When you first begin working with search engine optimization, it can be difficult to know where to start. You know that SEO is important to the success of your website and business. You're aware of many of the must-do SEO tasks— but how should you get started? By creating an SEO task list and prioritizing those tasks based on their potential impact, you'll have a detailed roadmap to use on your way to SEO success. Let's start prioritizing.
First, check to see whether Google (and other search engines) are able to crawl your website in its entirety. If there is a noindex blocking any of the important pages on your site, you're going to have a hard time moving forward. Use a tool like ScreamingFrog, which analyzes your entire site. Alternatively, check out Quix for a page-level scan.
Visit Google's PageSpeed Insights to view data about the speed of your website. You can use WebPageTest to check whether you're utilizing compression and browser caching resources correctly.
Developers: make sure you read up on HTTP/2 for quicker load times.
Scan through your internal search logs to uncover keywords being used on your website. Create a page for any of the keywords that you're not already targeting.
The three tasks above can be completed in a relatively short amount of time. To recap, these tasks must be completed before taking on the monster project that is a completely customized SEO plan for your website:
Let’s dive deeper into search engine optimization and talk about creating a strategy that works for you.
You can try to knock out all of your scheduled SEO tasks at once, but you'll likely get burnt out. The Yoast SEO plugin is a valuable tool that you can use to cover many of the basic SEO tasks on individual pages of your website. Make sure that you have a content plan that merges well with your SEO plan. Your targeted keywords should match up with the target audience of your blog.
You'll need to become a master of keyword research and create a site structure that lends itself well to SEO.
Last, and most importantly, without great quality content SEO, your website will never see the front page of Google. Creating copy that is both compelling and SEO-friendly is key to hitting your site traffic goals. By starting with these three basic principles you can begin to design a list of high-priority tasks to complete. Start with these!
Key Takeaways — become familiar with the ins and outs of:
Read up on structured data and make sure that you understand the concepts. This could be a big time investment depending on how familiar you are with this topic, though it's well-worth the time. Decide whether to utilize structured data in your SEO strategy.
After you're confidently able to understand the above concepts and have outlined a strategy to uplevel your SEO, start on these ongoing but important technical tasks:
It's important to understand that as search engine algorithms change, so will SEO best practices. Make sure you're keeping up-to-date on current trends and technologies in the SEO world by following popular authoritative publications that post SEO tutorials and tips.
If you're looking on expanding your content and want to designate some of your articles to be Cornerstone SEO Content. We have a great post on how to write better content that will rank.
See: https://brightvessel.com/build-cornerstone-seo-articles/
At Bright Vessel, we know how integral having a solid content plan for your business is. It's a time-consuming, detail-oriented process that can make or break your website's success! You need an active and up-to-date content plan that you can rely on to take your business to the next level. Contact us to learn more about how a content marketing plan can improve your conversion rates and benefit your bottom line.
