Having a website without doing any SEO is the same as having an online business card. Unless the owner somehow sends people to the site, they won’t find it on their own because it won’t rank for any relevant keywords. It’s possible to get traffic to such sites, but that means paying for ads. Developing an SEO strategy saves money in the long run, especially if you’re planning to create a new dating site (or promote the one you have). Adding content to the site is free, so filling a blog with articles is a free way to rank for numerous keywords. Of course, it takes time. And planning.
Find Your Dating Business Niche
- Who?
- What?
- Why?
- How?
- When?
Before thinking about having a dating site, answer the five simple questions. Who are the ideal members of your site (ex. men seeking women)? What kind of dating do they want (casual hookups or serious dating)? Why do they want that exact kind of dating (ex. young men want to hook up with young women for a dating experience)? How can a dating site help them get what they seek (ex. it has a personality test to make matchmaking more accurate)? When can they expect the results (ex. members on some dating sites meet hours after sending the first message)?
Answering these questions will give a clear picture of the target market for your dating site. That info will help with choosing the SEO strategy. If you decide to create a platform for casual dating, you’ll be able to pick relevant keywords with enough volume. That will let your site steal some traffic from the leading hookup site already ranking for many keywords. That site gets hundreds of thousands of visits every day without PPC because of its SEO strategy. It took some time, but hard work paid off, so they’re now the first choice of most singles seeking hookups. Of course, providing real value to members is crucial for success. However, without SEO, no one will know your site offers any value. That’s why SEO isn’t dead yet, nor will it die any time soon.
SEO Tips to Market Your Dating Site
We mentioned one of the most important tips for creating an SEO strategy for promoting dating sites. Analyzing the market and the target audience is the first step, or better to say, the first half of the first step. The second half is learning everything about the competition.
Check What Are The Other Sites in The Niche Doing
For small businesses getting leads isn’t an easy task. The same is with dating sites. New sites grow much slower than big sites because they lack awareness and trust. The more people join, the sooner new members start trusting the site. Checking out what the competition does is part of every SEO strategy. Not just checking out, but deeply researching. It gives info about the target audience and successful (or unsuccessful) SEO moves; the more research, the better. Knowing what everybody else does gives power; that’s why research and planning are on top of the list.
Chose a Brand Name and Domain
Choosing a name for a dating site has long-term effects on its branding. However, some people neglect the importance of the domain name for SEO. Using keywords from the semantic core (more about that below) in the domain name is a trick that shows crawlers and people what the site is about. Although most domains aim to be as short as possible, using long-tail keywords can help in the long run.
Design is Important
SEO is optimization for search engines, so people may think the design of a dating site isn’t important. Why would a browser care if the site looks good? Browsers don’t care, but people do. And there is something called bounce rate. It’s a nightmare for every website owner. Poor design and slow loading speed are the reasons why people exit the site seconds after entering. Ensuring members can find all the features on desktop and mobile versions reduces bounce rate and help with increasing SEO rank.
Find The Semantic Core
The semantic core is the pack of the most relevant keywords for your dating site. If you’re planning to create a hookup site for mature dating, the semantic core will probably be mature, hookup, dating. The word probably is there because it’s impossible to determine the semantic core without answering the five questions from the beginning and checking the competition.
Start Writing Blog Posts Like Crazy
Writing blog posts is part of on-site SEO, but it’s so important that it has to get more attention. Again, developing a content strategy is a must. Just writing random stuff will rank for some keywords, but not nearly as writing well-planned articles. Before choosing the plan for a month, three months, or a year, do keyword research. It will help you or writers you hire write better articles. Checking out Google Trends while creating a content strategy is a trick clever marketers use.
On-site SEO
Besides writing blog posts for singles seeking dates online, every dating site has to do other on-site SEO actions to help boost the rank. It’s a big topic so we won’t go into details. We’ll list some of the tricks to fix common SEO problems quickly.
- Writing SEO titles and meta descriptions to grab attention on SERP
- Writing ALT texts on all the pictures to let the crawler know what is on them (great for adding more keywords)
- Interlinking – adding links to other pages on your site to keep the visitor browsing longer
- Choosing appropriate H1, H2, H3, etc. to help crawlers understand the page
- Using bold and italic to grab the attention of readers and crawlers
- Including links to trustworthy sites to show crawlers you want to help visitors
Off-site SEO
Another huge part of SEO doesn’t happen on the site. Off-site SEO is mostly focused on getting as many high-quality backlinks as possible. A backlink is when someone puts a link to your site on their site. That’s a kind of social proof in the SEO world, which is crucial for earning the trust of both browsers and potential matches. Browsers reward sites with many relevant backlinks by giving them a higher rank.
SEO is important in the online dating industry. It’s impossible to get much organic traffic without it. The sooner you start doing SEO on your site, the sooner new members will register.