SEO for Women: You Don’t Need to Be a Tech Wizard: Here’s the Truth About It

Let me be honest with you for a second.

If you’re a woman running your own business and SEO feels like something that was designed for someone else, someone more technical, more funded, more whatever I get it completely. When I first heard the term, I glazed over. It felt like one of those things that other people did, the ones with a developer on speed dial and a marketing budget to match. Not me, sitting at my kitchen table trying to figure out why Google hadn’t noticed my website existed.

But here’s what nobody in the SEO world wants you to know: it isn’t that complicated. It’s been made to sound complicated, mostly by people who want to charge you a lot of money for it.

The basics? You (yes, you, running your business solo or with a tiny team) can absolutely do them yourself. And they work.

Let me break it down.

So what actually is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. All it really means is: making your website easier for Google (and other search engines) to understand, so that when someone searches for something you offer, your page shows up.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Think of Google as a very eager librarian who’s read every page on the internet and is trying to match readers with the right books. Your job is to make your “book” (your website) as clear and relevant as possible so the librarian can recommend it confidently.

Why does it matter for you?

Because social media is rented space.

Your Instagram account, your Threads profile, your TikTok……none of it belongs to you. Algorithms change, platforms die, accounts get hacked. But your website? That’s yours.

Google search is also one of the most powerful forms of traffic you can get, because the people arriving at your site are already looking for what you offer. They typed it in. They want it. That’s very different from someone scrolling past your post on Instagram while half-watching TV.

The three things that actually matter

There are entire books written about SEO. Most of them contain a lot of filler. Here’s what you genuinely need to focus on:

1. Know what words your people are actually searching for

These are called keywords, and they’re just the words and phrases your ideal customer types into Google.

Before you write anything (a blog post, a service page, an about page) spend five minutes thinking: what would someone type if they were looking for this?

A few free tools to help you:

• Google itself: start typing something in the search bar and watch what it suggests. Those suggestions are real things people search for.
• Answer the Public (answerthepublic.com): type in a topic and it shows you every question people ask about it.
• Google Search Console (free, linked to your website): shows you exactly what people typed before landing on your site already.

The key tip: be specific. “Business coach” is incredibly competitive. “Business coach for female entrepreneurs in the UK” is much easier to rank for, and it’s also much more likely to attract your person.

2. Use those words on your pages, naturally

Once you know what someone would search for, use that phrase on your page. In your page title, in your first paragraph, in a heading or two, and a few times naturally throughout the text.

Please don’t go overboard. Stuffing a keyword in 47 times makes your writing awkward and actually hurts your rankings. Write for humans first. Google is clever enough to understand context.

The most important places to use your keyword:

• The page title (what appears in browser tabs and Google results)
• The first 100 words of your content
• At least one heading (H1 or H2)
• Your meta description (the little summary that appears under your link in Google)

If you’re on WordPress, a free plugin called Yoast SEO walks you through all of this step by step. It even gives you a little traffic light to tell you how you’re doing. Very satisfying.

3. Make Google trust you

Trust is built through two things: good content and links from other websites.

Good content means writing things that actually help people. Genuinely useful, specific, well-written content gets shared, gets bookmarked, and gets ranked. A blog post titled “5 Ways to Grow Your Email List” is fine. A blog post titled “How I Got 347 Email Subscribers in 3 Months Using Only Threads” is better. It’s specific, it’s real, and people will want to read it and share it.

Links from other websites (called backlinks) are like votes of confidence. When another website links to yours, Google sees that as a signal that your content is trustworthy and worth recommending. You can earn these naturally over time, but you can also be proactive: write guest posts, get featured in online publications, collaborate with other businesses in your space.

(This is one reason being featured in a magazine like Anne Louise Magazine, our sister publication, genuinely helps your SEO. You get a real link from a real, established domain. Not all “features” online are equal, but a proper publication link carries real weight.)

Three quick wins you can do this week

If you want to start somewhere, start here:

1. Fix your page titles. Go into every main page on your website and check what the title says. Does it clearly describe what the page is about, using words your customers would search? If your homepage title just says your business name, that’s a missed opportunity. It should say something like: “Online Membership Community for Female Entrepreneurs | Your Business Name.”

2. Write one helpful blog post a month. One good post per month, consistently, adds up fast. Over a year that’s 12 pieces of content that Google can find and rank. Pick topics that answer real questions your audience has.

3. Set up Google Search Console. It’s free, it takes about 10 minutes to set up, and it shows you exactly how your site is performing in search: what people are searching when they find you, which pages are getting impressions, and what your average position is. It’s genuinely fascinating data and it will show you exactly where to focus your energy.

4. Tell Google when you publish something new. Here’s something most people don’t know: Google doesn’t automatically find your new content the moment you hit publish. It finds things in its own time, which can take days or even weeks. But you can skip the queue entirely.

Once you’ve published a new post, go into Google Search Console, click on URL Inspection in the left-hand menu, and paste your new blog post URL into the search bar at the top. Google will check whether it’s been indexed yet. If it hasn’t, you’ll see a button that says Request Indexing. Click it.

That’s it. You’ve just told Google “hey, this exists, come and look at it.” It usually gets picked up within a day or two rather than weeks. Do this every single time you publish something new and it becomes second nature in about 30 seconds.

What about all the other stuff?

Site speed, technical audits, backlink profiles, schema markup, canonical tags…yes, all of that exists. And eventually, as your business grows, some of it will matter to you.

But right now? It’s noise.

The foundations (the right words, helpful content, a trustworthy site) get most people 80% of the way there. Master those first, and the rest can wait.

You’ve got this

SEO is genuinely one of those things that rewards consistency over expertise. You don’t need to know everything. You just need to keep showing up, keep writing, and keep making your website a little clearer and more useful than it was last month.

Google notices. Slowly, then suddenly, it really does.

And when it does…..when you log into Search Console one morning and see your position climbing, or a new reader lands in your inbox saying “I found you on Google”… it feels brilliant. Because that traffic is yours. You earned it. And it will keep working for you long after you’ve moved on to the next thing.

Now go fix those page titles.

Linsey x