There are a few optimizations that can be made to each page on your website to help improve search engine optimization. Before you can implement the on-page optimization checklist, you need to make sure you’ve done your keyword research and understand the targeted keyword for the page.
You want to choose one primary keyword. The page will end up ranking for multiple terms, but you want to start by having a primary keyword to focus on for each page. And ideally, your pages will all focus on unique topics.
Once you understand the targeted keyword and write your article, you’ll want to follow this on-page optimization checklist to fine tune your article for SEO.
To easily refer back to this information, download the On-Page Optimizations Cheatsheet below.
Add the keyword to the title.
Confirm the keyword appears in the page title. The closer to the beginning of the title the better. The page title tag is displayed as the main title in Google search results. To make sure it isn’t truncated in the search results, keep the title under 60 characters or less than 512 pixels. To see what the title tag code looks like and how to add one in WordPress, view the guide to HTML tags for SEO.
Add a meta description.
Make sure to add a meta description to your page. And make sure it includes your targeted keyword. If you’re using WordPress, you can add this using the Yoast plugin. The meta description appears below the title in the search results. It alone doesn’t impact your rank, but if it’s persuasive it can increase the likelihood of a user clicking on the link. More clicks do have a positive impact on rank. Also, the search engine will bold the search query if it appears in the description. So add a persuasive meta description that includes the keyword you are targeting.
Add keyword to URL.
If you have control over your URL make sure it includes your keyword. To optimize the URL for SEO, you want it to be human readable (meaning no confusing codes, just plain English) and concise.
Include only one H1 tag and add the keyword.
Make sure you only have one H1 tag. This will likely be taken care of by your website theme, but if you manually assign header tags make sure only the top most prominent title uses an H1 tag. Also, confirm your keyword appears in the H1 tag (closer to the beginning is best). Use H2 and H3 tags to format any other headings and subheadings throughout the article.
Add keyword to subheadings and paragraphs.
Review your article. Locate any instances where you can add in your keyword, topic, or any keyword variants. You don’t want to include the exact phrase every single time, but add similar relevant phrases. Don’t over do it, keep it subtle and natural. Try to incorporate the keyword in a few subheadings and paragraphs.
Make sure your keyword appears in the first paragraph.
As we just discussed, you want your keyword and keyword variants to be sprinkled throughout the article in a natural way. This is especially important in the first paragraph. Make sure the keyword appears in the first paragraph of the article.
Add images with alt tags.
Add at least one image to your content. Make sure to add alt tags to any image tags. This increases the chance that your images will appear in image searches. Also, this is another opportunity to try and add your targeted keyword or a close variant as another indicator to the search engines of how your article is relevant to the topic.
Add internal links.
Internal links have many benefits. Internal links create pathways for both readers and search engines to navigate your website. They help distribute the value of one page to another page. And they can increase the time users spend on your website.
Review your article and identify any part of the content where it would benefit the reader to add a link to an existing article on your site. Then, review your existing articles to determine if there are any places in your existing content where it would be a benefit to the reader to add a link to the new article. Here is a process you can follow to add internal links to your site.
Include more than 500 words.
There isn’t a hard and fast rule to use for length. Typically marketers aim for at least 500 words, and a lot of people recommend long-form content of at least 3,000 words. The best rule to follow is to write the amount of copy that makes sense for the topic. Quality is more important than quantity. But, if your page has less than 500 words, you may want to add more content to it if you’d like it to be ranked in search engines.
To easily refer back to this information, download the On-Page Optimizations Cheatsheet below.
The User Experience is Always the Priority
Remember, you aren’t trying to hack your article to magically appear high in the search rankings. You’re just trying to make it a little easier for the search engines to identify what the article is about. Your target audience should always be first in mind. If optimizing for perfect SEO makes the article less useful to people, then don’t do it! Optimizing for the reader first is the only way to ensure long-term success.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
Staying home with your kids is a privilege that once you’ve experienced it, you don’t want to lose it. But, sometimes finances don’t stretch as far as you’d like and you start trying to figure out how you can bring in some money while still staying home with the kids. The idea of starting a blog that makes money sounds great, and you hear success stories about people who have done just that, but is it possible for you? We will guide you through what you need to know so you can understand how to start a Mom blog and make money.
Choose a Focus
The first thing you need to do is decide on the topic your blog will focus on. You need to choose a niche. To do this, think about what you want to be known for. Are you the Mom who cooks? The Mom who travels? The Mom who crafts? Or, is your blog about something entirely different?
You don’t have to choose a topic specific about being a Mom. I blog about digital marketing tactics you can do yourself. I am a Mom, I stay home with my kids, and I love spending time with them. But I’ve decided that isn’t what I want to be known for online. I want to be known for helping entrepreneurs demystify SEO.
So, choose a topic that makes sense for you. Determine what you want to be known for and how you will create targeted blog content to help make that happen.
Understand Who You’re Talking To
Once you understand the focus for your blog, figure out exactly who you’re talking to. The best way to do this is to create a marketing persona.
You want to have a clear idea of the exact person you want to help. Once you have this, you’ll be able to write each blog article and social post to resonate with that exact person. Being clear about who you’re talking to will allow you to write persuasive content and help establish you as an authority in your niche. That way, you’re more likely to attract a passionate reader who will eventually convert when you have something to sell.
Create Your Blog
Now that you understand the focus of your blog, and the audience you want to attract, it’s time to create your blog. You’ll choose a platform and a host as well as name your blog and get a domain name. Then you’ll choose a website theme, configure your site, and start building out content. To see exactly how to accomplish all of that, view the complete guide on how to start a blog.
Identify the Content People Want to Know
Once you’re ready to start creating content, you need to make sure you understand what content your audience is interested in. Creating content takes time, so you want to make sure that time is spent writing about topics people are searching for.
To do this, you need to conduct keyword research. Keyword research will allow you to brainstorm content ideas and identify which terms have a high monthly search volume and low competition. That is the content you’ll want to start with. View the full keyword research guide to learn exactly how to perform keyword research and download a free template.
Ideally, you’ll want to post a new blog article weekly. But, quality is more important than quantity. So, if your schedule only allows you to post a new article every other week or once a month, make that your goal and schedule accordingly.
Regardless of the posting frequency you choose, you want to make sure you are posting consistently. So, choose a timeframe you can commit to and then make sure you are consistently adding new content to your website.
Time to Monetize
Once you have a following, determine how you will monetize your site. Now, it’s not bad to have an idea for how you will monetize even before you have an audience, but be flexible. You want to make sure that your monetization efforts align with the audience you’ve attracted and help them solve a problem. Sometimes as blog traffic grows, our audience can shift one way or another. You may find that a different monetization route makes more sense for the audience you’ve attracted.
There are several different ways you can monetize your blog. You can offer coaching, you can sell an ebook, a digital course, or a digital download, or you can make money with affiliate marketing. To learn more about each of those monetization paths and determine which one would be best for your site, view our complete guide on how to monetize a blog.
