This post is a shortened version of a more descriptive post that appears on the BringShare blog called 10 Actions to Strengthen your SEO.
As a small business, it's difficult to keep up with SEO. It can seem like an endless task to be constantly optimizing current content, creating new and attempting to read Google's mind in terms of how it deems your company to be relevant for certain keywords. If you're not currently ranking for terms you feel you should be, take a look at the 10 simple tasks below to start working towards a solution.
1] Do a bit of SEO Keyword Research
This is incredibly, incredibly important. If your website is full of terms that are highly competitive, you may be losing out on potential traffic. Changing a term on your website from "Email Marketing Dashboard" to "Email Marketing Dashboards" could very well be the different in thousands of searches worth of traffic. So how do you identify what keywords to shoot for? first find out what terms are already generating conversions on your website. You can do this by digging into Google Analytics (or if the thought of doing that yourself gives you an auto-headache, have no fear! BringShare members can bypass Google Analytics and just log in to their account to easily see this info. If you're not a BringShare user, sign up for a free BringShare trial here). Those keywords can be a great starting point. You can also use a variety of tools to help you determine further words to rank for.
2] Understand your competitor's SEO
Maybe you're a small shop and you can't compete with Walmart down the street on keywords. Maybe you're a small shop competing with another small shop down the street. The first example is a situation when you may want to consider changing the keywords you want to rank for. If competition is too stiff, get creative and find another way to tell your customers about what you do! If you think you can take your competitor on the keywords they rank for, go for it! You get two times the benefit: You push competitors out of the ranks and your business moves up!
3] Optimize your Title & Meta Tags
This is something quick to check off your list. Make sure you have optimized Title and Meta tags! They're a basic way to tell a search engine "hey, this is what my website is all about."
4] Optimize your Headings & Subheadings
This is yet another way for you to tell a search engine who you are and what you do. Take a bit of time to be specific. "Email Dashboard" is probably not as indicative as "Email Marketing Analytics Dashboard".
5] Use and Optimize Title & Alt Attributes
Title and Alt attributes are another way to get a search engines attention. Since computers are computers and not humans, it's important for you to identify what pictures are or where links may lead. It makes it incredibly easy for search engines to categorize your website.
6] Optimize File Nomenclatures
Again, make things easy for search engines. When they read the file nomenclature on your website, reading a file called "Marketing_Dashboard" is much more representative than you uploading a picture named "IMG_12".
7] Write Content People will Share
SEO isn't just about your website. It's also about what people think of who you are and what you do. Hopefully you're doing this anyway, but write and share content that reflects you as a brand and be as relevant as possible!
BringShare is digital marketing software that pulls all of your digital marketing data into one convenient place, saving you time and money.
Marissa_R
