You may not have an hour a day to spend on your SEO, but if you find just one hour every week, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish.
Each of the following eight tasks can be done in under an hour, so they’re not onerous and the rewards will far outweigh the effort.
So, why not book in an SEO hour of power every week and give your website the best chance of being found online by the people who matter the most … potential customers.
Add keywords to title tags
You would have already done a heap of keyword research to discover what keywords you want to rank for and what keyword phrases are niche and highly relevant to the various pages of your website. Remember, keyword intent (the why behind a search query) is really important when you’re evaluating keywords and making decisions. Have you asked why the searcher would have made this particular search? What were they looking to do? Buy something? Solve a problem? Learn something? Find a particular website or brand?
Once you’ve got your keywords, add them to your title tags. Start with your home page and your key content pages (such as your main service pages, category pages and product pages).
Set up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service giving you invaluable information and insights into how Google sees your site. You can use it to monitor and maintain your website’s presence in Google’s search results as well as see which pages are problematic. It shows you the pages where there are errors preventing Google from indexing the pages, and you can then make improvements where necessary.
Build some backlinks
There are many different ways of building backlinks. In an hour, you can easily make a start on this important aspect of SEO by checking local business associations or industry bodies that you’re a member of and seeing if there are any opportunities for bilateral links between you. It’s also a good idea to check your competitors’ backlinks on Google and see if there are any opportunities for your website.
Add internal links
Internal links are links from one page on a website to another page on the same website. They are basically hyperlinks between your internal pages and they give Google an idea of how your website is structured, but they’re also a smart way of boosting your SEO.
When you’re adding internal links, remember the reader comes first (not the search engines) and they should always make sense. And remember, it’s best to use part of a keyword phrase (ie one or two words) rather than the whole phrase.
Check for broken links
No-one likes a broken link. Not Google. Not your site visitors. Not your SEO strategy. No-one. When you spend an hour checking for broken links, fixing them and then re-testing them, you’ll be doing everyone a favour. Use brokenlinkchecker.com to check for errors.
Install a caching plug in
Speed is of the essence in the world of websites, and in just 60 minutes, you can accelerate your website’s performance so that you get more traffic and improve your conversion rates. By installing a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache, you can improve your page loading speeds (which is one of the search engines’ key ranking factors) for both mobile and desktop users.
Optimise images
You can get a lot done in an hour when you optimise the images on your website. The aim is to decrease the file size without losing quality and there are different ways you can go about doing this including using the correct image dimensions and format and compressing the images. Prioritise those pages that you’re aiming to rank well for, making sure that you use your target keywords in the file name and remember to add a descriptive image alts.
Review your site structure
It’s always good to take a step back and cast a critical and objective eye over your website structure. Take an hour to review the pages of your site and how it is structured. Do you have an About Us page? Do you have pages for your key products and services? What about a FAQ page and a blog? Put yourself in the shoes of the user and imagine how they would navigate your site and what they’d look for.
An hour of effort on your website will be time well spent – and if you commit to eight hours over the next eight weeks, you will be surprised at the difference it makes. A website is an important and valuable business asset and it needs regular attention if you want it to deliver the desired returns.
