Can anybody share an actionable SEO working plan for beginner website owners?
Here are some actionable ideas and useful tips that can help you set up a beginner SEO working plan to get started with your small business website optimization for Google’s online search. But before we go any further, let’s face some cold truth. The thing is that among the other challenging obstacles commonly faced by small startup businesses, a dire need to pull more web traffic – coming from organic search listings – is arguably the most critical task related to organic SEO (particularly for brand-new websites, which have just recently gone live). It means that to drive a sufficient amount of organic search traffic as soon as possible, every single page and every piece of your content should be properly optimized to be prominently shown in the relevant SERPs.
Ultimately, to be displayed among the first ranking positions found on the first page of Google’s search, and therefore start pulling together more clicks/visits, leads/subscriptions – to finally convert the maximum number of potential clients/buyers into the paying customers. Luckily, you can quickly get everything in place (at least at the basic level) with the following not too complicated SEO working plan – simply because accomplishing it on your small business website won’t take much of your time or effort. That being said, here are several foundational approaches and related actionable steps for you to start improving your website’s online performance straight away, without wasting your tight startup budget.
Introduction to SEO: Actionable Working Plan to Get Started
Stage One: Keyword Research & Targeting
Make sure to realize the importance of choosing the right set of core target keywords you’re going to optimize your on-page content for. Otherwise, betting on top popular search terms (i.e., those featuring a sufficiently high search volume), combined with a naturally heating keyword competition (i.e., making them too difficult to rank for) – can quickly end up with actually wasting all your precious time and hard effort you have been investing in website content creation. That way, I recommend initiating your SEO working plan with handling an in-depth keyword research. Start with a good old Google’s Keyword Planner tool (to get a big picture of the whole keyword glossary potentially relevant to the main sphere of your business or the website’s general content topic).
Next, complete your research with polishing the main list of your core target keywords – to finally keep only must-winning keyword assets, in line with grabbing some additional long-tail keyword suggestions (i.e. for even more precisely-targeted content creation – as you will be able to optimize it for longer phrases of top relevancy, which are actually used among your target audience with the maximum frequency). Among the other use-proven keyword research options available in the open access, I recommend you to use KeywordTool.io or Ubersuggest online tool – and quickly refine your main list of target keywords. Ultimately, to get down to your SEO working plan being already supported with a must-winning set of search terms that are definitely popular among your potential clients/buyers and wouldn’t be too hard to rank for.
Stage Two: Body Content Considerations
Understanding that with a poorly optimized content your website would have nearly zero chances of getting any prominence in Google’s online search, you should focus your efforts on creating and publishing only user-friendly content type that would be easily digested by the target audience. Avoid having too bulky plain-text writings that will inevitably look boring for the readers – you’d better have a clear & concise structure splitting your body content with well-optimized H1/H2/H3 Headers & Subheaders. Doing so, don't forget to use bold/italics formatting (of course, when it makes good sense) to help the readers quickly navigate through every content section and easily find what they are actually looking for. Consider revamping a part of your plain-text content into something much more enticing and attractive for grabbing the user’s attention, for example, great infographics, on-page images, video overviews/tutorials, useful spreadsheets/diagrams, top lists, step-by-step guides, “how-to” instructions, and anything else that can potentially help you attract more clicks, reposts, shares, mentions, etc.
Stage Three: Primary On-Page Optimization
And now it’s time to quickly run through the primary on-page elements that should be optimized within your basic SEO working plan. While these content-related elements are found directly on your web pages, they are of preeminent importance for all – both your live visitors, and Google’s search crawling bots that scan your web pages for indexing purposes. That’s why you should make sure everything is in place at least with the following:
- Title Tags – given that this first on-page element carries arguably the greatest weight in the eyes of the search engines, make sure to be wise when filling their precious text space limited within 55-60 characters. To make most out of Title Tags (their SEO performance, to be more precise), try to put your top valuable keyword assets closer to the Title Tag’s beginning. Hint: occasionally including your business brand name time over there (of course, when applicable) will give you another advantage.
- Meta Descriptions – the thing is that for some reason these elements are often overthought by too many novice webmasters and inexperienced website owners. But doing so, those guys are terribly wrong. Simply because Google is using Meta Descriptions to show a web page summary, which would be displayed in the relevant SERPs as “rich snippets” – right under clickable web page titles. So, make sure to fill these important pieces of metadata with only unique content rich with your top relevant keywords. While you are limited to about 120-125 maximum character length, I strongly recommend focusing more on their long-tail expressions). Otherwise, Google would simply show a random snapshot of your web page – therefore making your website less likely to receive a great number of user clicks it actually deserves. That’s it.
- Image ALT Tags – the thing is that Google is simply unable to “read” and “understand” your visual on-page elements, unless you are using the right tagging to “tell” the search engines what every image found directly on your pages is all about. That way, just don’t forget to create a relevant tag for each image, in line with making the same thing with every single filename (when renaming your images upon saving, note that only lowercase text is allowed over there). Try to make them rich with your top relevant keywords, in line with keeping everything clean & concise – and you’re done!
Post a comment
