SEO Basics

If you want your website to rank higher in the search engines, then you need to understand the basics of SEO. One of the most important factors in SEO is the keywords that you use on your website. You need to choose the right keywords and use them in the right places on your website. Another important factor is the content on your website. The content needs to be relevant to the keywords that you are targeting.

Set up GSC and Bing Webmaster tools

Setting up Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) should be the first step in your SEO process. These powerful tools from Google and Microsoft will provide you with valuable insights about your website’s traffic and performance in the search engines.

GSC and BWT will also alert you to any problems that need to be fixed, such as 404 errors or pages that are not being indexed. Both tools are free to use and easy to set up. If you don’t have GSC or BWT set up for your website yet, follow the instructions below.

Set up Google Analytics

SEO is important for every website, but it’s especially important for small businesses. Small businesses have to fight harder for every click, which is why they can’t afford to miss out on any SEO opportunities.

One of the best ways to make sure you’re doing everything you can to optimize your website for search engines is to set up Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you insights into how people are finding your website and what they’re doing once they get there.

It can be overwhelming to look at all of the data that Google Analytics provides, but there are some key metrics that you should focus on:

-Bounce rate: This is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that people are not finding what they’re looking for on your website.
-Time on site: This is the average amount of time that people spend on your website. A high time on site indicates that people are engaged with your content.
-Pages per visit: This is the average number of pages that people view during a visit to your website. A high pages per visit indicates that people are finding a lot of content on your website.
-Conversions: This metric varies depending on what you consider a conversion, but it generally includes any action that you want people to take on your website (such as filling out a form or buying a product).

You can find these metrics by going to “Behavior” and then “Overview” in Google Analytics. Once you know what these metrics mean, you can start working on improving them.

Install and configure an SEO plugin (wordpress)

To get the most out of your WordPress site from an SEO standpoint, you need to install and configure an SEO plugin. While there are many great plugins out there, we recommend using Yoast SEO. Yoast is a popular and comprehensive plugin that helps you optimize your site for both search engines and visitors. Once you’ve installed and activated Yoast, follow these instructions to properly configure it.

Keyword Research

The first step in any SEO campaign is keyword research. You need to find out what keywords your potential customers are searching for, and then optimize your website around those keywords. There are a number of different tools you can use for keyword research, but my personal favorite is Google Keyword Planner.

Identify your competitors

When you’re thinking about how to optimize your website for Google (or any other search engine), it’s important to first understand who your competition is. You might think you don’t have any competitors, but in the world of SEO, everyone is your competitor.

Your competitors are the other websites that are ranking in the search results for the keywords you want to rank for. If you want to rank for “foot massage”, your competition is any other website that is also trying to rank for that keyword.

You can use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to research the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. Just enter a few seed keywords into the tool and it will show you a list of related keywords and their monthly search volume.

Armed with this information, you can start to optimize your website for the keywords that your competitors are already ranking for.

Conduct a keyword gap analysis

When you’re trying to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to focus on the right keywords—those words and phrases that potential customers are actually searching for.

Not all keywords are created equal, and not all will be valuable for your business. The first step in keyword research is to conduct a keyword gap analysis. This will help you identify which keywords you should be targeting to improve your ranking in SERPs.

To conduct a keyword gap analysis, follow these steps:

1. Identify your top 10 competitors. You can use a tool like Alexa or Moz to find out who your top competitors are.
2. Use a tool like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or Wordtracker to find out which keywords your competitors are targeting.
3. Compare the list of keywords you found for each competitor with the list of keywords you’re currently targeting. Identify any gaps—those keywords that your competitors are targeting that you’re not.
4. Prioritize the keywords on the list of gaps you identified. Not all of them will be equally valuable, so prioritize based on factors like search volume and relevance to your business.
5. Update your keyword list and start targeting those new, high-value keywords!
   Find your main ‘money’ keywords
   
   When you’re ready to research keywords for your website or blog, start with your main “money” keywords—the ones that are most valuable to your business.

To find your main money keywords, ask yourself:

-What services or products do I offer?
-Who is my target audience?
-What are my goals for my website or blog?

Once you have a good list of potential keywords, it’s time to start your research. There are a number of different keyword research tools you can use, but we recommend starting with Google AdWords Keyword Planner. This tool will help you understand how many people are searching for each keyword, and how difficult it would be to rank for that keyword.

Technical SEO

Leverage “Inspect URL” feature in GSC

The “Inspect URL” feature in Google Search Console allows you to check if your website is correctly implementing Google Search algorithms, such as the Mobile-Friendly Test or the PageSpeed Insights test. It also allows you to check if your website is correctly implementing other well-known web standards, such as the W3C Markup Validation Service.

To use the “Inspect URL” feature, simply enter a URL into the search box on the Google Search Console homepage and click “Inspect.” Google will then run a series of tests on your URL and provide you with a report detailing any issues that were found.

