I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about what tasks could be done right now that might start having an impact on SEO growth. I want to start by making it very clear that SEO is a long term game and seeing results from any work you have done can take months. That being said, I wanted to give you five ideas of things you could do today to get a head start on growing.
Evaluate Your Homepage and Ensure It's Optimized
The first thing I recommend doing for many businesses, especially location based ones such as photographers is to start with youe home page and ensuring that is as optimized as possible. Your homepage should be a great landing page and introduction into who you are and what you do.
If you haven’t already, grab my free checklist to optimizing your homepage and work through it to ensure that your home page is as optimized as it can be. Although this might not automatically put you at the top, it will help as you continue to work on your SEO.
Fix Broken Links
One thing that might penalize you that you might not think about is broken links. This includes links that are on your website linking to other pages on your site, or links that might be linking out to external resources. Google wants to make sure that your users have a good experience, and if you have links on your pages that do not work, Google sees this as a poor user experience.
You can use a program such as SEMRush (You can make use of their free trial for this) or find other free link checkers online to tell you what type of links you might have on your site that are broken.
This will result in either removing the link entirely, or if you are linking to your own website you might need to set up redirects on the back end of your site to redirect to the relevant page. (If perhaps a URL was changed.)
Ensure Google Search Console is Set Up
Most people know about Google analytics, but did you know that there is a second program from Google that is in some cases even more helpful than Analytics? Google Search Console is a program that all SEO experts should ask if you have set up. This program can give you even more helpful information such as what keywords are bringing people to your website and allow you to submit sitemaps and URLs to Google.
This program is easy to set up, and the sooner you set it up, the more data you will be able to collect to help further your SEO goals.
Check Mobile View
As a society we shift more towards using our smart phones to view websites instead of our desktop computers, it is critical to ensure that your website looks good on all devices. Take a moment to look at your website on your phone and see if all things are able to be clicked on, text is able to be read, etc.
You also might consider asking a friend or relative if they can go on your website as well to give you additional feedback. If you are struggling to navigate your own website via your phone, it is time to make some updates to ensure a smooth user experience for everyone.
Brainstorm Four New Blog Post Ideas
Another thing that you could start doing today if you aren’t already doing it, is consider brainstorming and writing some blog posts to schedule out. Google favors new content that is serving a purpose and solving your ideal clients questions or problems.
This doesn’t mean that you should just post blog posts to publish content. In fact, I encourage people to start with on really well written blog post each month and go from there. Not sure where to start? Check out How to Write Blog Posts for SEO.
In Conclusion
SEO doesn’t have anything you can do right now that will immediately boost your rankings. SEO is a long term game and requires many different elements to be ‘successful’. Does that mean that you shouldn’t do it? Of course not. With the unpredictability of social media, it is critical to get people to come to your website, and from there, sign up for your email list.
Even though SEO is a long term game, does it need to be complicated? Of course not. Sure, there are technical elements to it that require specific knowledge, but once you have the basics down, it is a matter of continuing to be persistent in showing Google that you, your content, and your business are important and will assist Google searchers with what they are looking for.
