Once a website has been created, it is of utmost importance to start working on its SEO to make it successful. This optimization must be done from the beginning of your website's life since content is an essential part of every SEO strategy. Keep on reading to know the first steps needed to be successful online!
Think about your business and keywords
As we mentioned in previous articles in the rankingCoach blog, you first need to decide which are the most interesting keywords for your website. We strongly suggest thinking about those characteristics which make you stand out from the main competitors in your sector. Once you know the characteristics that show how you're unique, you can start to write down your main keywords based on this uniqueness. For instance, if you run a small food market locally based in Brighton, you should optimize your site for keywords as "local market Brighton" or "food market Brighton". If you are more proud of your products as you only sell locally grown fruits, you can also focus your optimization process on keywords such as "local products market" or "locally grown fruits market".
Note that Google results are very competitive, which means that your main competitors also want to be visible for the main keywords as you do. To help you with your keywords decision, we suggest using a keywords planner tool to know the search volume and competitiveness for each of the keywords you want to optimize. Some reliable tools for this step are the keywords planner available for Google Ads users or the free one offered by rankingCoach.
Website structure
As you may know, the content of a website is not only the texts on it but also its structure. This means that your texts must be optimized for your main keywords but also some other parts as headers, metadata, internal link structure, etc. For example, it is very important to have clear and defined titles and subtitles to help every user to understand what it is said in your website, as well as allow Google bots to track your site and assess the topics and the keywords on it. If you do this properly, these tracking bots will know which are the keywords for which you want to appear on Google results and will place you among them.
Once you have some optimized content and well-structured pages, the next step is connecting them. Usually, search engines value higher those websites with a strong internal links net. To do this, you will need to find connections between your pages and place some links to other pages in your own site. For example, in a flight comparator, the homepage should include links to subpages describing destinations or airlines included among the offered. If your content is presented in a blog, your posts should include links to previous posts providing further information about the topic which is been described. In any case, remember that your internal links net must be always coherent and avoid creating useless links.
External information
All the steps discussed by now are related to the internal aspects of a website. However, there are some external aspects to be optimized at the beginning of your site's life. Local SEO directories and Social Media platforms are the main external sources that will make your website popular!
On one hand, if you have a website for a restaurant, or any other physical business you need to focus on local SEO. Creating profiles for your company in the main local directories will show your business in different online and GPS maps, as well as will provide some external links to your website attracting more visitors to it. For example, if you have a shop and upload your information to Google My Business, your store will be visible by every Google Maps user. This will also allow people to leave their comments on it, which is really useful since positive reviews act as recommendations for new visitors and customers.
On the other hand, in 2019 Social Media is essential for a business wanting to be successful. We suggest creating profiles on the main platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube and regularly posting new content about the products and services that your company provides, as well as about your values and business idea. We could write pages and pages about Social Media strategies but keep in mind that the first step is making your profiles active and react immediately to any comments or messages from other users.
Still some work to be done...
Even if the beginning of your website's SEO optimization process seems hard, if you work with perseverance you will be able to boost your business to a top position in Google's search results. You just need to follow these first steps and keep on improving the main aspects of your website.
If you are still not confident enough to work alone on the search engine optimization of your website, rankingCoach is happy to help you! This "Do-it-yourself" cloud-based application guides you all over the optimization process thanks to the easy step-by-step video tutorials showing how to optimize your site. These are available for the most important CMS so you will see in the tutorials the same options appearing in your website editor.
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