Creating a blog won’t bring you money overnight. But, if you have a clear focus and post consistently, it will grow into a profitable business.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
Having the right tool for the job can significantly improve the experience and generally allows you to complete the task quicker and more efficiently. When it comes to digital marketing, there are hundreds of different tools to choose from depending on the task you’re trying to accomplish. It can be difficult to sift through the options and determine which tool is the right choice for you.
Digital marketing tasks can become broad when you’re a solopreneur. Whether your digital marketing tasks include SEO, design, project management, or all of the above, we’ll list the best tools for the job. And since we know there isn’t much of a budget for fancy tools when you’re working to get your business up and going, we’ll focus on tools that are either free or low cost.
Website Data
Gathering data from your website is important so you can make data-driven decisions. Even if you don’t understand how to read the data yet, and don’t understand how to use the tools, you still want to set them up.
The three tools that we recommend to gather website data are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools. All three of those tools are free. And all three of them start collecting data once they are set up. They do not pull in historical data. So, get them set up so they can start collecting data even if you don’t yet understand how to use the data.
Setting up Google Analytics is simple and a no-brainer for every business. It’s free and provides valuable insights into what your site visitors are doing.
Google Analytics provides data about your website visitors. It not only shows how many people are on your website, it also displays which pages they viewed, entered on, and left on. It allows you to see how many people converted, what traffic source they came from including organic search, referral, and social, and so much more.
All of this insight and data is free with Google Analytics.
Without visitor data you are operating your website blind. If you don’t know how many people are on your site, where they came from, and what they do when they’re on your site, you can’t make intelligent changes. This data is pertinent to optimizing your website, and lucky for you, it’s free and easy to set up.
If you don’t already have this installed on your website, let’s start here. Here is a guide you can follow to setup Google Analytics.
The Google Search Console contains data and utilities meant to increase website traffic and visibility on Google. Why would anyone turn down free advice from the people they’re trying to impress? The Search Console is what Google uses to communicate issues and errors to website owners and administrators. Ultimately, they use it to give free personalized feedback. If you take some time to listen you’ll likely see some search improvements.
To set it up, you can follow the Google Search Console guide.
For all of the same reasons marketers set up Google Search Console on their site, they also set up Bing Webmaster Tools. The only thing better than getting feedback on your site directly from a search engine, is getting feedback from two search engines! Just because the majority of organic search traffic comes from Google, doesn’t mean the Bing Webmaster Tools should be ignored.
To create beautiful graphics with no design experience, try Canva. Whether you’re creating an image for your blog or a social media graphic, Canva makes it super simple. You can choose from a template and fine tune it to match your brand, or you can build a graphic from scratch and easily drag and drop images and text until you have an image you’re happy with.
I find I use Canva for just about every image these days. Even though I know how to use Photoshop, Canva makes the process so simple that for most cases it just doesn’t make sense to use anything else.
If you do need to use Photoshop or Illustrator but can’t fit the tools in your budget, I’d recommend Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Photo is the Affinity equivalent to Photoshop, and Designer is the Affinity equivalent to Illustrator.
Though they are not identical, there hasn’t been anything that I would normally do in Photoshop or Illustrator that I haven’t been able to do with the Affinity tools. I have been amazed with how similar they are and how easy it is to transition and learn. You can even open PSD (photoshop) files in these tools if that’s the format you receive.
The best part, and reason why I made the change, is instead of a monthly subscription fee, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are a one-time flat fee of $50 each. These tools are certainly worth the cost if you ever need to do more advanced image editing or graphic creation.
Ubersuggest includes a slew of data that can help with SEO. The Ubersuggest data can assist when you’re conducting keyword research, performing a competitor analysis, or even tracking your website ranking. This tool is easy to use and does have a free option. The free option limits the amount of daily searches, but it’s certainly enough to get you started.
If you need keyword ideas, Answer The Public can help. This tool expands on a keyword topic and groups it out by questions, prepositions, comparisons and more. This is an amazing resource to be able to drill down on some of your topics and find content that is more targeted than your initial idea.
Google Trends allows you to view how popular keywords are on Google. You can review one term or compare two. You can determine which term is more popular. You can also find related topics and related search queries.
Screaming Frog is software you download and install on your computer. It allows you to scan your (or any) website and makes it easy to review on-page SEO elements. Once the scan completes you’ll be able to determine if you’re missing any title tags, H1 tags, or meta descriptions and if you have any duplicates. It is free to scan up to 500 pages. If you want to scan more than 500 pages you’ll have to pay the one-time fee to purchase the software.
To find broken links on your (or any) website, use BrokenLinkCheck.com. It’s a free tool that will run a scan and report back any broken links. It identifies the URL that is not working, the type of error it’s receiving, and the URL of the page where the broken link was found.
Hotjar is like the swiss army knife of user research. This tool includes just about anything you could ask for. It has heatmaps, scrollmaps, feedback polls, surveys, and session recordings.
Google Optimize allows you to perform split tests on your website for no cost. It is simple to use and the goals tie in with your existing Google Analytics goals. If you have enough traffic to start split testing, this is a great option.
Page Speed Tests
Both Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix are free tools to test your website speed. With both of these tools, you enter your URL, then it analyzes the page and gives you a report of how the page performed on various page speed factors. Each item that needs improvement includes information about how that item can be improved.
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that allows you to enter in your website URL and then it will perform a scan to determine if it is mobile friendly. If it is not, it will list some recommended improvements.
Responsinator makes it easy to review your site on various device sizes. Just enter in your website URL and then you can scroll down one long page and view the URL you entered inside several different devices.
HootSuite allows you to schedule out social media posts. It’s easier to keep up with your social media content if you schedule out posts on a weekly basis. HootSuite makes it easier to accomplish that. With the free option, you can schedule up to 30 posts.
Quuu Promote is my favorite content promotion tool. It allows you to use your content to create social posts for others to share on their social media networks. When people share your article it comes across as a natural share from a personal social account. It is an easy way to get a ton of social visibility.
Before using this, make sure social shares are a goal for you and your business. Shares may not lead to clicks and site visits, but they’ll give the content more visibility and a better chance that someone will decide to link to it on their own site.
If you need a free alternative to Microsoft Office, Google Drive is worth trying. Google Docs is their Microsoft Word equivalent and Google Sheets is their Microsoft Excel equivalent. Both tools are very robust and excellent tools to create and edit documents for no cost.
If you need to do any video editing, Camtasia is a great way to do it. It is simplistic yet contains the features you need to create professional videos. It has a bit of a hefty price tag, so before you buy make sure you download the free trial and test it to make sure it’s right for you.
If you have an apple computer, you may want to look into iMovie instead. This is a good choice but not available for Windows users.
If you need to edit audio for a podcast, Audacity is completely free and a great option. It’s not too difficult to get started with and offers several advanced features for people who are more comfortable with audio editing.
