As a small business owner there are tons of things competing for your attention, and unless you’re technically minded or operating in the SEO industry, it’s unlikely that technical SEO best practice is the highest priority.
But hear us out: this is something that’s definitely worth getting right, and the sooner you do it, the bigger the benefit you’ll see. Laying solid technical SEO foundations paves the way for more web traffic, a better user experience of your website and, ultimately, more sales.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, either. Here are 5 actionable steps that small business owners can take to strengthen their SEO foundations.
Set Up Tracking
The first step is simple: set up tracking, so that you can monitor the impact of your SEO efforts. Technical SEO is heavily data-driven, and metrics like page views, bounce rate, and time on page can give valuable insights into user behaviour.
You can use the following tools to track key SEO metrics:
- Google Analytics: a free suite of tools that measures how customers behave across your websites and apps
- Google Search Console: a reporting tool that lets you measure search traffic and performance
Using both tools requires creating a Google Account, verifying ownership of your domain, and adding tracking code to your website to allow Google to collect data.
Set Up Benchmarks
Once tracking is set up it’s a good idea to benchmark performance at the outset of your SEO efforts. Without these it’s a guessing game as to whether or not your work is having an impact on performance.
The most valuable benchmarks are those which matter most to your business, so it’s worth spending some time figuring out which metrics to track. Some ideas to consider:
- Traffic source: a breakdown of where traffic is coming from, i.e. direct, organic, social and so on – useful if an SEO goal is to drive more organic traffic
- Average rank: a top-level metric showing visibility in search engines – useful if your goal is to increase search engine visibility
- Conversion rate: the ratio of people taking a desired action (i.e. making a purchase or signing up to your newsletter) – useful to track engagement with commercial outcomes
We recommend documenting these figures and collecting them again periodically so that SEO performance can be tracked over time.
Get A Technical SEO Audit
With tracking and benchmarking in place, the next step is to commission a technical SEO audit for your website. Think of this like a car service: a comprehensive analysis by the experts, identifying any potential issues and outlining the path forward.
A technical SEO audit looks at your site’s performance with reference to current SEO best practice, and analyses how your site’s health impacts its ability to rank. Here are some areas that such an audit might cover:
- Crawling and indexing: how search engines discover and access your site, and any gaps that might be limiting visibility
- On-page health: how your pages are structured and organised, and the potential impact on visibility
- Page speed: how quickly your pages load, and any issues that might be slowing your site down
- Mobile checks: how your site looks on mobile and tablet devices
Nail Down The Basics
After commissioning an SEO audit you’ll have a list of actions to work through, varying in levels of complexity. It’s worth starting with the basics first – that is, the stuff that will bring your site in line with best practice fundamentals. This includes:
- Write good meta data: each page should have a meta title that accurately summarises its content, and a meta description that expands on this to signal the page topic to search engines
- Write good headings: each page should have a hierarchy of headings, with a single H1 heading giving the page title, and H2 and H3-level headings outlining subtopics
- Create a sitemap, upload it to search engines: a sitemap is a dynamic document that shows search engines how content is organised on your site. Linking your sitemap to Search Console ensures Google has an up to date understanding of your site and its content
- Create a robots.txt file: this is a file that gives instructions to search engines on how to crawl your sites, specifying any areas that they should ignore.
With the basics in place you can move onto addressing the progressively more complex issues identified in your SEO audit.
Optimise For Mobile
For nearly a decade Google has used responsive design as a ranking factor, meaning that unresponsive sites will find it harder to rank. Making sure your site displays correctly on all devices is one of the best things you can do to give your site the best chance at ranking well and attracting traffic.
Nowadays many website builders like Wix and Squarespace offer responsive design as standard, as do themes on CMS platforms like WordPress. But it’s always worth manually auditing your site to flag any issues that occur on specific devices. Resolving these and delivering a consistently positive browsing experience across different devices will stand your site in good stead to rank well.
The Bottom Line
For small business owners, SEO is not always the priority. But there’s a very strong case for ring-fencing some time to lay down the fundamentals: a site with strong technical SEO will be better placed to rank higher on search engines, attract more visitors, and convert them to paying customers.