SEO Checklist for Small Business Owners

It’s easy to forget the the simplest SEO tasks when you’re busy. Search engines can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site, but only if you’re consistent about doing the SEO work.

Here’s a simple checklist reminder for the next time you post on your blog or add a new page to your site. This list doesn’t include overarching SEO techniques for your entire website, but focuses on the everyday tasks when adding new content to a site which is already optimized for SEO.

• Choose keywords appropriate to the page; don’t simply replicate the website keywords on every page. Ask yourself, “What does my visitor want from this page or blog post?”
• Title tag
• Description tag
• Alt tag for images
• Image file names
• Social sharing fields (title, snippet, image)
• Using your keywords in the headings and sub-headings
• Keyword in page URL (aka “slug”) (and domain name, if possible)
• Keywords in text: don’t stuff them in, but having them near each other (“proximity”) helps; put them closer to the top of the page.
• Links to internal pages
• Links to external pages (make sure it’s a reputable site)
• If you’re using WordPress, choose one of the SEO plugins, like Yoast, to make it easier. It gives you easy-to-complete fields for data entry on the tags and snippets, and reminds you if your SEO isn’t strong for that page.
• If you have a Category or Round Up page that shows popular posts on a specific topic, add the new post/page to that directory for your website.

You can check where you currently rank for your keywords in Google Analytics. It’s the Queries report: Acquisition>Search Console>Queries

Want details? Check out my blog post Getting Your Website Seen on Search Engines.