Aloha! I’m Nick Ponte, and I love helping small businesses build creative and successful marketing strategies through my digital agency. Lately, I’ve shared tips for small businesses to improve their website and use successful digital marketing strategies.

When you bake a pastry from scratch, you’ve got to make sure you season the batter or dough as you go. Once a loaf of banana bread has started to bake, you can’t easily pull it out and add salt or stir in the eggs you forgot.

Likewise, growing your website from scratch means you have to work your way into SEO success. Take a few strategic steps as you get started to make sure you don’t scramble later trying to insert SEO. You can make your website work for you from the beginning.

Also Read: 3 Ways for Hawaii Businesses to Take Their SEO Strategy from “Good” to “Great”

Map Out Your Way to Success

If you go on a huge road trip, it’s helpful to have a map of some sort to show you the routes you want to take and the landmarks you want to see. It’s also helpful to have a few tools to help you—like a compass, if you’re directionally challenged.

Setting up a good SEO strategy is kind of like a roadmap for your website and marketing plans. When you know where you want to end up, you don’t have to question decisions at every turn. Plus, you’ll be able to watch your progress and course-correct when necessary. 

Your website works as one of the most important elements of your business, and staying on top of it helps you to improve reach, leads, and revenue. Your SEO affects how your site shows up in search results—a huge deal when you need to reach customers.

Some of this takes time. It can feel like a huge task to reach these goals when your website is brand new. You have to gain traction with search engines by regularly adding content and backlinks, building your authority, and keeping track of statistics. You can’t manage these efforts without a strong plan, though.

Don’t put off making a strategy. Save time and resources by starting with a good strategy from the beginning. Keep these three essentials in mind while you build your website, and you’ll find your roadmap to success.

Also Read: Driving Your Business to Online Success through Organic SEO

3 Essentials for Building SEO into Your Website

Use these three important tips as you work toward building your website and SEO strategy together:

  • Website Structure

Don’t make the mistake of saving this part for later when you’ve got your business up and running. From the beginning, plan the structure of your website around your SEO strategy. Create a plan for individual pages, blog posts, and content that uses your keywords in mindful ways to improve your website’s reach. Set up your URL structure to reflect your SEO strategy, too.

Keep in mind that part of your SEO strategy needs to include some behind-the-scenes details, like choosing a high-quality, high-speed website hosting provider. Users get tired of waiting when a website doesn’t load quickly, so make sure you pick a reliable one with great options for support service.

  • Content & Keywords

Your SEO strategy centers on your keywords. Your use of keywords draws search queries to SERPs (search engine results pages) content. With this in mind, ask yourself some questions as you establish keywords for your website. Do they match your product? Do they match the questions customers ask? How does it compete with competitors’ keywords? What other kinds of websites appear in SERPs when users search these keywords? As you work out your strategy, start with low-competition keywords and go from there.

Create a spreadsheet to plan and map your keywords, and use it to create your content strategy. Build a strategic calendar for creating posts for your website. (You can work this in with your social media posts, too.) Set a consistent publishing schedule. You could add four pages per month to your website, or you could add a couple of blog posts every week. 

SEO’s effect builds up, so by getting more individual pages to rank with keywords, you will gain rankings across your website. Don’t worry about trying to stuff keywords around your site. When you have matched your keywords with users’ search intent, you’ll naturally scatter keywords through the website content.

Check out your competition. Your SEO competitors show up ahead of you in SERPs. Identify businesses that sell similar products or services, write similar content, and get top keyword rankings. Study their websites and content. Perform a keyword gap analysis. What unique selling points do they use? What topics do they write about? Do they rank for particular keywords? You can use this information to start out-ranking them. A tool like Moz lets you review competitor overlap and keywords you share. Filter keywords relevant to your company and website and add them to your spreadsheet.

  • Strategic Tools

As you work to make your website gain traction, you’ll need some tools to see successes and where you need to work to improve. Check your analytics with Google Business tools. Review user engagement metrics. When you publish content, watch its performance. Over time, your content can improve your rankings in SERPs as Google learns to read and trust it. If your users have good experiences and your domain authority increases, that helps, too. Keep an eye on how your content increases your analytics.

Set up Google Search Console. With it, you can check things like page performance, speed issues, organic keywords leading to website clicks, click-through rates (CTRs), crawl and site index errors, and more. Make sure to verify your website with Google Search Console so you can start receiving this helpful data. Additionally, try a tool like PageSpeed Insights to keep track of and evaluate your website’s core web vitals and site speed.

With all this effort toward your website and its content, don’t neglect getting it in front of your audience. Promote your content across other marketing channels, like social media platforms, YouTube, or your email list. Your SEO performance will increase as a result.

We help businesses create winning SEO strategies, every day. If you want to learn more or want help, reach out to us today!

Further Reading: 3 Ways for Hawaii Businesses to Develop Successful On-page SEO

Photos Courtesy of Peter Vanosdall, Taylor Kiser, and Campaign Creators

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