If search engine optimization is only a fraction of your responsibilities, this article is for you.
SEO is often misunderstood as a source of traffic and revenue that will keep flowing regardless of how much time and resources are put into it. Look at your web analytics — Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics. Note your top two performing channels. SEO is likely one of them.
What would happen to your business if natural search bottomed out tomorrow?
Instead, what if tomorrow and the next day and the next, you spent 15 minutes on improving the natural search performance of your site?
15 Minutes
In 15 minutes, you could:
- Optimize the title tags on five pages.
- Ask your developers to modify the default title tags to be more optimal.
- Request a new content field from the creative team to host textual content on pages that have none.
- Identify the pages that lost the most natural search revenue from last month to this month.
- Request 301 redirects from developers to remove old content and harvest its link authority.
- Crawl your site to find bot blockers that limit indexation.
- Analyze your competitors’ ranking pages to understand what your team could create to compete.
- Research top-ranking blogs in your industry to identify collaboration opportunities.
- Write an email to developers requesting new schema structured data on your product or location pages.
- Set the process in motion to register for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Getting Started
All of these things have something in common: They’re focused on a single action that will result in a change to the site today or very soon.
Without a plan, that focus can easily fall by the wayside. It’s easy to get caught in analysis paralysis, where you spend day after day analyzing the data and ruminating over the options.
You will cause no natural search performance improvement without taking action. Unless something relevant changes on the site that the search engines can access, your SEO planning is wasted. And without a plan, the actions you do take will be misinformed and potentially damaging to your performance.
To make the plan that enables 15 minutes of daily SEO, put in some extra time up front.
- Understand what searchers want. Research in Google Keyword Planner to identify the words and phrases that are important enough to searchers that they bother to search. Then group similar keywords to understand which types are the most valuable. For example, if you sell baking supplies, add up all of the keywords that contain “cake pan” and “cookie tin.” Which keyword groups are more popular? Now you know what searchers want and in what order.
- Understand high performing pages. Dig into your web analytics program to identify which pages are performing and which aren’t. Then use Google Search Console to find out which of the keyword themes that you researched are performing and which aren’t. Compare those two datasets to uncover the gaps in your site’s SEO performance.
- Set your SEO goals. For ecommerce sites, this one is easy: increase revenue from natural search.
- Develop your SEO strategy. You know what you want. You know what your searchers want and whether your site is delivering that. Your SEO strategy is simply how to give them what they want to get what you want. It could be a list of five things on a whiteboard.
For more, read “4 Steps to Better SEO in 2019.”
Every Month
Pull out your planner and list an SEO task in every weekday square. If staring at the 20 weekdays in that first month is too daunting at first, then start with the first five weekdays in the next week.
The key is to start.
If your task is research, make certain that an action related to that research is planned within a week. For example, if you research to find underperforming pages, act on your findings shortly afterward.
Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Algorithm updates happen, as do site releases and promotional campaigns that require your time.
But once you set your plan, do everything in your power to complete it. If you have to move some tasks out a day or a week to support the business, resume the plan afterward.