SEO– Search Engine Optimization– is the holy grail of the online business world. With effective SEO, when a customer plugs in a keyword relevant to your business, your name will show up before your competitors. Despite the buzz around SEO, many businesses and blogs fail to dedicate time to this crucial step in increasing business awareness.
Before you spend a lot of time learning more about SEO and how to develop it, check out these quick, actionable steps that will go a long way in improving your optimization while you shift your focus to other things.
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Hire an Agency
Let’s cut to the chase here. If you haven’t had time to look into your SEO efforts so far, chances are you won’t have the capacity to give it the attention it deserves now. Therefore, you should consider calling a spade and reaching out to an agency. Outsourcing is usually a better option anyway. Having an internal employee looking into SEO can be extremely limiting. As it is rare for a startup to be able to allocate someone to handle SEO full-time, it quickly gets moved down the priority list. Outsource to an agency now, and your business will grow with minimal effort on your part.
Make it Mobile
As of 2016, more than half of online searches were conducted on a mobile device. As a result, Google gives precedence to websites that have both a desktop and mobile option. First, check to ensure that your page is mobile-optimized. Then, check to ensure that the mobile-optimized pages are user-friendly and work without glitching, which is a common occurrence with certain WordPress themes and user-made sites.
Check for Duplicate Content
If you get a lot of spam in your comment section regarding duplicate content, there’s a reason why. Duplicate content is a red flag for Google bots and can be detrimental to your SEO. Duplicate content means that there are multiple areas with the same title or description. Perform a website audit and determine if any pages have the same meta title or description. The easiest way to correct this issue is to rename things as needed. This is an opportunity to optimize your titles and descriptions to be picked up by Google.
Check Your Rankings
Choose a few of your cornerstone articles or pages and run them through an assessment tool to determine where you rank on Google. Take it a step further by seeing what keywords you’re missing to improve your ranking and evaluate what your competition’s ranking and content scores are. This will help you optimize a few key pieces while striving toward a complete overhaul and sitewide SEO.
Have Google Recrawl
So you’ve made some changes based on the advice above? Great! Now it’s time to ensure that Google is taking notice. Log into Google Search Console, click “Crawl” and select “fetch as Google” to initiate a new crawling process. Simply put in your URL and click the button to have your site reviewed. You can do this multiple times each month, which is great if there is ongoing work to improve your SEO or overhaul your website.
These are just a few quick, actionable SEO tips to get you started. For best results, do your due diligence and work with the experts to make your site rank on the first page of Google.
