While it’s true that there are SEO best practices everyone should regularly undertake, it’s also true that not everyone has the resources or staff to do those activities as often as recommended, if at all. Typically, a small business is torn in many different directions when trying to establish an SEO checklist that covers everything. This can lead to burnout or ineffective practices that don’t deliver sufficient payback for the work involved.
To get the most out of your SEO practices, it’s important to finely tune your SEO checklist and prioritize based on your business needs.
1. Start with a Master Wish List
List all SEO tasks you do now, and what you would like to include in the future, in a spreadsheet. It can be functional requirements like fixing broken links to publishing content two to three times a week. It can include implementing new SEO tools to starting a social media sales campaign. It’s up to you what’s on your master wish list.
2. Allocate Resources and Staff
Have you struggled to allocate the proper staff to consistently produce quality articles for your blog? Does your staff need training on SEO tools? Do you have SEO tools?
If you are going to make SEO a priority, then you must allocate both time and money to in order to cover the costs of your staff and SEO tools.
3. Prioritize Tasks
There are several ways you can prioritize your SEO tasks once you have them laid out in a table with associated resources and staff allocated.
Go for the low-hanging fruit since these tasks take very little time to implement on a regular basis. Low hanging fruit tasks are those that minimize resource costs or maximize profits.
- Identify tasks that may not be as easy to do, but have a high payback either in more traffic or sales. You may need to hire experts to help you with some design issues, but the loss from not doing the task may make you bump it to the top of your list anyway.
- Find better ways to do the tasks through automation tools or services. These can cost money and take time to learn, but can be well worth it in the end. You may not be able to divert time or money to these items right away, but they should be on your list of low-risk tasks that could end up making your business more efficient and productive in the long range.
Here’s a sample list sorted by priority:
Top Priority Tasks
- Fix Broken Links – If your links are broken, the search engines can’t crawl your site efficiently. Plus, people who come upon a broken link often get frustrated and leave the site. So, make sure your links are working.
- Poor Performing Link Structures – Are your blog posts linking to other relevant content on your site? If not, you could be missing a golden opportunity to keep your visitors there longer.
- Fix Internal Issues – Anything that can hamper your business needs to be a top priority.
- Get Properly Indexed for Major Search Engines – You can’t be found via searches if you’re not properly indexed with the search engines, so it’s a top priority.
Medium Priority
- Add Social Media to Blogs and Campaigns – Does each blog post have social media buttons embedded into them so that your visitors can easily share them with their friends and followers? Have you developed business profiles on leading social media sites? Are you posting your new content on social media profiles to drive traffic back to your website?
- Convert to a Mobile-Friendly Design – If you don’t convert to mobile-friendly content for your website you are automatically being ranked lower by Google for those pages. Outsource this task, if necessary. With VSAT networks making mobile technology available even in the most remote locations, this is one priority that will just increase in demand over time.
Low Priority
- Update Site Look – Does your site is look good across every platform? If not consider site redesign.
- Implement Social Media Automation Tools – Track the results of campaigns and automate publishing schedules with different social media tools to get the most out of your social media profiles.
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