By Adam Steele
This is a guest post, courtesy of Adam Steele, the founder of Loganix, a popular SEO fulfillment company located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
If you are an author who’s opting to self-publish instead of going through a publisher, the one big thing you lack is the marketing power that you’d get from a publishing company. That puts all of the marketing efforts to generate awareness and sales for your book on you. Thankfully, you can get a lot of attention through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your internet presence.
In short, SEO involves optimizing your website to make it easier for people to find it when they search for something on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and so on. Here’s why you should consider SEO when you self-publish a book.
Build Your Following
Google is by far the biggest and most used search engine on the Internet, and it has claimed in the past that there are trillions of searches per year. That’s a huge potential audience to reach every day. If you want to grow the size of the audience that follows you before your book’s release date, you can achieve that through basic SEO principles:
- Make a website and install Google Analytics to track your website performance
- Create a blog that gives regular insight and updates on your progress to build a dedicated audience interested in you and your book
- Optimize your website and your blog so it appears higher in search results when people Google something related to you and your book
It’s always a good idea to get this started before the release date of your book, so you can grow your audience and following ahead of time. These will help give your book more sales after the book is released. You can also set up an RSS feed that will help people sign up for any blog updates.
Get More Interviews, Reviews, and Guest Posts
SEO can also help you get more exposure and publicity, leading to an increase in the size of your audience by making it more likely for people to reach out to you for interviews, guest posts, and book reviews. If people can find your website, they can learn about who you are as an author. If they find your blog that you regularly update, they can get an idea for how good of a writer you are. If you write books for a technical, non-fiction niche, your site and your blog can also help establish your expertise within your field.
If people are able to easily find your site and blog through a web search, you’ll start getting requests from other authors, book review sites, and maybe even agents or publishers down the line. They might ask you to do an interview, request a copy of your book to review before it comes out, or for you to write a guest post on their site. They might also do the reverse — ask to have you interview them, review their book, or have them write a guest post on your site.
Either way, it helps you form connections and relationships in the industry that will help give you more exposure and promotion of your book when it comes out. The more positive relationships, reviews, interviews and guest posts you have by and about you, the better it is for your online reputation. If someone hears about you and searches your name or book on Google, they’re more likely to see all of these positive websites and articles than negative ones.
Sell More Books
In the end, what you probably want most of all is to sell more of your book when it is published. Growing your following and establishing important relationships online among other writers, reviewers and publishers can all help with that — and SEO can help you achieve those goals.
What SEO can also do is help you directly sell more books. When you optimize your website for search engines, you make it quick and easy for people to find your site and your online store to buy your book. They’ll also see all the good blog articles, guest posts, interviews and so on that present a positive online image of who you are and how good your book is. Those help convince people to buy your book.
On the other side of the coin, it is a proven fact that the more difficult it is for people to find you and where to buy your book, the more likely they are to give up along the way without making a purchase. Without proper SEO, when people search for you or your book they might find someone else’s website, blog, or book that leads people to buying from them instead. Or they might find negative reviews about your book rather than good ones. Either will directly cause you to lose sales.
Adam Steele is a builder of things, including agency and link building solution, Loganix, internet marketing agency The Magistrate, and among others, a Referral Spam Cleanup tool. He is always looking for a new hustle, and eager to help others with their marketing and business-related questions.
