Whether you have an existing website or you are just starting your own business and launching a new website, you need to make sure that SEO is correctly implemented on your site. While SEO is an on-going and long term investment, giving yourself a solid platform to build on is one of the most important things you can do for your online business. Having site-wide good SEO will put your start-up business on the right path as soon as your site goes live.
While most entrepreneurs are experts in their given fields and they may even know quite a bit about conducting business online, it’s unlikely that they know a lot about SEO considerations. However, you don’t need dedicated SEO resources or even a marketing team to optimize a website. Putting SEO best practices in place early on can pay dividends down the line as a business grows.
Today I’d like to address the issue of SEO for new websites: What are some SEO tricks I can do to help get my new business website off the ground?
General Setup
- Install Google Analytics.
- Set up Google Webmaster Tools.
- Link Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics to get more insight into how users are finding your site organically.
- Create a sitemap.xml file and upload it to the root directory of your site (or enable this feature from within your backend, if available).
- Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools for indexing.
Make Sure Google Can Crawl Your Website
The first and easiest thing you can do to help get your new website off to a good start in terms of SEO is to make sure that your website is crawlable and indexable by Google’s crawl bots. A lot of the time people forget to set their pages as indexable and followable, and as a result Google can’t properly crawl the page and rank it appropriately. Make sure you triple check this before your website goes live so that it doesn’t happen to you.
Your Magic Keyword Research
- Make a list of all services or products that you offer. How do you categorize them? How do potential clients and customers look for them? Come up with as many combinations of phrases as you can imagine.
- Get your additional keyword ideas by using the Google Keyword Planner where you can “Search for keyword and ad group ideas.”
- Once you have a list of your selected words, input all keywords into the Keyword Planner to “See how they perform.”
- Narrow down your keywors list by looking for specific phrases that have relatively large volume (meaning that there are a lot of people looking for them) while having relatively low cost per click (meaning there might be less competitors). These are going to be your target keywords.
- Break up your selected magic keywords into small groups of similar phrases, and assign each group to an applicable page on your website. Don’t have pages that fit a group? Just plan to use those keywords in your upcoming blog posts.
For more SEO tips just select the SEO category on our blog 😀
With Love,
Hanni B.