If you have an apple computer, you may want to look into Garageband. This is a good choice but not available for Windows users.
If you want to start a podcast and need a podcast hosting service, I’d recommend Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout not only hosts the podcast episodes, it also makes it super simple to publish your podcast across many different podcasting platforms.
If you’re just getting started and need a free marketing email platform, MailChimp is a good choice. It’s simple to use. The free account even allows you to set up automations.
The downfall with MailChimp is it doesn’t allow you to move a subscriber from one automation to the next or move them list to list. So, when you start creating more automations and add complications to your email marketing campaigns, you end up having duplicate subscribers on your lists. This can make things get confusing and since the cost is based on subscriber count, this can pull you out of the free account quicker and can end up costing you more money than necessary.
This isn’t an issue when you’re first starting and things can be simple. Once you want to start adding content upgrades and moving people from list to list, I’d recommend upgrading to the next email platform in our list.
ConvertKit makes it easy to manage your marketing emails. It does cost a minimum of $29 per month though so you want to make sure you are taking advantage of the features and making it worth the expense.
With ConvertKit you can drag and drop automation workflows to easily move subscribers around various email campaigns. They can enter with a content upgrade, then be sent information about a free course, once they opt into the course you can start sending that content, then when they’re all finished you can move them over to your newsletter so they continue to keep in touch with you.
This system makes it very easy to manage and create email campaigns.
Trello allows you to manage tasks in a digital kanban style. It has multiple vertical lists that you add tasks to. The tasks are added in blocks. It’s a similar look and feel to post-it notes on the wall. As a task progresses through the various stages along the way to completion, you move that task to the appropriate vertical list to match its current stage.
The trick with Trello is to name your lists in an appropriate manner for how your work progresses. The most simplistic lists would be To Do, Doing, and Done. The lists that I like to use to match our workflow are Brainstorm, Upcoming, Blocked / Discuss, In Progress, QA, Move Live, and Completed. The tasks typically always move to the right and eventually end up under Completed. Sometimes an item can move back to Blocked / Discuss if an error occurs and then it restarts its journey towards the Completed list.
The other task management tool I rely on is ClearPath Online. Now, to be completely transparent I do want to point out that this is a product I helped create. But, our digital marketing tools list would not be complete without it. This tool helps entrepreneurs grow their own website traffic. And it’s used consistently by its creators. We don’t just market it to others, we use it to grow our own brand and practice what we preach.
ClearPath Online is preconfigured with the inbound marketing tasks you need to complete to grow your own website traffic. The tasks are personalized for you and will appear in your task list at the optimal time. The system creates a routine for you and makes it simple to understand what you need to do, when to do it, and even includes simple step-by-step directions so you know how.
WordPress Plugins
If your website is built with WordPress, there are a few plugins that are valuable digital marketing tools as well.
Redirection allows you to add 301-redirects. This is useful if you update a page URL. This plugin will automatically create a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. You can also manually go in and create a redirect. This is helpful if you want to create a shorter version of your URL to share on social sites.
And lastly, Boxzilla. Boxzilla allows you to create lightbox pop up modals on your WordPress website. When someone clicks a link to play a video or clicks a sign up form, you can use boxzilla to open up that element in a box that overlays the current page.
These are the tools I rely on when looking to improve my SEO, grow my website traffic, and increase conversion rates.
Do you have any digital marketing tools you rely on that aren’t included in this list? Please share them in the comments!
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
Performing an SEO audit on your website can help uncover items where your website can be improved to increase search engine rankings. An SEO audit leaves you with a checklist of SEO fixes and improvements. We’re going to walk through exactly how to do an SEO audit for your own website.
When to Perform an SEO Audit?
There are two primary reasons why you would perform an SEO audit on your own website.
The first reason is if you suspect you have an issue. If you aren’t happy with your traffic from search engines, if you feel your website isn’t moving up in search rankings, it’s time to perform an SEO audit and determine if there are any issues that need to be resolved.
The second reason is if you haven’t focused on SEO before. If you’ve recently decided you want to start leveraging SEO to grow your traffic, performing an SEO audit is a good way to get started.
The Tools You’ll Need
This audit is specifically designed to use a minimal amount of marketing tools. When you’re getting started, an SEO audit can be beneficial. However, when you’re getting started you also probably aren’t making as much money as you’d like and you have low to no budget. So, we aren’t going to use expensive tools for the audit. For each item we’ll list out a free tool you can use to accomplish that part of the audit.
Audit Components
We’ll break the audit into three different parts; the technical aspects, on-page elements, and user experience.
To easily document your SEO audit, download the free Google Sheets SEO audit template below.
These will be the components of our SEO audit:
Technical
Check for duplicate versions of site
Confirm pages are indexed
Robots.txt
XML Sitemap
Site Speed
Broken Links
On-Page
Page Title
H1 Tag
Meta Description
URL Structure
Keyword Focused
User Experience
Mobile Friendly
Content Structure
Images / Video
Above the Fold / CTA
About Page
Technical Aspects
We’ll start by going over the technical aspects of the audit.
Check for Duplicate Versions of the Site
Let’s start the audit by checking for duplicate website versions. You only want to have one primary version of your domain. All other versions should redirect to the primary. The various versions include http, https, and the www and non-www versions. To test this, type each variation into a browser and make sure it automatically redirects to your preferred version. So, if my preferred version is https://mywebsite.com I would check and confirm these variations redirect to that domain:
http://mywebsite.com
https://www.mywebsite.com
http://www.mywebsite.com
Since my preferred variation had https and non-www, I check to confirm the http and www versions of both redirect to my primary variation.
Ideally, you do want https to be the primary variation because you want your website to be secure. There is a minor boost in search rankings for having a secure site. There is no preference between the www and non-www versions. That is completely your preference. Neither option impacts search rankings either way.
Update your audit list:
If every version redirects to your primary version, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If any of those versions did not redirect, flag this audit item so you can come back and add a redirect.
Confirm Pages are Indexed
Next, we’ll confirm pages are being indexed in Google. There are two ways to do this, both of which are free.
The first option is to search directly in Google. Go to Google and use the site attribute to restrict the search results to your website. To use it, just type site: directly before your domain.
site:mywebsite.com
You will see at the top of the search it displays the number of results. It will say something such as About XXX results.
The number of results gives you an idea of the number of indexed pages for your website. If this search doesn’t find any results or if there are only a couple, there is likely a problem. If it finds a handful but you know your website has hundreds, you’ll want to figure out why there are so many pages missing. If it shows a few hundred, and you agree your site has a few hundred, then that helps to confirm pages are being indexed properly.
The second option to confirm pages are being indexed, is to use the Google Search Console. This is a free tool. But, if you haven’t already set this up, it won’t have any data in it yet. If that’s the case, it’s still a good idea to set up Google Search Console to use later, but use the first option to complete the audit.
