—
Self-improvement and running a business have a few things in common, none more so than the importance of focussing on the fundamentals.
If you’re reading the Goodmen Project Business blogs because you’re a man with a business – whether a father, son, friend or something else – then this post is for you. In it, we’ll address some ways to bring your business website in line with technical SEO best practice. After reading you’ll have the knowledge to strengthen your site and tap into better visibility, more traffic, and more sales.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Getting started with a technical SEO audit
- Taking benchmarks
- Setting goals
- Putting the fundamentals in place
Getting started with a technical SEO audit
The first step to strengthening the fundamentals of your business website is to build a better understanding of your current performance. This involves carrying out an audit, or commissioning a technical SEO audit from expert practitioners.
If you’re keen to do the audit yourself, there are several tools you can use:
- Google Lighthouse: an auditing tool that evaluates your site’s performance, accessibility, SEO and more
- Google Search Console: a suite of reporting tools that give an oversight on your site’s visibility in Google
- GTMetrix: a speed testing tool that gives an in-depth analysis of your site’s performance
- Ahrefs: an SEO tool that gives detailed information about a site’s visibility and rankings, along with many other metrics
These vary in their utility, and each provides a unique combination of metrics, so it’s worth familiarising yourself with each to better understand which tool(s) best fits your needs.
Commissioning an SEO audit lets you skip the technically advanced analysis and tap directly into the expert insights, and is recommended if you’d rather focus directly on implementing the solutions.
Taking benchmarks
Once your audit is done, whether you did it yourself or commissioned it, the next step is to benchmark your current metrics. This gives you a basepoint from which to evaluate ongoing performance.
SEO is a data-driven discipline, with a number of metrics each contributing to a complex picture of how people find and engage with your site. By benchmarking and continuing to track key metrics you give yourself the data you need to for increasingly sophisticated analysis as time goes on. In other words, you set yourself up to build on the foundations that solid fundamentals lay.
Here are some key SEO metrics we consider benchmarking at the outset:
- Organic traffic: the number of visitors coming to your site from search engines, useful for assessing the effectiveness of your SEO efforts in attracting users.
- Mobile traffic: the number of visitors coming to your site on mobile devices, useful in understanding the device split of visitors to your site.
- Keyword rankings: the positions of your website’s keywords in Google results, useful in understanding the impact of your SEO strategies.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page, useful in flagging if your site is not meeting visitor expectations.
- Page load time: how long it takes for your pages to load, useful in identifying slow pages that need improvement.
- Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users who click on your link in the search results compared to how many times it was viewed, useful in understanding whether your listings are good at attracting visitors.
We recommend tracking these metrics in a spreadsheet or other document so that you can analyse trends over time.
Setting goals
With an audit carried out and benchmarks in place you can move onto setting goals for your SEO efforts. Clear and achievable goals give structure to your SEO and ensure that the actions outlined in your audit lead to onward progress, rather than existing in isolation.
Here are some example goals that might be useful for small business owners:
- Increase organic traffic: website traffic is one of the key metrics to track, as the success of your business depends on attracting people to your site and converting them to customers. By setting a goal to increase traffic by a certain amount over a specified timeframe – say, 35% increase over a year – you can measure the effectiveness of SEO optimisation, content creation and other activities.
- Improve keyword rankings: by increasing your visibility in search engines you increase the likelihood of people visiting your website, making rankings a crucial part of the puzzle. Identifying a set of strategic keywords and setting a goal to improve their ranking over a period of time gives insight into the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
- Increase local visibility: for businesses with a physical location, we recommend setting a goal to appear in Google’s local listing three-pack for your local area. For local searches these results attract more engagement than traditional listings, making your presence there beneficial for your business.
Evaluating performance against your goals at the end of the specified period will let you assess performance, refine onward goals, and identify other areas to focus on.
Putting the fundamentals in place
With an audit, benchmarks, and goals, you have everything you need to begin implementing a technical SEO strategy. The first step, as with anything in life, is to develop the fundamentals, and in SEO this includes the following:
- Speed optimisation: by optimising images, leveraging caching, minimising assets, and implementing other speed improvements, you reduce page load times and improve user experience.
- Mobile optimisation: Google rewards sites that load correctly on all devices, meaning you need to leverage responsive design so your site runs smoothly on desktop, tablet, or mobile.
- Crawlability and indexing: the more accurate an understanding a search engine has of your site, the more effectively it can rank your content. Generating a sitemap and defining access with your robots.txt file will communicate your site structure.
- Structured data: schema markup is a type of structured data that gives context to content on websites, further improving search engines’ understanding. Implementing this can improve CTR and drive additional traffic to your site.
In conclusion
For small business owners there are innumerable benefits to implementing strategic technical SEO on your website. These include better visibility, more traffic, more customers, and more revenue.
And while it’s never too late to get started with technical SEO, getting the fundamentals right at the outset puts you in a much stronger position early on.
—