How To SEO Business Websites
How to SEO Business Websites For A Successful 2018
Whether you call them New Year’s Resolutions or New Year’s Intentions, there’s no time like the New Year to make changes. At Digital Firefly Marketing we’re not going to tell you to lose weight or get your closet organized. We’re setting an intention to help you grow your business so get started with these 4 ideas for New Year’s Resolutions for business owners. From learning why it matters to how images affect SEO, we’ve got New Year’s Resolutions to help you get your SEO game up there with the best business websites of 2018.
A One Year Roadmap to Understanding SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers to how to set up your website so that search engines like Google rank it high when someone searches for something relevant to your site and its content. SEO matters across several areas from your website, including many you didn’t know about. Set a New Year’s Resolution to join the rank of the best business websites by learning twelve website SEO strategies, one a month, and applying them. By learning one strategy each quarter you’ll devote the time to learning, teaching, and applying.
Getting Down to The Basics of Website SEO
When: January
What: Start with the basics by exploring why SEO even matters and tricks that help every website’s SEO.
How: Get your team together and toss some newsprint on the wall or hand out markers. Have team members get their voices in the room by having them create two lists. First: WHAT is SEO? Second: Why Does SEO Matter? Take note of who knows what, who seems interested in what, and who is lacking knowledge. Follow up with team members to fill in their gaps with articles like the ones mentioned above.
Why: An understanding of SEO is the root of digital marketing success. You’ll learn the lingo, discover what you don’t know and get a sense of what is out there. Why? Simple — nothing is worse than giving everyone a one-size-fits all talk. Pair up members of your team who have different strengths and interests and have them learn about and present one thing about what SEO is and then fill in the gaps by having someone teaching why it matters. Give those who already know something else during that time and watch your productivity soar!
How To SEO Images
When: April
What: Learn about how images are killing your SEO.
How: Well in advance, assign one of the teams the task of reading our article about how images can hinder SEO. Then have them present this to your team before having everyone jump on your site and audit it to see where improvements can be made. Find examples of what you’re doing right and project them as a guide post.
Why: Making sure your images maximize their SEO potential makes your site more attractive to Google. Leaving out this important element of SEO can lower your rank. People learn by doing. So let them! After a quick presentation let everyone get their hands dirty by assigning out different portions of your site (one team does the blog, one looks at all pages under a menu, etc). Keep things fresh by not just talking at your team but engaging them in the process of making your site better.
Audit Your SEO, Google Does!
When: July
What: Dig deep into your website and evaluate its SEO. Google does this regularly!
How: Learn how to evaluate your site by reading our article and then schedule a time when your team can focus on doing an audit. Divide up tasks, bring in coffee and bagels or a healthy afternoon snack spread and perform your own audit.
Why: If you know your website SEO strengths you know where to stop fretting. When you find the weaknesses you can be proactive to avoid penalties and lower ranks from Google.
Digital Firefly Marketing offers a free SEO audit (do yours first and compare your results to ours so you can see just how much you’ve learned!). Let us assess everything from your code to your titles to discover ways to improve your website SEO.
Learn About Keyword Research, The Backbone of Good SEO
When: October
What: Start thinking about the keywords that influence visits to your site. Keywords are short phrases that reflect what people are searching for. Right now? New Year’s Resolutions is a hot one. When creating content and developing materials you will put on your site all of your team members should have a basic sense of keywords, how to research them, how to use them, and how they work.
How: Have your team think about what search terms people might use to get them to your page. Then test it out: use those terms and see where you show up in Google. Not finding yourself? It’s probably time to start focusing on building a keyword strategy that works and familiarizing your team with how to research keywords.
Why: When your team understands the bones of SEO it imbues your site organically. Content is created; blogs are scheduled; h1’s, titles, and meta descriptions are written, and everything else automatically includes the SEO best practices everyone understands and values.
Reflect, Celebrate, And Set Goals
When:December
What: Take a break from learning and teaching to assess how you’ve done.
How: Randomly ask questions about what SEO is, why it matters, images and SEO, and SEO tricks. Ask about your site and sites in general. Think about SEO, Google and how to seo and create fun questions and a lot of them. Pull them out of a hat. Someone gets it right? Give them the question. No one is sure, put it on another pile. At the end, give everyone some sort of treat (ie. take them out for a round of drinks) and recognize the person who knew the most answers. Gentle ribbing is encouraged. Talk about areas where your site needs more work and assign this accordingly.
Why: Reflection, celebration and goal setting will move your team forward and keep up the momentum.
In a year you can greatly improve your website and teach your team how to think with SEO on their minds whenever they are planning content. Need more ideas for resolutions for 2018? Let’s talk in the comments or on Social Media.
With a penchant for SEO since 1998, Maarit Durity’s experience and expertise in SEO strategy and execution is reflected through the success clients’ websites reap.