If you already had Google Search Console configured, you can view indexed pages by going to Index > Coverage > Valid. This will show the number of pages your website has indexed in Google. The number should be steady or increasing.
Update your audit list:
If the number of indexed pages looks appropriate to you, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the number of indexed pages seems too low, flag this audit item so you can come back and figure out why. You’ll want to check to see if there is a meta robots tag or robots.txt file causing an issue.
Robots.txt
Next, you’ll check your robots.txt file to confirm nothing pertinent is being blocked. To access your robots.txt file add robots.txt to the end of your website domain.
https://mywebsite.com/robots.txt
If you have a robots.txt file, this will display it in your web browser. Check to make sure there is nothing unexpected listed under disallow. If you aren’t sure what you’re looking at, you can view the full robots.txt file guide here.
If you don’t have a robots.txt file, that’s okay. It isn’t required. If there are pages you’d like to keep the search engines out of, you can refer to the robots.txt guide above and add one. The robots.txt file isn’t a guarantee that those pages won’t be indexed but it does guide the search crawlers so there is a better chance they will be able to index all of the pages you want indexed.
Update your audit list:
If the pages disallowed in your robots.txt file look appropriate to you, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If there are any questionable items in your robots.txt file, flag this audit item so you can come back and fix any issues.
XML Sitemap
Next, check to make sure you have an XML sitemap. The sitemap is another file that helps search engines understand what content to index on your website.
If you aren’t sure if you have a sitemap, sometimes your sitemap URL is included in your robots.txt file. You can look for it there. The sitemap is most commonly named sitemap.xml and located in the root file, so there is a good chance you can find it by going to https://mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml. However, this is not a requirement, so there is a chance it is configured differently on your website.
Similar to the robots.txt file, you want to review your sitemap and ensure the content listed looks appropriate. You want your sitemap to include the content that you want indexed in the search engines.
If you don’t have a sitemap, you want to create one. A sitemap can only be beneficial. It makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your website and identify the content that needs to be indexed. View the full sitemap guide to learn more about what a sitemap is and how to create one.
Update your audit list:
If you have an XML sitemap and the content looks appropriate, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If you don’t have an XML sitemap, or if the items included in your sitemap look questionable, flag this audit item so you can come back and fix any issues.
Site Speed
The speed of your website can impact both search engine rankings and user experience.
Run a couple of tests to determine if there are improvements you can make to improve the speed of your site. There are two tools you’ll want to use to test site speed, both of which are free.
You’ll want to run both Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. With both of these tools, you enter your URL, then it analyzes the page and gives you a report of how the page performed on various page speed factors. Each item that needs improvement includes information about how that item can be improved.
Update your audit list:
If the page speed tools found no issues, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the page speed tools found any areas for improvement, flag this audit item so you can come back and determine if you can implement any of the suggested fixes.
Broken Links
The last of the technical items to review, is to check for broken links. To do this, you can use BrokenLinkCheck.com. It’s a free tool that will run a scan and report back any broken links. It identifies the URL that is not working, the type of error it’s receiving, and the URL of the page where the broken link was found.
Update your audit list:
If no broken links were found, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If there were any broken links, flag this audit item so you can come back and fix or replace each broken link.
On-Page Elements
Now we’ll move onto the on-page elements. For these items, it will be easiest to run a scan so you can easily identify any issues across your entire site. Checking each individual page would be much more time consuming.
To run the scan, you can use Screaming Frog. It is free for up to 500 pages. If you need to scan more than 500 pages, there is a one-time fee to purchase the software.
Page Title
You want to make sure every page has a unique title tag. The title tag is one of the elements search engine spiders can use to identify what the page is about. The title tag is also the text that is used to display as the main headline in search results.
Make sure to include the targeted keyword for the page in the title tag. Also, keep the title tag under 60 characters or 512 pixels in length. That way it doesn’t get truncated in the search results.
To find this information, look at your website scan in Screaming Frog. It lists the title tag under Title 1 and then you can view the Title 1 Length and Title 1 Pixel Width. If you click on the Page Titles tab at the top, you can easily filter the results by various categories such as duplicate titles and titles with over 60 characters.
Update your audit list:
If every page has a unique title tag that is less than 60 characters or 512 pixels, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If any titles were duplicates or too long, flag this audit item so you can come back and fix any issues.
H1 Tag
The header tags create the hierarchy of your page content. The most important header is called the H1 tag. There should be only one H1 tag on each page. And, you want to include the targeted keyword for the page in the H1 tag. The rest of the header tags will be H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6. The higher the number, the less important and lower in the hierarchy the header is.
To identify if you have one (and only one) H1 tag on each page, refer back to your Screaming Frog scan. Under the H1-1 column you’ll be able to see all of your H1 tags. There should not be an H1-2 column. If there is, review any pages that have data in that column. Those are pages with more than one H1 tag.
To quickly review H1 tags, click the H1 tab at the top. There you will be able to filter the results to quickly identify pages with missing or duplicate H1 tags.
Update your audit list:
If every page has a unique H1 tag, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If any page is missing an H1 tag or has a duplicate, flag this audit item so you can come back and fix any issues.
Meta Description
The meta description does not impact search ranking but it is used as the description that appears on the search results page. It can help convince people to click through to your site.
Similar to title tags and H1 tags, you want meta descriptions to be unique on each page. And the meta description should be under 155 characters so it isn’t truncated in the search engine results.
To identify if your pages include meta descriptions, refer back to your Screaming Frog site scan. The meta description is listed under the Meta Description 1 column. There will also be a column titled Meta Description 1 Length which lists the character length of each meta description.
If you click the Meta Description tab at the top you’ll be able to filter the list by meta descriptions that are missing, duplicates, or over 155 characters.
Update your audit list:
If every page has a unique meta description below 155 characters, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If any page has a missing, duplicate, or long meta description, flag this audit item so you can come back and fix any issues.
URL Structure
URLs should be human readable. They should not include IDs or codes. If possible, they should also include the targeted keyword for the page.
If you edit any URLs make sure you add a 301-redirect to the old URL so it redirects to the new URL and any existing links do not break.
Update your audit list:
If the URL structure is human readable and does not include cryptic codes, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the URL structure is overly complicated and difficult to read, flag this audit item so you can come back and determine if there is a fix. Depending on the content management system you’re using, you may not have much control over the URL structure. If you do have control and can fix it, create a plan to take care of it. If you can’t control it, don’t worry about it too much. It only has a minor impact and it isn’t worth breaking your existing URLs.
Keyword Focused
You want to make sure you’re focusing on optimizing for phrases people are searching for. If you aren’t sure what people are searching for, you should conduct keyword research.
Take a look at some of your most important pages. These are likely category pages and popular articles and guides. Are these pages optimized for keywords people search for? Or, do they use generic terms and have no consistent keyword theme?
Update your audit list:
If the content pages are all keyword focused, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the content pages are not optimized for a particular keyword or phrase, flag this audit item so you can come back and make improvements. You’ll want to do keyword research and optimize your pages for a relevant keyword.
