10 Quick Tips For Improving Your Site’s SEO

For many small business owners and entrepreneurs, time is a scarce commodity. Developing marketing campaigns and learning how to SEO websites will always be pushed aside in favour of more urgent tasks such as invoicing or responding to customer enquiries.

Fortunately, search engine optimisation can easily be done in your (albeit scant) spare time. If you ever find yourself on hold to a call centre, or waiting for a client to arrive, consider dedicating a few minutes to one of these quick tips for creating a fully SEO website…

#1. Google the term “site:yourdomain”.

This displays all Google links to your site. Seeing which pages perform strongly (and which don’t) helps to identify how your brand comes across in search results. It could inspire content or design changes.

#2. Check your site’s authority.

The Open Site Explorer tool is a free platform that indicates how highly regarded a website is in terms of reputation and influence. If your domain/page authority is low, urgent revisions may be required.

#3.  Load every page on your website, and see how quickly each one displays.

Search engines now estimate loading times, penalising slow sites. If a particular page takes ages, find out why. It might be down to large images, or unnecessary code, plugins or content.

#4. Upload a social media post.

This can be about anything relevant to your business, from a general comment to a specific enquiry or promotion. Use a couple of industry keywords, and add an inbound hyperlink to your company website.

#5. Think about ideas for a blog.

This should ideally be hosted on your company website, demonstrating the site is regularly updated with original content. Scribble down possible titles, themes or concepts, and let them percolate in the back of your mind.

#6. Prepare a draft email to send to clients, offering your services as a freelance blogger.

Many firms struggle to generate original content for their own sites, so they welcome guest contributions. They’ll mention your business and might even upload a link.

#7. If your site is hosted on WordPress, install Yoast.

This is great for dipping in and out, individually ticking off recommended SEO website improvements. It takes seconds to add an image description, page header or title tag.

#8. Comment on LinkedIn posts.

Most British adults have a LinkedIn profile, yet its blogging tools are underused. Discuss and debate other people’s posts, hopefully building contacts while publicising your business and driving traffic to your profile.

#9. View one page of your site in Google Analytics.

GA is dauntingly complex, so break it into bite-sized chunks. Examine one page for evidence of low engagement or high abandonment, considering what you can do to improve these stats.

#10.  Look at your site’s robots.txt file.

Every site should have a small text file telling search engine crawlers which web pages to view and index. Use a scanning tool like Screaming Frog to ensure you’re not missing valuable SEO website goals.