THE SEO Task List: 3 Tips for an SEO Boost

Tips for SEO Improvement

Got a few minutes? Here are 3 things you can do today to get an idea of where you site stands, and how people find you, and boost your page ranking.

Run A Performance Test

Slow sites and pages can kill SEO, and impatient users that have expectations for snappy response times will abandon pages that take to long to load. Create a benchmark today to start improvements for your website, Shopify store or blog. Here are some free tools to help:

• Jetpack Boost – Jetpack is a suite of tools provided by Automattic, that any startup should leverage if budgets are non-existent. The Jetpack Boost plugin provides a quick, rudimentary speed test, and several toggles for performance enhancing modules. Basic for pros, but it can give you a great read on site performance from 30,000′. Note: WordPress only.
• GTMetrix – GTMetrix is a great performance suite that let’s you go deep and wide…for free. The test provides a granular view of performance with a grading system, a breakdown/waterfall timing diagram and links to “how to fix” pages. It’s essential for anyone wanting to rise through the SEO ranks and provides more info than you probably would ever need.

• Google Lighthouse – If you use Google Chrome, you have access to an amazing tool to tune up your website and make it rock! The Google Developer interface provides the Lighthouse testing tool. It tests all type of items including performance, SEO rating and best practices and can help tune that engine.

Now that you have a baseline you can build a plan for optimizing your pages for improvement.

Revisit Your Keyword List(s)

You have a keyword list right? ;). A roadmap for others to find you, your goods and services? For entrepreneurs and startups, this is typically a spreadsheet with digital dust and cobwebs that makes a rusty hinge sound when you open it. Defining that digital map too the treasure that is you is critical, and needs to be revisited often. If you don’t have a list, make one. Keep it short, 10 or so keywords and phrases will be sufficient for starters. Free tools to leverage:

• Google Ads Keyword Finder – this is my favorite free tool for keyword research and exploration. Enter a few words and get back long and short tail phrases and volume numbers as well as ad costs. I utilize this tool even before I write content to include phrases and keywords to use in my titles, bullet headings and anchors. It also comes in handy to spy on the competition as you can enter your competitors URL as a primer.

• Google Trends – One of my sites is an upscale gardening tool site, and when we initially did keyword research, we ran comparison analysis on our top keywords to figure out the highest search volumes, geographic trends for keywords and seasonality. I love love love this tool.

Rewrite, augment and picture-ize your hot content.

Taking a content inventory and identifying content that is almost above the fold has paid great dividends for me. This “almost”content is high potential value, and with a little effort, it can provide a big payback on a little effort. I like to think of these pages and posts as Google’s bullpen: the standby pitchers that can save the game at a moment’s notice.

So first off, how do you identify these pages? The best free tool for the task is Google’s Search Console (click link for how to enable). The tool gives you a looking glass into how Google views not only search in general, but specifically how it views your site/pages/content. For the purposes of this post, you can look at the Performance view and see your top ranking keywords and pages.

Once you have your “almost” content, or those ranked in the lower top ten, give the pages or posts a refresh. Add some links, and content with synonyms, add images that have keywords in the image file name and alt tags, Add sections and anchors, etc. I am routinely amazed at t he boost this provides to SEO results from a simple refresh activity.

Just a quick set of tasks to do when you have some free time (lol). Let me know how it works or if you have other suggestions.