Implementing a Basic SEO Plan

Marketing your business on search engines requires a basic knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO), and one of the best ways to do this is to create a plan and do your research along the way. If you’ve never dipped your toes in the wide world of SEO before, going in with a basic plan is mandatory. Here, we’ll give you some of the basics of how you generate a basic SEO plan that can get you on the right path.

Step 1: Identify What Pages To Optimize

Good SEO planning works in stages. You’re not going to be realistically able to optimize your website all at once, especially if you’re a small business harried for time. So, it’s time to do a cursory dive into Google Analytics.

If you haven’t set your website up to use GA, follow these steps. You don’t have to understand everything right away. Just get a sense of what your top performing pages are in terms of pageviews (just to start). These are your pages that you’re going to work to enhance.

Then, take a look at the pages themselves. What is the content focus of each one? If your top performing page is a product page, or a blog post you wrote a year ago, what is the focus. What are the “keywords” that are used throughout the page. You can think of keywords as part of the answer to a question that someone is searching for.

So, if you have a page talking about how you made a Photoshop plugin, your keywords are likely centered around Plugins, the development process, etc. Make a list of the common keywords that appear on these pages, and place them in a document. We’ll return to them in a minute.

Step 2: Look at the SERPs

You’ve got your keywords from several different pages. You can use a tool like Answer the Public to see related keywords, or what people are searching for that is tangential to the keywords you found.

But, the primary function of keywords is to help the Google search algorithm find the right answers to different search queries. So, in our Photoshop example above, Google’s probably not going to find your page if the search query is just “photoshop plugin.” However, if you get more specific, like “how to build a gradient generation plugin for photoshop,” you might have more luck. Spend some time googling various search terms that are related to your keywords, and see what comes up. Take notes on those pages, and then return to your own.

Step 3: Build an Outline

For each of the pages you’ve researched, do what I call a quick reverse outline. Summarize all of the content on the page and put it in outline format. Then, from there, start identifying places where you can beef up sections of content and add in additional keywords and possibly answer more questions than you did originally. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have marching orders for building up the page itself.

Step 4: Optimize For On-Page SEO

Next, go in and start actually making the on-page changes that you set up in your outline. Here are some things that you can do:

• URL optimization - Checking to make sure that the URL of each of your optimized pages is clean and less than 255 characters with “-” separating each word.
• Internal links - No more than 15 links on a page that links to content within your website. However, a well-networked website looks good to search engines.
• External links - Link out from your site only when it adds value to the reader, and make sure to only link to pages you trust.
• Page loading speed - Make sure that your website is optimized to meet Google’s page loading standards.
• Mobile-friendliness - Your page needs to be mobile-friendly in order to get close to the first page of the SERPs.

These steps in addition to your keyword facelift can go a long way towards optimization.

The Next Phase

Now that you’ve done some basic optimization, it might be time to move to the next level. Things can get more complicated, so it helps to explore other options, like paid SEO plans. This post will give you the tools to make that happen. Good luck!