Websites are essential for a business to grow and get new customers and the most asked question is how can a small business help themselves and to increase ranking on google and get on page one of Google!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an essential part of any digital marketing and advertising campaign. Search engines like Google determine how high you should rank on the results page from information gathered when they index your site. This can be specific keywords and phrases
Optimising your website can significantly help a small business succeed and ranking on google so I have created a checklist of things to take into account to try and help your business.
Always remember Google is a business that wants to give their customers the best results as that is essential to their business success so make sure you are giving people what they are expecting. E-A-T SEO Google (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness)
Checklist of things you need to look at to get on Google and improve ranking on google:
Keywords need to be researched using a tool like Google keyword planner. Each page needs to be optimised for a single keyword, not multiple different words.
The keywords need to be placed within the webpage header, title tag, alt image tags, URL, and Meta description. Then used within the page itself but NOT excessively.
Always focus on readability and user experience over rankings.
Search engines crawl websites by following links both internal and external links. Links can identify the relationship between the pages, posts and other content. On-page SEO and Off-page SEO
Internal linking structure is where one page on your website links to another to help visitors and search engines find your most important pages and content.
External inbound links to your website indicate to Google that other sites trust your website and give it authority in the field.
Duplicated or Plagiarised content that is very similar to another website content. Be unique and offer help, advice to the question being asked.
Duplicated content can also happen within your own website so it is important to use canonicalization (rel canonical) to indicate to search engines which content and page is the master copy of that content.
How mobile-friendly is your website? There is a huge amount of Google searches through mobile devices every day and because of this Google announced “Prepare for mobile-first indexing” where they will focus on mobile indexing as a priority over desktop from March 2021.
Currently “Mobile devices account for 63% of all Google searches” so you can see why it is so important as we move forward.
Mobile friendly is also important for visitor experience and will look more professional and will attract more visits.
Website speed is critical for SEO and user experience as slow loading can inconvenience users. Google ranks faster-loading websites higher than slower loading websites. Google have PageSpeed tools.
Lazy-loading content where deferring loading of non-critical or non-visible content.
Reviews are essential to help both ranking better and influence potential customers. They also influence how Google see your business relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.
Actively encourage customers to leave feedback and reviews. Reviews offer a way to use the power of reviews to drive more traffic to your website, build trust with potential customers thus improving rankings. Win, win, win!
Make sure search engines can easily crawl your website and where possible make it easier. Make sure to include a Robot.txt file tells googlebots and other searchbots which pages to crawl.
Local SEO is important to small businesses. Create a account to share your business details like name, product, or service, contact details like email address, phone numbers, website address and essential details like opening times.
I hope this checklist has helped give you ideas on how you can help improve your business ranking on google.
Google's algorithm is constantly changing, and updates are very common. Most of these Google algorithm updates are minor and unnoticeable, but you’ll notice there is a big update at least once a year a large-scale overhaul of the SERP (search engine results page) that may impact your business and or your clients, but allows the algorithm to keep up with changing trends.
Read More: How do Google Algorithm Updates affect your website?
But what on earth is SEO? Or, for the non-acronym lovers out there, what is search engine optimisation? It is the way you can help increase traffic from search engines organically. What do we mean by organic traffic? Visitors find your website after finding you on a search engine's results page (SERP) and not through paid ads.
Read More: Basic Website SEO Checklist
Technical SEO is the technical changes you can make to help search engines crawl, index, and rank your website content. A successful SEO strategy includes both on-page and off-page SEO aspects. Off-page SEO involves building backlinks. On-page SEO involves the structure, content, and keywords of your website.
Read Me: Basic Technical SEO Checklist
Off-page SEO tactics are actions you can take to help your website rank better in search engine results pages.
Off-site SEO factors like backlinks and reviews are believed to weight ranking by up to 50%. Google Algorithms and ranking factors constantly change, but currently, these are helpful factors.
Read More: Off-page SEO Checklist
On-page SEO or Onpage optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising each individual webpage to perform the best it can. Impacting on the ability of the page to rank better in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Helping it rank higher in organic search results and earn more relevant traffic from the search engines can help you get the visitors your business wants.
Read More: On-page SEO Checklist
E-A-T SEO is Google way to try and be certain of the websites and content they are recommending to searchers. Google want to deliver the most relevant information — but also the correct, accurate information to their customers.
Read More: E-A-T SEO Google Checklist