DIY SEO Check-Up
If you are a small business owner and have wondered why your website does not pop up at all on the search you desired or has a very low ranking despite the hard work and creativity you poured into its design, it is probably because your website is improperly SEO optimized. Here, I'm going to show you how to do a simple audit and improve your SEO optimization considerably without involving an agency.
First off, I'm sure you might be wondering "What is SEO? And why does it matter if my website is SEO optimized or not?" Well, it matters because SEO determines, to a great extent, how regularly your website as a small business owner gets visited, and without a properly optimized SEO content, all the hard work you put in the designing of your website will be for nothing, as your website will get buried (literally) under the weight of thousands other websites like yours, undeservedly so, yet buried all the same if theirs is more SEO optimized. In very simple terms, SEO are the natural pathways your customers use to enter your site, and the more these pathways are present in your website, the higher your website, and by extension your small business, generate traffic, and hopefully, sales. Well optimized SEO content will deliver 80% results with 20% effort for you, and there exists a variety of free SEO optimizing tools today that you can use as self-help to optimize your sites without referring to any web expert. Some of the tools are:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Moz Local Listing Score
- Keywordtool.io
There is also the choice of using paid SEO optimization tools like Ahrefs and DeepCrawl but those are more for web specialists that might come off a bit too technical small business owners. Listed below are the steps you should take if you want to properly optimize your website as a small business owner.
1) Crawl your Website: The first step you must take is to install an SEO tool, like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and use it to crawl your site. This is what will give you the crucial tips and information you will need to check out as you audit your website. On Google Analytics, you can carry out basic checks such as ensuring it is properly installed on every page, and correct configuration. You can also carry out basic tests on Google Search console.
2) Check for response codes : After crawling, open up your Screaming Frog SEO Spider and jump to the response code. We're on the lookout here for redirects, 404s or other errors, which you must look into, and sort out at once!
3) Next, you should check your URL, ie the thing that shows in the browser when people are browsing through your website. The preferred format is lower case, non ASCII characters that correctly describes what your website is about.
If you take all these steps correctly, you are good to go.
