Starting a business is not an easy process
and it becomes even harder when you are looking to expand your business. If you
have a small business, you need to be present in most digital platforms to
advertise your products or the services you are offering. Some of the digital
platforms you should join include social media and search engines. However,
start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) might find consultants and SEO
services
quite expensive – especially if they have not done thorough research and
they are looking to keep costs low.
Here is an SEO checklist that will help you
prioritize your SEO tasks for a small business enterprise:
1. Know your target audience well
This is very important because you will
know who you are selling to and your target market. When you know who your
target audience is or will be, it becomes easy to market your products or
services, create content and search for the keywords to use among other things.
Therefore, whether you are hiring an SEO agency or you are doing it yourself,
you need to research your target audience to make the right choices.
2. Fix technical issues and optimize
your page
If you do not know anything about SEO or
you have a piece of limited knowledge about SEO, it is advisable to
hire an SEO expert agency
or an expert to offer SEO services. Your website should not have any technical
issues like duplicate content, broken links and slow page speed. If these
issues are not fixed, they will affect your rankings and traffic to your page,
making it hard to benefit from SEO strategies.
After fixing the technical issues, you need
to optimize the page by creating quality content by conducting thorough
research. Some of the things you need to optimize when creating content are:
3. Register and optimize Google My
Business
When starting a business, you need to make
it very easy for people to find you on Google places and on the internet.
Therefore, you will have to register and optimize your Google My Business to
enable customers and other people to find you with ease. Optimizing your Google
My Business is easy because you only need to
claim and verify it on its website. Some
of the things you should remember when optimizing your business are:
Fill out as many fields as possible to enhance your listing (e.g.,
adding videos and photos).
Choose the right category for your business.
4. Manage the local business listings
and citations
When optimizing your business, you need to
understand that consistency and accuracy is very important to avoid confusing
people. As a result, your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP)
should be accurate to improve your local presence. If you don’t know your
accurate NAP, you can look for a service that will distribute your NAP
information so that you can update the info on your page.
5. Add schema markup
Schema markup usually sends search engine
signals about the components of a page, including:
6. Register with Google and Bing
webmaster tools
If you have a website already, you need to
register with search engines such as Google and Bing and submit your sitemap.
This is very important because you will find out what the search engines
understand and know about your search engine content.
7. Register with Google analytics
Even though the webmaster tools can offer
you a wide range of information from about search engines,
Google Analytics offers a lot of
information about users’ views. Knowing your users’ views is important because
you will know their experience on your website and understand how you can offer
them a better experience by improving your content or services. Google analytics
should help you find out the following: