Your Small Business SEO Checklist Guide

When we talk about SEO it’s not just about getting rankings in the search engines.

We need to have a greater purpose which is to drive conversions to sales / leads or whatever metric you wish to achieve.

Search volume for keywords is important to, but don’t think just because the search volume is low that you should ignore that key term.

Look at the commercial intent of the searcher and how relevant that is to you and your business.

We have ranked clients for key terms with less than 20 searches per month that have been worth $100,000 plus in additional revenue to the company.

So how do you help your site to rank better?

Follow some of these handy tips and make sure that your content works for both users and the search engines.

Understand how your audience search:

Having a good understanding of your audience demographic will open the door to how they search so you can create content that will help to attract them.

  • Look at your competitors and what they are writing.
  • What’s popular and trending in Google Trends?
  • What’s popular and getting shared across social media.
  • Create stories that revolve around your brand.
  • Look at related search terms to create more relevant content.

Optimise your content for your audience:

You should keep your clients front and centre when creating your content, not the search engines.  There are ways to tweak content so that it can be written naturally and still be better optimised for search engines, but focus on the client first.

  • Write naturally in conversational tones.
  • Keep your content interesting.
  • Use the correct language for your audience.
  • Keep content easy to read in blocks of text.
  • Check for spelling grammar and punctuation.

Optimise for Search Engines:

Have a regular posting schedule for content and use a scheduling calendar if possible. This great editorial calendar plugin is one of our favourites to get clients to use.

Make sure that you use unique content, do not scrape or steal content from others, thats a big no no.

As well as that make sure that you:

  • Implement xml sitemaps.
  • Optimise your robots.txt file.
  • Have an internal audit of your content to make sure there are no broken links.
  • Provide value to your readers by linking out to other quality resources.
  • Link naturally from within your content as well.

Check your progress:

Whatever path you take whether it is SEO, Paid Search or Social media you need to track your progress.

Things can and will change so benchmark your site at the beginning to see where you are at because if you don’t know where you are starting you will never know where you are going.

Our client services dashboard covers all the ranking metrics you need from SEO rankings, to website traffic and social media as well.

So if you need assistance with getting on the right path then contact us today or get our free seo audit and one of our consultants will get back to you shortly.