If you are a new business, there can be a lot to think about during the process of launching your website. From deciding on a content management system and writing your content, there are a lot of factors to consider to get your website’s SEO off on the right track. With all these tasks it can be hard to figure out where to get started. Below are a few basics and things to do to help optimize your new business’s website for SEO.
Choose a SEO-Friendly Content Management System (CMS)
There are countless CMS platforms to choose from when setting up your business’s website. Unfortunately, you won’t find one that will do all the SEO work for you. However, there are some that are more SEO-friendly than others. WordPress, BigCommerce, and Drupal are a few of our favorite CMS that we work with and are very SEO-friendly to use. There is also a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org that many people don’t take into account. In general, you’ll want to do some research to find which platform will work best for your needs, but here are a few things to take into consideration:
- Can you easily add content on all pages?
- Can you have unique page titles and meta descriptions on each page?
- Can you download plugins or tools such as redirection or broken link checker to help with your SEO?
- Is it hard to navigate the backend or make changes to the site?
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-friendly websites continue to play a large factor in a website’s SEO, because it is how a majority of people search today. If Google sees that a website isn’t mobile-friendly, that website will see a drop in its ranking. Many content management systems are already designed to be mobile-friendly. However, if you aren’t using a CMS that is, you’ll want to put this task on your list. Avoid getting your new business’s website off on a bad track and make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
Find Your Target Keywords
Picking the right keywords for your website is another important SEO strategy, but it can be especially difficult when you haven’t done it before. To start, create a list of words that describe your business, products, or services that you offer. You also want to make sure the keywords you choose are relevant to the landing page you are optimizing. If you choose a keyword that doesn’t relate to your services, then this can hurt your rankings.
Creating and Optimizing Your Content with Keywords
Once you have chosen your target keywords and pages to optimize on your website, you’ll want to begin creating content. Each page of your website is valuable – especially the home page. Search engines crawl millions of pages looking for results that are the most relevant to what a user searched. Therefore, it is ideal to have quality content on the pages you want to optimize with your keywords. Don’t forget to include your keywords in your page titles, meta descriptions, and headings.
Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console
What’s the point of doing all this work if you aren’t keeping track of your SEO progress? Google Analytics is the best way to monitor organic search traffic, so make sure you have properly installed your Google Analytics tracking code into your site. Google Search Console is another helpful tool to keep an eye on crawl errors and search queries with their clicks and impressions.
Implement Schema Into Your Website
If you are unfamiliar with schema, basically it is a small bit of code that provides all local information about a business. The schema code contains the address of the business, phone number, website URL, hours of operation and much more data that provides more information in a “code form” to Google and other search engines. This code markup is only in HTML code and not displayed on the website. Generally, it is put in the footer of the site. Overall, schema helps provide more information to search engines and can help your business website show up in local search results. You can learn more about how to implement schema here.
As you can see, there is quite a lot of work that goes into optimizing your new business’s website for SEO. Following the steps above can help, but don’t expect results overnight. Once you have completed the steps above, start tackling off-site SEO using part 2 of this blog post.
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