SEO Without a Website: Wait, What?

It sounds crazy, but you don’t actually need a website to practice SEO. Optimizing your brand for the web is an incredibly useful skill, and if you’re planning on opening a business someday it helps to learn how SEO works and start getting involved as soon as possible. Understanding the basics of SEO and then practicing those different SEO techniques can help get you found online and make your presence known in your industry online—you can add the website later.

The question then becomes how to make this happen. SEO is a very large and involved topic, but most of the advice and tips out there revolve around a person who already owns a website and fails to see how having SEO as a skill can work for just about anyone. It might seem overwhelming at first, but it can be argued that starting to understand SEO concepts without a website is easier because you don’t have as much on your plate. You can be the judge.

Different Ways You Can Use SEO Without a Website

Which SEO tactics and methods you are going to use will depend completely upon your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish. For the most part, basic SEO tactics will be all you need to get started. You can visit this link to learn about getting started with some of the most basic SEO practices. Once you have a handle on how it all works, there are a few different ways you can use your new skill despite not having a website:

• Social Media. There are two ways to look at the social media angle. First, you can optimize your social media websites in order to get found for searches within that social network. For example, if you want to show up for a search for “journalists” on LinkedIn, there are optimization techniques you can use to make that happen. Second, your social profiles will show up on a Google SERP. These are typically already first if someone was to Google your name, but if you have a very common name and you want it to be easy for people to find your profiles easily, SEO is going to come into play.
• Job Websites. If you’re looking for a job, you might create a profile on a job board website like Career Builder or Monster (or for many, something more targeted). Understanding SEO can help you make sure that your profile is earning visibility when certain keyword terms are searched, and this could be the difference between interview and no interview. For example, you may find that the keyword “business writer” gets 3 times more visibility than the term “content editor,” so you’ll want to use that term somewhere on your profile (ex: I have been a business writer in the past before I moved on to become a content editor). Without SEO knowledge, you never would have known.
• Local Businesses. If you’re working for a small business that’s been around for decades, you could be a well-known company with no website. This, however, doesn’t mean your business isn’t online. Google may have actually picked up your business and created a business listing online that is still open for you to claim. This listing is being shown to relevant audiences who search location-specific things, so claim that business and then use SEO methods to help bring that listing to the top of the SERPs and really use it to your advantage.

In the end, you don’t need to have a future plan of owning a website. Starting your own business or blog doesn’t have to be everyone’s dream, and your line of work could have absolutely nothing to do with the Internet at all. Nonetheless, the Internet is still used when you consider the points listed above. You might get Google’ed before you get that first job, you might want to be found by a potential employer, and you might start a website and/or a business someday even if that was never your plan. The moral of the story is this: It’s tough to say how important SEO is when you don’t have a website, but it’s safe to say that it certainly is important.