Understand your audience / who you are trying to attract
- Set SEO objectives and goals you can measure e.g.
- Increasing program or product awareness?
- Gathering qualified contact information for future relationship building?
- To encourage repeat visitors or improving customer support and services
- Brainstorm keyword phrases applicable to your target audience search queries.
- Conduct a competitive analysis to prioritize your keywords and content needs
- Ensure your website is optimized and being indexed by key search engines (sitemaps, mobile usability, etc.)
- Write appropriate content and select appropriate images to optimize your website landing pages, utilizing SEO best practices (including optimizing for local foot traffic and telephone inquiries if appropriate)
- Ensure you maximize on-page (e.g. meta descriptions, keyword URLs and headlines, fresh content updates, etc.) and off-page (social cues, links, anchor text, etc.)
- Set up a Google My Business and/or Bing My Business accounts and ensure your NAP (Name, Address, Phone #) are consistent everywhere they are listed online
Once you have followed these 8 steps you will begin to gather data on what search queries and content are increasing traffic to your website. You can then begin to analyze the results and continue to adapt to marketplace, consumer and competitive changes. The major search engines all have webmaster tools that allow you to (at no cost) manage your website’s SEO performance, view diagnostic errors and uncover insights into how to further optimize the traffic that is coming to your website. Your website analytics can outline what visitors due when they arrive at your website, but by using additional SEO tools (e.g. MOZPro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc.) you will also be able to gather insights about any potential missed opportunities / traffic not visiting your site.
Free Webmaster Tools