No business owner has the time to do a lot of SEO, but you can delegate the SEO basics to an employee or freelancer. Even doing basic SEO tasks can make a difference to what page of Google’s results you appear on. Take control and prioritize.
Your Top Priorities
SEO Basics
Content
UX
Links
Promotion
DIY SEO comes down to proper site management, fresh content and making your site attractive to users.
SEO Basics
SEO is too important to leave to chance. Neil Patel puts it very clearly in his SEO guide,
“If you ever need to hide a dead body, you should place it on the second page of Google search results.”
You MUST do everything in your power to improve your search engine results pages (SERPS) ranking, or no-one is going to find you.
Good site management is a part of SEO that can be outsourced, or delegated to a trusted employee. This SEO Chat article runs you through the basics of SEO and can form the basis of your employees’ training.
The most time-consuming aspect is keyword research using the free Google Adwords tool, but even this is not a task you need to do yourself. With basic training and the right tools, your content team can identify keyword phrases to target.
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Installing the free Yoast SEO plugin on your blog will ensure writers’ awareness of the importance of correct keyword density.
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Yoast also checks for paragraph length, sentence length and other readability factors that will affect your user time-on-page and bounce rate statistics.
Content
Yeah, yeah. We all know content is king, but it takes time!
There is no way to avoid it. Regular fresh and insightful content is part of what will rank your site higher in search engine results pages (SERPS). There will be nobody else who understands your business as well as you, but you need to change that. If you don’t educate writers into how your business works, you will be stuck writing everything yourself, other important tasks will crop up, and the writing won’t happen.
Even the best writer works better with input from you regarding your services and clients.
Take the time to explain your business and how it works to your content production team. Educate your writers about your customer persona, his needs and how your company solves them. Make your business values clear, have a content production plan and feed your writers plenty of ideas for articles.
User Experience (UX)
The most important person in your organization is imaginary. Your customer persona should be writ large in every office, and room in your premises. Use an image of this imaginary persona as a screensaver on all your computers, put posters featuring his image on the backs of all the doors ion the washrooms and in the staff canteen.
If your users dislike your website, you are doomed.
Your site has to look good, use colors users like and that will elicit the emotions related to your business objectives. Minimize clutter, maximize contrast and ensure everything shown on a page is the optimum size, color, and shape. Negative space is every bit as valuable as page components, so avoid trying to do too much on any one web page.
Each page should have one purpose and one purpose only. The rationale behind a web page’s existence should be obvious. Navigation through your site should be simple and easy to use, regardless of the screen size someone is using.
Links
Building links to your website is essential, but if you build them in the wrong way, Google will bury you on page 200 of its SERPS.
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Safe link-building activities:
Learn what links point to you by installing the free Incoming Links plugin
Provide high-quality and insightful resources people in your niche value and will link to without any prompting
Build your reputation by sharing everything you know without asking for payment
Design infographics that link back to you when others install them on their sites
Promotion
It is well-nigh impossible to do even basic promotion without a large team.
Be selective.
If you only focus on one promotion channel, let it be YouTube.
Forget videos about your business; they won’t show in Google and no-one is interested. But, videos that show how to solve problems are another matter.
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Ryan Stuart from Webris says Youtube video promotion is vital as part of your top-of-funnel marketing and engaging customers.
Your Takeaways
Much SEO can be done in-house using basic training and free WordPress plugins to help inform decisions. You must delegate content production, but feed writers with ideas and company information frequently. Concentrate your social media presence on producing How-To videos on YouTube.
The post DIY SEO for Time-Poor Business Owners appeared first on SEO Chat.
Source: SEO Chat
Link: DIY SEO for Time-Poor Business Owners
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