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendliness is one of the many ranking factors considered by Google when it comes to SEO. In simple terms, this means that your website needs to be easy to read and navigate on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

There are a few ways to make sure your website is mobile-friendly:

• Use responsive design: This means that your website will automatically scale to fit the screen size of the device it is being viewed on.
• Use separate mobile URLs: This means you will have two versions of your website, one for desktop and one for mobile devices.
• Use dynamic serving: This means you will have one version of your website but the server will serve different HTML and CSS code depending on the device it detects.

Whichever method you choose, it is important to test your website on multiple devices to make sure it looks and functions as you want it to. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to do this.

Check your site’s loading speed

You can test your site’s loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Just enter your URL and click “Analyze.” The results will show you how your site is performing and give you specific suggestions for improvement.

Here are a few general tips for increasing your site’s loading speed:

-Reduce the number of HTTP requests made by your site. This can be done by, for example, using CSS sprites to combine multiple images into one.
-Make sure your CSS files are minified and gzipped.
-Load JavaScript files asynchronously or defer them until after the page has loaded.

On-page and Content

Fix duplicate, missing, and truncated title tags

Duplicate title tags are a common issue on websites. A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is meant to be an accurate and concise description of the page’s content. Unfortunately, many website owners create duplicate title tags, which can confuse both visitors and search engines.

There are a few different ways to fix duplicate title tags. One way is to 301 redirect the pages with duplicate title tags to another page on your website. This will help to consolidate your content and make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Another way to fix duplicate title tags is to use the rel=”canonical” tag. This tag tells search engines which version of a page is the original and should be indexed.

If you have missing or truncated title tags, you can also use the rel=”canonical” tag to point search engines to the correct version of the page. Missing or truncated title tags can be caused by a number of different things, but are usually due to technical issues on the website.

If you’re not sure how to fix duplicate, missing, or truncated title tags, you can contact a professional SEO company for help.

Find and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions

One of the most common SEO issues we see is duplicate or missing meta descriptions. This can happen for a number of reasons, but most often it’s because a site has been set up with dynamic or auto-generated descriptions, which can lead to pages having the same or similar descriptions. It can also happen if descriptions are not being created at all, either because they’ve been forgotten about or because someone doesn’t think they’re important.

Whatever the reason, duplicate or missing meta descriptions can have a significant impact on your SEO efforts. Not only do they make it difficult for searchers to figure out what your pages are about, but they can also lead to lower click-through rates (CTRs) from SERPs. In other words, if your pages are not appearing in SERPs with unique and relevant descriptions, you’re likely losing out on traffic and valuable clicks.

The good news is that duplicate or missing meta descriptions are relatively easy to fix. In most cases, all you need to do is update your CMS or content management system to generate unique descriptions for each page, or create descriptions manually for each page yourself. If you’re not sure how to do this, our team at SEOmoz can help!

Find and fix multiple H1 tags

If you have more than one H1 tag on a page, it confuses Google and your visitors about what the most important keyword phrase on the page is. There should only be one H1 tag per page, and it should describe the main topic of that page. You can use other header tags (H2-H6) to break up your content into smaller sections with subheadings.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process of optimizing a website for better search engine rankings through the use of external signals. External signals are signals that are not on the website itself, but are elsewhere on the internet. Many times, these signals come from other websites that are linking to the website.

Analyze your competitor’s link profile

In order to improve your own link profile, it is helpful to first understand the link profile of your competitors. This will give you an idea of what kinds of links they have and where they are getting them from.

To start, you will need to use a link analysis tool like Majestic SEO or Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Once you have found a competitor’s website, enter their URL into the tool and hit “search.”

The tool will then generate a report that will show you all of the links that are pointing to your competitor’s website. In addition, it will also show you the authority of each linking site and the anchor text that is being used.

Once you have this information, you can begin to analyze your competitor’s link profile and look for opportunities to improve your own.

Conduct a link intersect analysis

To really understand what your competitors are up to, you need to know what links they have and where they’re getting them from. This is important because it allows you to:
-See what markets/websites they’re trying to rank for
-Understand their strengths and weaknesses
-Get an idea of their budgets

Link intersects allow you to do just that. By finding out where your competitor’s links are coming from, you can get an insight into their off-page SEO strategy, which in turn can help you formulate your own plan of attack.

To do a link intersect analysis, all you need is a list of your competitor’s websites and a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Once you have these, simply enter your competitor’s domain into Site Explorer and switch to the “Referring Domains” tab. This will show you all the websites that are linking to your competitor.

Target your competitors’ broken backlinks

Off-page SEO (also called “link building”) is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. The more high-quality, relevant websites that link to your site, the higher your site will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

One of the most effective ways to build high-quality backlinks is to find and fix broken links on other websites. When you find a broken link on a website, you can contact the site owner and let them know about it. In many cases, they’ll be happy to replace the broken link with a link to your website.