While having expert guidance for your search engine optimization efforts has its own undeniable advantages, getting started on it is relatively straightforward with the right strategy. Here is a checklist to help small business owners and mangers kick-start their SEO efforts, and start making a difference in search rankings and website traffic.
1. Blog (and blog often)
“Content is king!” Google likes content. And loves fresh content. The more relevant content you have on your website and the fresher you keep it, the better Google thinks of your website. And the higher it will rank you in search results to send more people to it.
One metric that Google values higher is click wait times. That is how long a user spends on the page after clicking on a link to get there. The longer this duration, the better.
The easiest way to achieve this is by making sure your content is unique and relevant. Your blog should be relevant to your industry, and the user must find your writings unique enough that they spend time reading it
How to come up with unique and relevant content? It is pretty straightforward actually. It doesn’t need to be original artifacts flowing from your imagination. It just needs to be relevant and engrossing enough. The goal is to increase traffic to your site so that Google thinks it is an important one and needs to be ranked higher so that people are sent there. Here are some ideas to get you started.
New products: Blogging about new products or services launched in your industry, reviewing them, critiquing them or comparing them with competition. All these are very interesting for your users and encourages them to keep coming back.
Industry trends: Writing about the emerging trends in your industry. A simple Google search about news and topics in your industry usually gives you all the fodder needed to write a decent article. It also establishes your thought leadership, thus increasing traffic to your site.
Helpful advice: You can blog about advice on overcoming hurdles in your industry, or helping people get started on things. Readers love checklists and to-do lists. For example, this blog on getting started on SEO. ;)
Shareable on social media: Your articles should be short and sweet. And should be easily shareable on social media. Resulting in easy publicity for your site and more clicks on your articles. It is extremely important to make sure that you keep your site regularly updated. Keep adding new articles, and delete old ones. Doing so tells Google that your site is alive and well. Google ranks such sites higher on its search results. 2. Set up a Google My Business account Create a Google My Business account for your business. Ensure that you fill in all the fields in the about and information sections. Use the keywords you identified for your business when filling in those details. Google loves its ecosystem and having an account on My Business will give Google as much context as possible to understand where and when to display your business in the search results.
3. Add backlinks Another metric that Google loves is the number of links that point back to your website. Not only the count, the reputation of the site or pages where those links appear on. The easiest way to increase the number of these links back to your website on reputable sites is Accounts on social media and other sites: By creating pages for your business on various social media and posting links to your website on those pages, you can suddenly generate a number of backlinks to your website from reputable sites. Create pages on all relevant social media such as Yelp, Bing Local, Foursquare, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Along with links to your website, add relevant details in the about and information sections on those sites.
Post articles from your blog on those pages: Post articles that you have blogged on your website on these sites. Along with links back to those articles and your website. 4. Ask customers for reviews Another easy avenue for getting both backlinks to your website as well as goodwill generated online is asking your customers to leave reviews for your business. Have them write reviews on all the sites where your business has a profile set up. And ask them specifically to include a link to your website. This will result in fresh content about your business as well as increased number of relevant backlinks to your site. Both will help make Google rank you higher on its search results!
5. Mind the technical stuff In addition to the above listed steps, a few technical things are also necessary. After all, web search is an algorithm, and machines love some technicalities. Titles: Make sure that the title of each of your pages is relevant to the content in the page. And if possible include a keyword in it. This applies to the URL of the pages as well. The URLs need to be unique and easily help a user guess what the content on the page is. Headers: Headers on each page should contain text wirh relevant keywords. Your website has HTML code that builds and drives it. And HTML is full of tags. The header tag, that is, the <h1> tag is very important in helping a machine understand what the content on the page is about. Come up with some text with the relevant keywords and add to this tag. Meta description: Another section that is very important but often overlooked is the meta description. Meta description is not visible on the actual page itself, but is shown when displaying your site and page on search results, indicating what the page is about. So, each page on your website should have its meta description defined. And it should not be same as page content but contain similar keywords. Having all three above elements properly defined and with the most relevant keywords ensures that when Google scans your site it rates it high, increasing your chances of getting ranked higher on searches.
6. Optimize for mobile
All said and done, the Internet consumption is going mobile. Better performance on the smaller form factors like phones and tablets tremendously increases your standing before Google and it will rank you higher.
Rate your site on Web.dev: This is Google’s free online tool for SEO scoring on websites. You can enter your site’s name and generate a detailed report of the good and the bad. Including performance on various form factors.
Fix identified issues: The above step will result in Google identifying any shortcomings that prevent your site from getting a higher score. These are usually presented in a simple manner so that any user can understand what is happening, what needs to be fixed and how. Make sure you address all of them
Now get started As you can see, getting started on better SEO rankings is not rocket science and with a little dedication and regular effort it is pretty straightforward!