User Experience
Moving on to our last section of the audit, user experience. The user experience plays a big role in SEO. The goal of the search engines is to provide an optimal user experience by providing high quality relevant results. If your website provides a high quality user experience then you are helping align with the goals of the search engines and setting your website up for long-term SEO success.
Additionally, if you’re spending time to improve SEO to get more traffic to your website, it only makes sense to also improve the user experience. Once you get those people to visit your website, you want to make sure your website can convert those people. Otherwise, the traffic doesn’t provide much value.
Mobile Friendly
Make sure your website looks good on mobile devices as well as desktop. If you aren’t sure, you can use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to find out if your website is mobile friendly.
Update your audit list:
If the site is mobile friendly, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the site is not mobile friendly, flag this audit item so you can come back and make improvements.
Content Structure
You want your website easy to scan. People like to review the headings and bullets on the page to see if the content is worth reading. Additionally, having your keyword in headings and emphasized throughout the page helps search engines understand its importance.
Update your audit list:
If the content is easy to scan, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the content structure is all one block of text and doesn’t include subheadings or lists, flag this audit item so you can come back and make improvements.
Images / Video
Make sure your content includes relevant images and video where appropriate. The images should also include alt tags. The alt tags should include the keyword for the page or a keyword variant.
Update your audit list:
If the content includes images and/or video, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If there are no images or videos, flag this audit item so you can come back and make improvements.
Above the Fold / CTA
What you see without scrolling when the page first loads, is referred to as “above the fold”. You want to make sure that from that first screen people understand what you do and what you want them to do. That means, you need a call-to-action at the top of the page and a clear message about the value you provide.
A call-to-action could be a sign up button, a purchase button, or a download button. It’s whatever action you want people to take next. It doesn’t have to get them to the end goal, it just needs to get them off the homepage to the next stage.
Update your audit list:
If the above the fold area includes a call-to-action and a clear value proposition, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the area above the fold is missing a call-to-action or a clear value proposition, flag this audit item so you can come back and make improvements.
About Page
The about page is normally the second most commonly viewed page after the homepage. People like to buy from people. Make sure to have an About page in your main navigation and make sure the page clearly shares your story.
Update your audit list:
If the site has an about page in the header and the about page shares your story, great! Check this item off your audit list.
If the about page is not in the header or if the about page doesn’t share your story, flag this audit item so you can come back and make improvements.
Complete Your List and Take Action
Once you’ve reviewed all of these audit items, make sure you document your findings. Whether you use the provided template or not, you’ll want to take notes so you can make sure to take action and correct any issues found during your audit.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
If you’ve looked at your acquisition sources in Google Analytics, you’ve probably seen Direct traffic or (direct) / (none) listed towards the top. What does that mean, where are those people coming from? What is Direct traffic in Google Analytics? Is it possible that many people are directly typing in the URL into the browser? While that’s certainly some of it, it is not the only cause of direct traffic. Let’s discuss what direct traffic is and the many different factors that cause it.
Direct Traffic is Traffic from an Unknown Source
When Google Analytics can’t identify where the traffic is coming from, it categorizes it as Direct traffic. Direct traffic is the fallback when the acquisition source is unknown.
Direct traffic is a normal part of website behavior, however, it isn’t terribly useful when reviewing your digital analytics. It makes it hard to make decisions about your data when it isn’t clear where that person came from.
Because of this, Google Analytics uses last non-direct click attribution. What that means, is if someone visits your site from an organic search, then the next day they directly type in your URL, Google Analytics attributes that session to organic search, not direct traffic.
This makes the data more meaningful and easier to understand the value of various acquisition sources. It also means, although direct type in is a potential source of direct traffic, it doesn’t account for as much of the direct traffic as it would if last non-direct click attribution wasn’t used.
By default, Google Analytics has a campaign timeout of 6 months. What that means, is that original organic search would then cause that next URL direct type-in to count as organic traffic for 6 months. You can change the campaign timeout to be anywhere between 1 day to 2 years. You can edit this setting under Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Session Settings.
If your buying cycle is long, you may want to increase this. If it’s short, you may want to decrease this. If you aren’t sure, just leave it at the default. For most people the 6 month default setting will provide accurate data.
Causes of Direct Traffic
Direct Type in or Browser Bookmark
As we’ve already discussed, one of the possible sources of direct traffic is when people type the website URL directly into the browser. The same thing can be accomplished by the user creating a bookmark for the website and clicking the bookmark. This type of traffic would be counted as direct traffic in Google Analytics.
HTTPS to HTTP
HTTPS websites can’t send referrer data to HTTP websites. Instead of referral data, it shows up as direct traffic. This is how HTTPS should work, this is not an error. HTTPS is secure data, whereas HTTP is not. So, HTTPS can not send it’s secure data to HTTP.
What this means is, if you have an HTTP website (not HTTPS), and you get referrals from sites using HTTPS, you won’t be able to see that traffic in Google Analytics. It will be clumped together with your direct traffic. This only happens when HTTPS tries to send to HTTP. HTTP can send referrer information to HTTPS with no issues.
If your website isn’t using HTTPS yet, this is a good time to look into it. It will only become more and more important in the future.
Missing Tracking Code
If one or more of your site pages doesn’t have the Google Analytics tracking code and someone visits it, then clicks a link to another page on your site which does have the tracking code, Google Analytics would attribute this as a self referral from your own website. And by default, your website is listed in the referral exclusion list. If this is the case, then the visit would be attributed to direct traffic instead.
To avoid this, make sure whenever a page gets added to your website it has the tracking code added. Make sure this is part of the default page creation process and you aren’t required to manually add the tracking code.
Redirects
Meta refreshes and javascript redirects can wipe referrer data. Be very specific with any redirects. Try to avoid redirect chains on your website (where you have an internal link pointing to an outdated URL which redirects to the current URL). Whenever possible, it’s best to link to the current URL instead of relying on a redirect.
Shortlinks
Just like with redirects, when you create a shortlink or use a URL shortener system such as bitly, you lose your referral data. To compensate, make sure you add UTM tags on the URL you are sending the traffic to. That way, you have a shortlink that is easy to share and remember, but when people use that URL they are redirected to a page that is your full URL plus all of the UTM tags appended to the URL to be able to track where the click came from. To learn exactly how to add those UTM tags, follow our complete UTM tag guide.
Offline Documents
Do you have any downloadable freebies on your website? These are things such as PDFs or Microsoft Word files that people download in exchange for an email address. If those documents have any links in them, clicks from those links will show up as direct traffic. Since those documents are not part of your website, they are local assets downloaded onto people’s computers, Google Analytics can’t attribute those links to the appropriate source. That can be fixed by adding UTM parameters to those links, just like we discussed for shortlinks.
