you, no problem! Note that this isn’t something that we offer in our regular rates, so just contact us here saying you want more details on the SEO audit and we’ll get back to you on that with pricing (we keep prices pretty low for audits/consultations like this, but I can’t give you a general price here because it’s more on a case-by-case basis).

Final note: the video here was by no means comprehensive! In fact, it just scratched the surface of SEO! I’d definitely recommend continuing to research this topic around the web…there’s a lot of easy-to-access info out there!