It’s a new year! You’ve got a long list of goals. You need an SEO tune-up that gets search visibility and content upgrades that improve your digital marketing. Long-term, multi-layered plans are important. But there are also quick fixes that actually work. Taking one day for an SEO tune-up can make a big impact on your search engine optimization strategy this year.
Here are five steps you can take.
1. Set Up a Reliable SEO Tool
There are lots of great SEO dashboards (with free versions that work great). Tools like Morningscore.io offer numerous ways to check and correct your website SEO. You can monitor multiple URLs, check your site performance against competitors, see how well your content does in generative engine optimization (GEO), and more. Once you set up your account and do your initial scan, you’ll have lots of potential starting points from which to build and sharpen your SEO strategy.
2. Check Your Page Speed
You only have a fraction of a second to make a great impression online. The longer your page takes to load, the less likely someone is to stick around and explore it. Using the Google Page Speed tool helps you understand where slow load times might be impacting your website performance (which, in turn, can affect how well your pages perform in search results).
3. Update Your Alt Text
Log in to your website and check out your media library. Ensure that every image and photo in the library has alt text included. This helps Google bots understand what they’re “looking at” and how relevant it is to the content they’re crawling. Alt text is also a great way to make your website more accessible to people who use screen-reading software.
4. Develop a Content Checklist
SEO is a way of life for people who are serious about improving digital marketing for their business. To make it easier, make optimizing your content a part of your day-to-day. Develop a content checklist that includes some SEO best practices, like:
- Make sure each page has no fewer than 400 words of original content
- Include local SEO keywords, subject matter keywords, and product/service keywords as appropriate.
- Put keywords in the meta title, meta description, and URL of each page you create.
- Place those keywords naturally throughout each page (in the title, in the headers and sub-headers, and throughout the body of the page.
- Include alt text for any images or icons used.
- Check links to make sure they work.
- Add valuable, informative content to your website regularly.
5. Audit Your Site
A site audit shows you where your SEO is strong, what can be improved, and how issues can be fixed. Audits also give you a sense of which issues are high-priority and which can wait. You’ll also learn where your SEO issues are content-related, which ones are technical (related to how your website is built), and which ones could be improved by fixing links, media, and other website components.
We offer free website audits to any business looking to improve their search engine optimization. Ready to see how your site stacks up? Request your FREE SEO audit today.