When you add UTM parameters you’re able to specify the source, medium, and campaign. That way, you can track that information under your Google Analytics acquisition sources, instead of clumping it all under direct traffic. To learn exactly how to add those UTM tags, follow our complete UTM tag guide.
Email
Another common source of direct traffic is from email campaigns. When someone clicks a link an email you sent them, it counts as direct traffic. Google Analytics can’t by default identify that the click came from an email campaign.
Just like with the shortlinks and offline documents, this can be fixed by adding UTM tags to specify the campaign attributes. Most email providers even have an option to enable UTM tracking so each link automatically appends the UTM parameters needed to track the campaign data in Google Analytics. If this is an option with your email provider, I would enable it so you can get all the data without the headache of creating a UTM tag for every single link.
Dark Social
And lastly, is what is referred to as dark social. Several forms of social traffic end up being counted as direct traffic. It’s very hard to attribute these visits properly, and instead, you should just be aware that this is likely accounting for a big chunk of your direct traffic (provided you’ve addressed any possible issues outlined above).
Now, this doesn’t apply to links that you post on your social media accounts. Or links other people post on their public facing social media accounts. For the most part, Google Analytics is able to associate those links properly as social referrals. They can identify the URL the link is coming from and that it is a referral, and can also identify that the referral type is a social network.
Where this applies is with the authentic social sharing from brand advocates to their friends and family. This is a great problem to have, people are sharing your brand. But, you can’t easily tell all those people to use UTM tags to track the data.
If someone shares a link to your website in an email, text message, facebook messenger, or slack message it’s going to count as a direct link. This is essentially a digital word of mouth channel. Word of mouth has always been difficult to track, this is just the digital version.
In Summary
Direct traffic is a normal part of your digital analytics. If more than about 25% of your traffic is from direct traffic, then start looking into the potential problems outlined above. Is your site HTTPS, are pages missing tracking code, is traffic being redirected? Create a plan to leverage UTM tags on external traffic sources.
If your direct traffic is equal to or less than about 25% of your website traffic, this is pretty common. So, make sure you understand what it means, these aren’t just a total number of people typing your URL directly into the browser.
Either way, it’s a good idea to review the direct traffic causes outlined above and make sure your direct traffic number is not being overly inflated by poor tracking.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
There seems to be some confusion between UTM and GTM. We’re going to first explain what UTM means, then GTM, then go into UTM vs GTM. The two are completely separate systems and can be used independently of each other. They do not rely on each other. However, there are advanced Google Analytics configurations that can be made when these two are used together. Here is what you need to know about UTM vs GTM.
UTM tags and a tag manager sound like two items that would be related, right? Although they sound similar they are not related to each other.
UTM Tags are Added to a URL to Track External Links
UTM tags are attributes (or parameters) added to the end of a URL. These attributes record additional information in digital analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. When you add a link to your website in an email or an ad, UTM tags allow you to add insight about that particular campaign so you can better understand where people are coming from and which campaigns are having the biggest impact.
GTM is Used to Load and Maintain Website Tracking Tags for Various Software Programs
GTM, on the other hand, stands for Google Tag Manager. It is a tool that is completely separate from Google Analytics. Although, it can help with Google Analytics setup and maintenance, as well as other non-Google related tools.
Tools, such as Google Analytics, require a tracking tag to be added to every page on your website in order to capture the data used to populate the tool. Depending on what you want to track on your website, you could have multiple tracking tags. You can have one for Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, and a user analysis tool such as Hotjar. Instead of adding each of those separate tags to your site, you can add just one tag for a tag manager, such as Google Tag Manager (GTM).
That helps in two ways. First, it improves page speed because instead of loading multiple tags, your site only loads one tag and the other tags load asynchronously. Second, when you want to add a new tag you now have one place to add it to get it to appear on every page.
UTM and GTM are Not Linked to Each Other
These two systems do not need to be used together. Adding UTM tags to your URL will allow you to track those metrics in your Google Analytics account regardless if it is set up using Google Tag Manager or not. GTM does not provide any analytics. It can be used to deploy Google Analytics tracking, but using a UTM tag does not rely on GTM in any way.
UTM tags aren’t configured in Google Tag Manager because they aren’t deployed on your website. UTM tags are added onto your existing URLs, they aren’t added to or configured on your website.
You do not need Google Tag Manager installed to use UTM tags. You do not need any tag managers to implement UTM tags. To find out exactly how to create a UTM tag, we have a complete guide to UTM tags you can follow.
Advanced UTM and GTM Configurations
If you want to get into some advanced configurations, there are some customizations you can make to UTM tracking using GTM. By default, UTM tags allow you to track the campaign, medium, source, keywords, and the campaign content. If you want to add an additional parameter such as audience, you can do that with GTM. Here is a guide you can follow to use GTM to create additional UTM attributes to track more data.
In Summary
Whether or not you have Google Analytics set up with GTM, you should still use UTM tags to track external links in your marketing campaigns.
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
When you’re working on growing an organic audience for your website, SEO is a big deal. And when you sit down and create some goals for yourself and your business, you’ll want to include some goals for SEO. But what does that mean? What should you focus on? Here is how to set goals for SEO.
Create Goals that You Can Control
I’m going to start by making this really clear. To set goals for SEO, don’t focus on reaching a target for any particular metric. Instead, set a goal for yourself that you are in complete control as to whether or not it gets completed.
Don’t get me wrong, metrics are important. And it’s important to measure results. But first, let’s create an SEO goal for you.
The most common SEO goal is going to be content related. To be successful with SEO, you need content, you need web pages that are worth ranking. So, decide what type of content you’re going to build out. How often are you going to post? Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly?
This will be your primary SEO goal. Create a goal for how often you will publish new high-quality content on your website so you have pages worth ranking in search engines.
If you focus on creating consistent content, the numbers will improve. You can instead set a goal of improving metrics by a certain amount, but this seems backwards. How will you improve those metrics? Instead, create your goals based on the action you will take to improve your metrics and any improvement you see will only further motivate you to keep improving your website.
Don’t Stop at SEO — Set Goals to Improve Conversion too
Don’t only focus on improving SEO. Getting search traffic is important but it’s only half of the puzzle. Once those people visit your website you want to make sure they convert. If you focus solely on getting search traffic and you don’t work on improving the experience when people visit your site, you’re wasting your time. For SEO to be successful, you need to get people to click on your website, and then your website needs to convert those people.
To do this, first you need to understand what you want people to do when they access your site. What do you consider a conversion? You likely have multiple conversion paths. Your primary conversion may be for people to make a purchase or register for an account. Before they get to that point, there are likely numerous micro conversions that they are more likely to take on your website. Some of the smaller conversions could be watching a video, downloading a free guide, or signing up for an email course.
Ideally, your micro conversions will exchange a content item for an email. Once someone gives you their email, you then continue the conversation. You offer value, and then more value, and then even more value. Then, you share how your product can help. Then you keep providing value and continue communicating in that manner. Over time, people will become more familiar with your brand and when they’re ready to make a purchase, they will go back to your website.
