It’s about time you take action!
There are three areas that are important aspects of a website which get rewarded with good rankings: the usability, the technicals and the links.
The usability is all about About Us, Contact Us and the privacy policy. It is making sure there is good, high quality, unique content. For technicals, you want a good, quick loading site that is responsive so that it appears and looks great on different mobile devices and tablets. Make sure it loads quite quickly. If you’ve got a very high bounce rate or low user engagement, they’re not visiting many pages on your site, you want to try to see if you can increase that. You also want to set up your Webmaster Tools. Make sure your page titles, your on-page SEO are well set up.
The final one is the links. You want to make sure if you do go down the linking area, and it’s important, if you can, just make sure you do it naturally.
Go through just those three strategies, that‘s how Google is ranking. That’s how Google determines what a good site is to bring up. It will analyse these three things and then it will think, what has someone actually typed into the search engine? Do I have a page in my index that is relevant to that search query? Yes, I do. Ok, I’m going to display it. That’s really how it goes through.
The five steps SEO action plan.
Now there are five steps to be put in place. Fix what is happening on your website, check the usability of your site, optimise each page, set up social channels and think about getting some links.
1. Be technically sound
Firstly we need to start off by fixing what is happening on your website. That’s always where you start. You want to make sure technically speaking, your website is sound and also your usability is sound, so you have great quality signals for Google.
If you start there, it’s like fixing your home base first. If you do that, then everything else will work well. If you’ve got a low score in any one of those three areas, it will drag everything else down. That’s why SEO and the definition of SEO really has started to expand.
2. Check the usability
Fix your website usability and chat with the webmaster. Depending on where you’re at with your level of understanding when it comes to websites, you might want to try to find someone to help. There are plenty of different places you can go. Head over to upwork.com; that’s a great place to find someone who can work with you on an hourly basis to help implement some of these things.
Go to them and say, can you tell me how quickly my website is loading? It looks like it is taking on average ten seconds to load. What do we need to do to try to get that down underneath four seconds? That might be re optimizing some images or making some changes, those sorts of things. You’ll chat with a webmaster to try to improve those sorts of things.
As you go through each one of these steps, you will see an incremental gain in your visibility in the search engines and also the traffic that is coming through to your website.
3. Do your on-page optimisation
The next action step would be to think about what are all of the pages that you’ve got on your website. List all of them out and then from the top, one at a time, you don’t have to do it overnight, just pick a batch of twenty and start with twenty. Pick a keyword that is relevant to that page, put it in the relevant places: the title, the description and a couple of times on the page. You can use the Yoast SEO plug in to make it easy for you and put it in the relevant spots.
4. Set up social channels
As you’ve done this, you’ve now fixed your home base. Then you move into your social channels. Make sure that you’ve got a couple of social channels set up. If you haven’t yet, get a bit of a rhythm in the way that you create a piece and then the way you share it out on to your social channels.
5. Link outreach
Finally start to think about some link outreach. Where can you get some links? Do you know someone, did you go to a local blog meet up and they’ve got a really well ranking blog? Can you write a guest post for them or can they reference you in another piece of content that they’ve already got on the website? It’s ok to do some reciprocal linking as in you link to them, they link to you. It’s probably better though if you can get some links just to you.
Do a press release
If you want to stretch just a little bit more, you can take it up a notch and do something like a press release. You could use a service called PRWeb. That can be a good way to build some links. You can also have a look, are there any relevant directories? Are there directories out there that are relevant to your specific niche? Maybe you get listed in those. Have a bit of a think about where you can get your message listed out there. Going through that process will yield some good results.
Focus on your user
Always the focus is back on the user, making sure that you’re providing good, relevant content for them. If you’re doing good content, SEO happens naturally. Once you reach a critical mass, people will just start to share it. As they start to share it, you’re going to earn the links and then that is going to build on itself. Then it becomes a bit of a snowball. Think about the three areas that Google takes into account for its rankings. Then put this five step action plan into operation and sit back and watch your business grow.
Are you ready to do your own SEO action plan? If you think you need expert assistance, we are offering our SEO Starter Pack. Just click here for details.