SEO strategy development takes a momentous amount of time, effort, and expertise. It can feel overwhelming if you’re just getting started. Luckily, there are some simple, quick SEO tasks you can execute that will help you improve your organic search engine rankings without needing to be an SEO guru.
Each of these SEO tasks takes less than an hour and has the potential to save you money, boost your rankings, and get you more business online.
- Add a blog post. You might not have time to plan out a landing page, but the quick-to-publish power of blogging makes adding new content to your site super easy. Focus on a keyword that relates to your niche, and remember to share it on your social networks!
- Do some competitor research. You may not have hours to sit and analyze your competitors’ every metric, but one quick way to catch a glimpse into what you’re up against (and how to beat them) is to search for keywords you’d like to rank for, see who comes up, and plug their URL into the Google Keyword Tool. You might get ideas for keywords you hadn’t thought of.
- Check your URL structure. Do pages on your website or blog look like http://mysite.com/45/a3bc8r97 instead of http://mysite.com/products/my-awesome-product-name? CMSes like WordPress make it simple to make your URLs more SEO-friendly in the settings, allowing your URLs to contain their relevant keywords instead of numbers or random strings of characters.
- Link yourself up. Spend a few minutes looking through your website’s content for opportunities to link to other pages on your site. If you don’t see a relevant keyword in the text, put in a sentence that contains one that relates to another page on your site and pop in a link behind the anchor text. This not only helps your visitors browse but it gives search engines the message that your site is connected and relevant.
- Have a look at your statistics. If you don’t already have a tracking system like Google Analytics embedded in your site, setting that up will take the place of this task (and it’s just as quick!). If you do have an analytics program installed, check in on it and filter your traffic by keyword to see what visitors are typing to find you. A lot of it is likely to be irrelevant, but take notice of the keywords that bring the visitors that stay for a long time on your site. How can you optimize your site’s structure and content to better target those keywords?
You’ve just learned 5 quick and simple ways to give your website an SEO mini-makeover. Are there other SEO tasks that you’ve done in less than an hour that you’d like to share?