These are the conversion paths you want to optimize to grow your SEO. The smaller points that take more time to convert to your primary conversion. Someone coming to your website from search likely isn’t going to buy your product today. There is a much better chance they will download the free PDF guide you have available. So start by offering a high value freebie and building trust and authority with your site visitors.
Just like with the SEO goals you created earlier around your content creation, create conversion optimization goals in a similar fashion. Don’t create a goal of improving your conversion rate by a certain percent, instead create a goal you can control.
Do you already have a freebie to get people on your email list? If not, start there. Create a goal to make a conversion path with no barriers to start building trust and authority. If you do already have a freebie, how can it be improved? Is it noticeable on your website? Is it clear what problems it solves and why it’s worth getting? Can the actual item be improved? Do people open the emails you send after the fact or should the subject lines be improved?
Create a goal for yourself to improve the desired conversion path you want people to take after they visit your site from search engines. Once you complete the goal, you’ll be able to monitor conversion rates to see the results and understand the impact of the change. But, set your goal as the action you can perform and use metrics to measure the result.
Optimize Existing Efforts
Getting SEO traffic from new content is great, but don’t forget about the pages on your website that are already bringing you SEO traffic.
Go to Google Analytics, and go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Add a secondary dimension of Medium. And then use an advanced search to only include the medium dimension of organic. This will show you the top pages people land on from organic search traffic.
Look at the pages where you get the most sessions. Review those pages. Is the content still accurate? Could you add any charts, images, or videos, to improve the content on the page? Are there any free templates or guides you should offer on this page in exchange for an email address?
Create a goal to review and update the pages that currently bring in the majority of your organic search traffic.
Understand the Metrics to Measure for SEO Results
So now you have at least three SEO goals that you have complete control over if you achieve them or not. You have an SEO content creation goal, a conversion optimization goal, and a goal to improve the current top SEO content. Now, you need to understand the metrics you can measure to determine the impact your goals had on your site performance.
The two main metrics you will monitor are traffic and conversions.
Metrics to Measure Search Traffic
When your website is brand new, your search traffic will probably be very low. And if you just spent months or even a year building content to improve SEO and your traffic numbers are still low, that can be discouraging. Just because your website doesn’t have much traffic yet, doesn’t mean your efforts aren’t having an impact.
When your website is brand new, monitor search impressions instead of traffic. Search impressions will be the first metric that starts to climb when you focus on improving SEO. Your content will start to display more in search engine results pages which increases your impressions. This is positive growth that you should be proud of. Keep going down that path and this will eventually turn into clicks and website visits.
To monitor your search impressions, go to the Google Search Console. Under Performance, click on Search Results. This will show you both the total number of impressions and total clicks. Though clicks will always be much lower than impressions, this will show you if you are trending up or down. So, start by monitoring these impressions when your visitor count is too low to notice an impact.
Once you consistently post content, this will change and your website traffic will increase. The time it takes to start getting search traffic will vary depending on how competitive the industry is and how often you update your website. It could take months or it could take years.
To view the amount of traffic you get from organic search on your website go to Google Analytics. Navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium. You’ll want to look for your organic traffic sources. This will likely be listed as google / organic and bing / organic. You can view the number of sessions to see how much traffic your site is receiving from search engines. Compare the date range to the previous year to see how your efforts have improved.
Metrics to Measure SEO Conversions
Lastly, you’ll want to measure conversions. In the same Google Analytics report you just looked at to view traffic (Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium) you’ll see on the right hand side there are conversion columns. You can use the dropdown at the top of the conversion columns to select the conversion point you want to measure. This can be e-commerce related or any of the goals you have set up. This will allow you to view the conversion rate and number of completed conversions by the acquisition source such as google organic search traffic.
Sometimes organic search traffic can play a role in the conversion path even though it wasn’t the last piece. For example, someone can find your site using organic search, then they start following you on social media. They eventually convert based on a social media ad which gets credit for the conversion. However, organic search did play a role in the beginning of the process. You can view this information under the Multi-Channel Funnels report. Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions. Here you can view how the various channels play a role towards conversions.
In Summary
To set goals for SEO, focus on the actions you’re in control of. Set your goals based on what you will get done. Then make sure you know the metrics you can measure to determine the results of your work.
Get the work done, then measure the results. SEO is a long-term game, success doesn’t happen overnight. Stay consistent and be proud of any wins you see.
What SEO goals have you set for yourself? Share them with us in the comments!
Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:
The idea of SEO can be overwhelming in the beginning. The internet is flooded with free marketing resources. And though it’s great to have so much knowledge available, going through countless articles can be daunting and it’s hard to know which are trustworthy. To make it simple, I’ve outlined the SEO basics you should know to get started. And, I’ve identified the SEO guides to follow to dive deep into the key tactics you’ll need to learn SEO.
The first and most important thing to learn is what SEO actually is. SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. Moz defines SEO as “the practice of improving and promoting a website to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines.” Basically, SEO is meant to improve your website rankings in search engines and ideally receive more website traffic in return.
Now that we know the meaning of SEO, let’s define some other jargon terms you might come across when learning about SEO.
Commonly Used SEO Jargon
Algorithm
According to Google an algorithm is “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.” Where SEO is concerned, an algorithm refers to the rules a search engine uses to rank websites.
Crawler
“Crawler” is a generic term used to describe programs that automatically run to scan websites. The crawlers are sometimes referred to as “robots” or “spiders”. A crawler discovers websites by crawling from one link to another. Google’s main crawler is called Googlebot and Bing’s main crawler is called Bingbot.
Keyword
Keywords or keyphrases are the query terms people enter in the search engine to try and find a web page or site to match their search intent.
Organic
Search engines have two types of result listings, paid and organic. The organic results are the free listings which you rank for naturally.
SERP
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It is the page that occurs with the results after you perform a search. There are typically ten organic listings on each search engine results page.
White Hat and Black Hat
White Hat and Black Hat are opposite types of SEO tactics. White Hat strategies follow the rules and guidelines set forth by search engines and are the most beneficial long-term. Black Hat tactics are frowned upon. They are intentionally sneaky and meant to trick search engines. Black Hat strategies aren’t long lasting as search engines are constantly changing algorithms to improve search quality.
Why Does Everyone Focus on Google?
According to comScore, over 64% of search queries come from Google. Since the vast majority of searchers are using the Google search engine it makes sense to focus on Google.
With that being said, over 20% of search queries do come from Microsoft products so you certainly shouldn’t ignore Bing. However, Bing and Yahoo generally have similar rules and guidelines to Google so by catering to Google’s standards you are likely setting it up to rank higher on Bing and Yahoo as well.
How Do Search Engines Work?
A search engine has an organized index of content. You can think of it as a library. The search algorithm acts like the librarian. When a book request is made to a librarian, the librarian attempts to select the book that is the best fit. Similarly, when a search query is made in a search engine, the algorithm attempts to provide the most relevant and useful results. The search algorithm sorts through the content every time a search query is performed.
