Your Small Business SEO Checklist

seo checklist

A small business desperately needs to be noticed.

Unlike giant corporations, small businesses can’t rely on name recognition. And yet many small businesses neglect their SEO despite it being one of the best ways to be seen online.

Luckily, we’ve put together an SEO checklist, so you can give your site a tune-up and climb the rankings.

Are You Making Your Keywords Work?

Your keywords are vital to ensuring the success of your SEO strategy.

Check over your keywords – they need to be relevant to your page, and you need to make sure you’ve captured the different ways people might search for your content.

The more specific you can get your keywords while still hitting all the important terms, the better. This means you’ll have less competition being split off to other sites offering the same thing.

Your home page should support your keywords, as well. Make your site’s welcome text and introduction page use your keywords in a natural, context-appropriate way.

Are You Using Inbound Links?

Inbound links are how search engines decide if your page is important in your niche, so they should be part of your SEO checklist. The way a search engine sees it, if someone is linking to your page then it must be with good reason.

Inbound links enhance your website’s credibility to search engines. Without them, search engines don’t consider your website notable enough to rank highly.

It’s important your inbound links are good quality. They should be targeted to your site’s keywords and content, with anchor text to match. Avoid links that simply say things like ‘click here’ or ‘this link’ – for instance, if your site is based on coaching, then a good link would read something like ‘small business coaching‘.

Are Your URLs Readable?

This is an easy check to undertake, but it could result in some simple improvements to your site’s SEO.

Search engines rank sites with human-readable URLs higher than those without. If your URLs are just your homepage followed by strings of letters and numbers, consider changing them.

Where possible, do your best to match your URLs to your site’s keywords.

Does Your Site’s Code Look Good?

How your site is put together is next on the SEO checklist.

There are specialized SEO tools to give you an idea of how SEO friendly your site is. You want to be sure your site contains all the write meta information to be properly indexed by search engines.

Are your Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords all in place? Do you have a clickable main title along with supporting headings?

Search engines crawl this text to find out more about your website. They can’t read content meant only for human eyes, so you need to give them these pointers.

Do You Have Enough Supporting Content?

Your keywords won’t do you much good if you don’t have content to back them up.

You should have pages, blog posts, and articles all using your keywords in context-appropriate ways. Don’t just spam keywords, however – you need to make sure your keywords are interspersed among information that’s actually relevant to your visitors.

This is an important part of your SEO checklist because it allows search engines to see that you’re not just a content-free landing page. The genuine traffic from visitors also boosts your profile, helping to legitimize your place in the rankings.

Keep Checking the SEO Checklist

A checklist isn’t a one-time document. Site design drifts over time, so keep this page in your favorites and be sure to visit often to give yourself a tune-up.

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