Rachel Toy Writes

Rachel Toy Writes

SEO Checklist for Small Business Websites

Posted on Author racheltoywrites_adminPosted in Small Business Marketing

Starting as you mean to go on with your website SEO will mean your brand new website will actually be found by potential customers. However organic SEO can also take at least 3 months to work properly, so you will want to start sooner rather than later. Here is my SEO checklist for Small Business websites with best practices to follow if you are just about to launch or wish to give your existing one a major SEO Copywriting overhaul.

Some of the items below you can do yourself, and others may require your web developer’s assistance. If you require any further advice for your particular setup, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Keyword Research

  1. Go to Google Keyword Planner (Google ads account required – don’t worry you wont have to pay anything to use it though, unless you decided to take out an ad). Put in your main service areas or products, along with any associated phrases you can think of, to see how the keywords perform and / or get additional ideas.
  2. Ideally you want to go for keywords or phrases that have many searches per month, and medium – low competition. High competition and low searches will be a very hard grind!
  3. Make a list of all your chosen keywords, and break them down by pages. Have 1 or 2 keywords (better if it’s longer phrases) per page. So if you are trying to fit too many keywords into one page, you know you need a new page of content for each!

On Page Optimisation

For the keyphrase you have chosen above, you will need to include it at least once in the following areas of the web page. Some content management systems such as WordPress will include handy plug-ins to make it easy for you to get the keywords into the right areas of the page. Yoast seems to be the most popular for this at the moment, and for good reason too!

  1. Title tag – include your keyphrase and business name and keep it unique, with no more than 60 characters. NB this is not the page heading! (see below). This will be shown on the Google results pages as the title for your site/page.
  2. Meta Description – keep this under 155 characters and write a unique description to entice people to look at your site, including your keyphrase at least once and at the beginning. This appears below the title of your site/page on the Google results pages and if you get it right, will encourage click through.
  3. Body Text – mention the key phrase at least twice, and once in the opening paragraph of the page. Also try and keep the page length over 300 words.
  4. Page Headings – each page should include one H1 heading (using HTML tags) with the keyphrase in it. Other heading tags (H2 – H6) can be used further down the page to sub categorise content.
  5. If you have many images, use relevant keyphrases in the ALT / Title tags of each to allow Google to help users understand what they are seeing.
  6. Page URL – include the keyword once in the web address of the page.

Google Setup

  1. Setup a Google Analytics account (or add to your existing Google account)
  2. Add in your Destination Goals for any call to actions on your site (e.g. Thank you page for a completed contact form)
  3. Setup Google Search Console and link with Google Analytics so that you can see data on search queries for your site.
  4. Create an xml sitemap and submit to Google Search Console – this allows Google to index your site more quickly. You can create one easily at xml-sitemaps.com
  5. Create a robots.txt file if required to disallow any irrelevant content (such as upload folders, test pages etc).
  6. Register on Google My Business, which is important for Local SEO, especially if you are a business offering services to local customers. You just need to claim your business and fill in all the details such as address, opening hours etc. You can even add updates and images. Your website should also work on mobile devices so that if people are using google maps from their smartphone, and click on the website link, they get a seamless experience.

Then you will need to put in place regular content marketing to provide quality content to your visitors (and Google), along with quality links by sharing content on social media or other blogs and websites. If you need help with this then do not hesitate to contact me using the details below! I also offer a FREE Website Healthcheck Service which will help further identify areas of improvement for your business website.

Good Luck!

This post is written by Rachel Toy, a freelance content writing specialist based near Aylesbury, Bucks, UK. If you would like to learn more about how effective Content Writing can help your business email me on rachel@racheltoywrites.co.uk