The search engine is always trying to find new ways to provide the perfect match to every search. That is why some searches return pictures, videos, and maps. The ideal result varies depending on the search.
And this system is constantly getting better and better. That is why the search algorithm is always being changed. It is being improved in order to return the best search results possible.
If you want more information on how search engines work, go directly to the source. Google has put together an incredible video providing a behind the scenes tour of how Google search works. It is both entertaining and informative.
Pages are Ranked, Not Sites
It’s good to know that SERPs list web pages, not sites. This is important because it means that every page matters. This gives you many more opportunities to rank for different keywords, since each group of keywords can have a particular page associated with them.
Relevance is Key
It’s important to remember that relevance is key in the search engine’s eyes. When a user enters a keyword, the search engine wants to display results that are relevant to that keyword. Similarly, when the user clicks on a link the search engine wants the contents of that page to be relevant to the text displayed on the result and the original keyword.
Learn SEO for Free
As mentioned earlier, there truly is an abundance of free SEO resources online. Some of them are better than others and it can be hard to weed through them all, especially when you’re first starting out. Here are a few resources that I personally find to be the most useful if you’re looking to learn SEO for free.
It’s worth the time to read through both of these so you get a clear understanding of what’s important to Google.
Moz
Moz has excellent resources for learning SEO. Though every MOZ resource really is beneficial, I would start out with the Beginners Guide to SEO. The guide has a nice A through Z overview on everything SEO related.
Neil Patel
Another great resource is Neil Patel. He offers a lot of good SEO knowledge as well as broader digital marketing information and is even responsible for the UberSuggest tool. Neil Patel offers several free digital marketing video courses including one specific for SEO called SEO Unlocked.
ClearPath Online SEO Course
The How To Do SEO Yourself course offers a free step-by-step program to teach you how to grow your site with SEO even if you have no prior experience. It’s self-paced and includes several templates to help create a simple system.
Where to Focus Your SEO Efforts
Google has stated that there are over 200 ranking signals. Though there is some suspicion as to what those 200+ ranking signals are, there is not a definitive list from Google and signals are subject to constant change.
If you aren’t sure where to start, you can always begin with an SEO audit. In no particular order, the following aspects of SEO are the ones where I choose to direct my focus.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a good place to start. It will help you make decisions when it comes to content and on-page optimizations. Performing keyword research will ensure you aren’t wasting your time when writing content. Instead, it allows you to focus on topics people want to hear about.
Performing keyword research doesn’t have to involve expensive tools. Here is a simple keyword research system you can follow. It includes a Google Sheets template and uses non-paid tools and resources anyone can access.
On-Page Optimizations
There are several elements on your web pages that can affect search rankings. Some of the main on-page elements that can and should be optimized are meta tags and html elements such as title tags, header tags, and image alt tags.
If you’re looking for a tool to audit your current on-page elements, I’d recommend Screaming Frog. With Screaming Frog you can easily see your on-page elements as well as the length and pixel width.
Another great tool to identify on-page optimization best practices is Bing Webmaster Tools. And it’s completely free. Bing actually offers a URL Inspection tool in their Webmaster Tools. You enter any URL on your site and it identifies SEO and indexing issues.
You can use your keyword research to identify topics that are important to your niche and build out relevant pages corresponding to those terms. You can also generate content ideas based on audience feedback. What are the most common questions you get? What do you hear people struggling with? Write content to support their needs.
When creating content, spend extra time writing the title. The title is one of the most important pieces of your content because it is one of the primary factors as to whether or not the article will be read. We’ve put together a 7 step system you can follow to create a catchy title for your content.
When it comes to creating content for SEO, remember to focus on the reader. Don’t get too carried away with SEO best practices. It’s more important to create interesting and valuable content for your ideal reader.
Backlinks
Backlinks are both important for SEO and difficult to obtain. Like the content, it isn’t the sheer volume of backlinks that is important, but rather the quality. The best backlinks come from authoritative, relevant sites.
There are several link building strategies you can use. Yet, I don’t focus on building links. It’s extremely time consuming and I’ve found it isn’t a good use of my time. I focus on building high quality articles and then get the word out naturally to anyone following my brand. That is primarily through email and social networks. This does slowly build up links. It is a long process but it is the result of efforts that I would be doing either way.
Page Speed
Google has stated that page speed is one of the many ranking factors they use. There has been page speed research done which shows that the particular page speed metric Google measures for ranking purposes is Time to First Byte (TTFB).
Furthermore, optimizing page speed is always a good idea because it leads to a better user experience.
Some of the best tools to measure and optimize page speed are:
There is a whole slew of technical SEO aspects that are worth your attention. Some of the main ones include an XML sitemap, robots.txt file, the URL structure, schema tags, broken links, and HTTP status codes.
A good tool to use for many of the technical aspects is the Google Search Console. Within the Google Search Console you can upload your sitemap, view what is being blocked in your robots.txt file, create schema tags and check current tags for issues, and find crawl errors caused by broken links and 404 error codes.
A nice tool to easily identify broken links on your site is Broken Link Checker. As a side note, this tool can also be used on sites you don’t own. You can then reach out to the site owner and offer a replacement for the broken link with a comparable link to your site.
Another important piece of technical SEO is identifying any penalties that have been placed on your site. You can check the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for any manual penalties, but they won’t notify you of algorithmic penalties.
Some tools to try and identify if your site has been affected by an algorithmic penalty are:
Google has recently added more emphasis to the importance of SSL and domain security. Having an SSL certificate can boost your search rankings, though not substantially. To check the security status of your domain you can use the SSL Server Test tool.
Mobile
Google has a mobile-first index. Your ranking is determined by your mobile site. If your site isn’t mobile friendly it won’t rank as well.
The most important thing to keep in mind is any URL should be providing the same value and content to the user, but in an optimized output based on the device viewing the URL. Mobile users don’t want to automatically be sent to your home page, they intend to reach the specific relevant topic that matches their search query.
Listen to the Search Engines
When optimizing your site for search it’s important to listen to the search engines. Both Google and Bing offer webmaster tools. These tools are essentially the search engines attempting to communicate with you. It’s important to verify your sites within the tools so you can listen to the feedback you’re receiving directly from the search engines.
Stay Current on SEO Knowledge
The world of SEO is constantly changing and evolving. If you really want to learn SEO, you’ll have to continuously educate yourself and stay up-to-date on SEO. To fully understand SEO you must immerse yourself into the industry.
At the end of the day your SEO changes should make sense for your community. If you want your SEO efforts not to become outdated, focus all changes on what is best for your audience. The search engines are doing everything they can to provide the best results and best user experience. If you have the same goal in mind, any algorithm changes in the future should only help your site and not hurt it. If your website has a page that is truly the best option for that user, then search engines will eventually rank it higher than all other options.
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