Search Engine Optimisation can take up a huge amount of your time if you’re going to do it properly. There are countless tweaks that need to be made to every facet of your website. That’s why it’s so important to prioritise which SEO tasks you should do first. The following are 5 critical SEO tasks to get you started.
1: Scan For Duplicate Content
It’s tempting to use the same content for different pages, but it’s a complete no no. Check your site for duplicate content and replace it immediately. It reduces your visibility by confusing Google bots and it turns users off as it appears spammy.
2: Responsive Web Design
If you’re website is a few years old, chances are it doesn’t have a responsive design. That might not have been an issue then, but it is a huge one now. Mobile now accounts for more searches than desktop so your site has to look good on different screen sizes. If you are capable you will need to redesign your whole website and make it responsive. If not you can always hire some expert web designers to do it for you.
Setting up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools is crucial to make sure search engines index you. Setting these up allows you to make sure Google bots are crawling your website, without them you won’t turn up in any search results and it will be very difficult for anyone to find you by doing anything short of pasting in your URL.
4: Keyword Research
It’s very important to carry out proper keyword research before you start creating content. Think about what words and phrases that it would make sense for you to rank for, then run them through Google’s Keyword Planner tool. This will give you suggestions for keywords as well as search volumes for every keyword you would like to use.
5: Create High Quality Content
Creating high quality content at a high volume is an excellent way of pushing your page up the SERP’s. Depending on how much time you have, you can create content once a day or once a week more is always better (unless it’s duplicate or low quality content). This also helps to improve your credibility and it gives Google more pages to index.
There are endless possibilities for improving your SEO once these tasks are completed, but if you start strong you will be in a great position to deal with them.