No Bullshit — Anyone Can Do SEO!!!
If there’s one thing I want companies to know about search engine optimization to know, it’s this: SEO helps those who help themselves. That is to say, there are some basic things you can do on your own that will vastly improve your website, before you spend the money to bring in an SEO professional like myself.
Here are some basic SEO upgrades I recommend, that anyone can do:
Google Search Console is Your Best Friend
Get an overview of what you need to work on by visiting Google Search Console. Add your website to the Search Console dashboard, and Google will review it and tell you some basic things you can improve, such as HTML, title tags, description errors, etc. (I also provide a little more info on those below.) One thing that the Search Console can help you with that’s important is your sitemap. This is a list of all URLs that are available on your website, and it’s something that’s often overlooked. Submitting this list to Google via the Search Console can increase your chances of the crawling bots recognizing the quality of your content and reviewing it.
SEO Tags: Title & Meta Description
When you search for something on Google, you may notice that there are subheadings under each page’s search results. Those are title tags. They give users an idea of what your site has to offer at-a-glance. A simple thing you can do to improve the SEO of your site is to make sure each page has a unique title tag, and the page description should be unique as well. A lot of websites either don’t have a description, or it’s duplicated across pages.
When a user sees your website in search results, the title tags and page descriptions are the first thing they see. You want them to click on it, and you want them to see what they are expecting to see after they click. If not, you are almost certain to lose the user right away. Google will register and record that bounce, and it will affect your search rankings. WordPress, Squarespace and Wix all offer the ability to edit title tags and page descriptions so make sure you are paying attention to those. To learn more about title tags, I recommend checking out this article.
Image Optimization: Resize & Compress
If your website takes too long to load, users will get impatient and leave, which will negatively impact your search rankings. The first and easiest thing you should do to prevent this is to make sure your images are appropriately sized so they don’t slow down your site. This is the most basic thing you can do to improve pageviews.
It’s very easy to resize images, especially if you start doing so as you’re building your site. You don’t need any special software, you can just use an online tool or plugin like ShortPixel (my clients will get premium access for free!).
This one step will put you in the 90th percentile in website speed, putting you way ahead of the game compared to other sites. One word of caution: if you have a lot of images on your site and you need to go through and compress and resize all of them, that process can take a long time. I highly recommend doing this from the beginning, if at all possible.
Spend Time with Google’s SEO Starter Guide
Google released the new SEO Starter Guide earlier this year, and I always recommend that companies have a look at it before investing in SEO support. The guide will walk you through some basics that you don’t need to pay an expert to tell you. In fact, I usually prefer that clients have tackled some of these basics before I work with them.
It saves money for the clients, and lets me focus my time and expertise on the things that will really launch your SEO to the next level. When a company hires me, I provide a full technical audit, set up automated reporting, develop content strategy and perform market research and identify potential partnerships.
By taking full advantage of the Google Search Console and the SEO Starter Guide, I can come in and help you not just fix small problems but really grow your online presence and user reach. (To learn more about what I do as an SEO consultant, check out my post “4 Key Things I Do For Companies”
I am interested in giving my clients the best service for their budget. Handling these basic steps on your own is the best way to save money, and give your website a great boost in search rankings, fast. You’d be surprised how often I work with companies and they haven’t made these simple changes on their own.
If you’d like to talk to me more about SEO, contact me today via https://asadzulfahri.com/contact/
