SEO agencies can be expensive for small and medium sized businesses, and more and more such sized companies are deciding to manage their own SEO activities in-house. Few have the luxury to treat it as a full time position and allocate it significant time and resources, meaning it can get overlooked completely for more pressing issues.
The best approach you can take is to integrate a small amount of SEO work into your day-to-day routine, fitting it in alongside all your other tasks. Committing just a few hours a week to SEO can make a real difference.
Initial ‘One-Off’ SEO Work
As a starting point, spend an hour a day or a few hours a week getting to grips with improving your website’s content to make sure its well-optimised. This includes conducting thorough keyword research and understanding who your customers are. Add unique title tags on every page, and incorporate chosen keywords into the body copy and other key elements – jobs that once complete will boost your SEO and only need to be reviewed every three to six months.
Ongoing SEO Work
If you’re grabbing lunch at your desk, spend some time browsing the latest SEO blogs to stay up to date with the latest trends and pick up useful pointers to implement on your website. We have compiled a list of a dozen or so blogs to help you do this here: http://bitly.com/seot.
The ongoing SEO work that has the greatest impact, however, is building or attracting links to your site and, once you start doing this well, there’s no room for complacency: you must keep at it to keep progressing.
There are plenty of online articles that cover link-building tactics such as submitting to relevant directory sites; publishing online PR to press release aggregate sites; or encouraging exposure of your business or its activities regularly in industry relevant blogs. Remember that what Google values the most is earned links – and these are achieved when you publish outstanding content that people just want to link to, whether it’s from their blog, Twitter feed, a newspaper site, or so on. Include keywords to help drive targeted traffic to your website. Few SEO tactics will prove more effective than publishing awesome content that genuinely stimulates discussion and creates a buzz within your industry.
By publishing a regular blog, you also show search engines that your website content changes frequently. Google’s recently announced the “Freshness update” which marks a significant change to its search ranking algorithm, and experts believe this will affect around 35% of searches. Google tries to decide when a query should prioritise “fresher” (up-to-date) search results over older articles. The ‘Olympics’ have been widely used to illustrate this, as Google would conclude that most people searching on this term will be more satisfied with results about London 2012, rather than about older Olympic Games. The potential impact of this Freshness update makes it all the more important to consistently publish up-to-date, high quality content on a regular basis.
Building momentum with your SEO efforts
There’s no quick fix when it comes to SEO, and the best way to gain momentum is to keep taking small steps. Don’t get hung up on knowing everything and getting it perfect right from the beginning, or you just might find you never really get started!
