What SEO Tasks Should you Prioritize

It is no secret that search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of website ownership for any business owner. However, with so many pieces to your site, how do you decide which SEO tasks to prioritize for the most benefit in return for your time. Over the course of the past few months I have had the opportunity to work with the SEO team at Today’s Business. Working on projects with the team has helped me understand when and why it is important to take on specific SEO tasks to see the greatest impact for your efforts. Below I have listed in order categories and tasks to help you succeed at developing your very own SEO strategy.

SEO Priorities Overview:

• Set Specific Goals
• Improve Structural Site Errors
• Improve Content
• Develop  Backlinks/ Internal Links
• Track Your Site Health and Continue Improving

Set A Specific SEO Goal

One important task before even beginning your SEO journey is to set specific and achievable goals. This will help inform the scope of the SEO changes you need to make as well as be the metric by which you track the success of your SEO efforts. Also, be sure to set a realistic time frame to achieve these goals. On average SEO improvements can really kick in after about 3 months. However, if you are new to SEO, give yourself a reasonable buffer and wait about 4-5 months before re-evaluating your strategy.

Improve Structural Site Errors

Before we can get into more creative methods of boosting your ranking, it is important to make sure that your website’s foundation is solid. Without a solid base your users will not be able to interact easily with your pages and Google will have a hard time determining important information about your site. This can include url structures, broken pages, or having pages not be indexed correctly.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Every year it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your site is accessible to mobile users. They represent 60% of internet users and are growing each and every day.  Ensuring that your page is useful to mobile users is crucial to accessing one of the largest demographics on the web as well as ranking highly in Google. You can check the mobile friendliness of your website via Google’s mobile friendly test.

Update Your Website Schema

Often referred to as structured data, schema is a type of code designed specifically to give vital information about your website to search engines. This is a final element of a high ranking site and lucky you don’t need to have a degree in computer science to write schema code. Use a schema code generator, choose the correct form of schema and upload it on your webpage. There are also plugins available that can handle many of these items as well. 

*The schema generation process will vary from platform to platform so you may need to research your specific situation separately.* 

Improve Content

Content is the backbone of a great SEO strategy. The content of a page is the reason users visit your site and oftentimes determines whether or not they convert. This makes it vitally important for answering users questions and ranking for high value keywords. A thorough understanding of your audience and the keywords you want to rank for will be necessary to developing valuable content. Once you understand both of those aspects you can start developing pages using the tips below.

Write Areas Served Pages

If you are a local company or simply want to target a specific local audience then writing one or more area served pages could be beneficial. An area served page is simply a page describing your product or service you offer to a specific local audience. This can help boost your ranking for members of that community seeking your services.

Title, URL, and Meta Description

Some of the most important and often overlooked aspects of improving content are your title, url, and meta description. These are ideal locations to place keywords that you want a page to rank for. In combination with a well written page these can be powerful tools in boosting the page rankings and click through rate.

Update Old Pages

If an old page still has relevant information that can be expanded or reformatted it may help bring in and retain more visitors without needing to write entirely new content. Simply updating some headers and adding in a new paragraph may be enough to boost a page’s ranking 1 or 2 spots.

Develop Backlinks/ Internal Links

Great for their own purposes respectively backlinks and internal links are vital to the overall health and flow of your website. However, they can be some of the hardest aspects of any SEO strategy. Backlinks often require an existing high ranking website and internal links need to be continuously updated and added.

Backlinks

A backlink is when a site other than your own links to a page on your site. This often requires a page to already be highly ranked as others will need to find the page, find it useful, and add a link to it from their site. Luckily there are some ways to get easy backlinks. If you are a very new site, adding yourself to free directories may help get some initial backlinks going. Also, one of the most common and powerful backlinks is a Google my Business listing. Similarly listings from local organizations or other listing sites like yelp could help to boost your overall website ranking without waiting for other pages to link to yours.

Internal Links

Not as powerful as backlinks yet still vital to a healthy site are internal links. This is when one page on your site links to another. One simple way to improve these is to run through your site once each month and link previously written to new content via anchor text that could be beneficial to the reader. If you are completely overhauling your site, it will be beneficial to write content with backlinks in mind. For example, if you’re listing the products you use on your services page, link each product to a page about that brand on your site. 

Track Your Site Health and Continue Improving

No SEO strategy is perfect. Google is constantly changing and there are always new ways to improve and grow your site. Using programs like SEMRush to track your website’s health will help you know when something needs to be changed and how your changes affect your site. This way you can guarantee that your site will always be on the up and up.

When to Seek SEO Experts

If you want a well developed SEO strategy guaranteed to boost your website or simply do not have time to optimize your site it may be time to seek expert assistance. Today’s Business is a multichannel digital marketing company that has been providing expert SEO services to business owners since 2011. Our experts will work with you to develop a plan and attack your goals to take your business to the next level. Contact Us today to get a free evaluation of your site and see how we can help boost your businesses online presence.

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