Prior to paid work from a consultant or SEO/inbound marketing agency beginning, there are fundamental SEO and inbound marketing best practices regarding your website, subscribers, analytics and accounts that should be in place.
Having these SEO, inbound marketing and analytic tools ready to go will provide you a true trial of this type of marketing’s effectiveness with your business. It will also set you up to accurately monitor key performance indicators. This work is somewhat technical, so if you’re not used to manning your own website or online profiles, it’s not a DIY type of thing. However, all of it is essential to marketing online effectively.
The linked text takes you to web pages that explain how to complete each task, or to an article explaining why it’s important.
Verifying Your Website on Webmaster Tools
- There are a number of ways to do this: Through Google Analytics
- Using the Google Publisher Plugin
- Copy and pasting code
Examining Webmaster Tools Data and Webmaster Suggestions/Errors
- Tips for using Webmaster Tools
- Crawl Errors
- Implementing rich snippets and structured data
- Taking action from Webmaster tools data
To better understand your data, feel free to export it and send the file to me or send over a screenshot.
Setting Up Goal Tracking and Conversions in Google Analytics
- How to add Google Analytics to your site
- How to create goals. You will probably want a “destination” goal. Each time a visitor reaches a certain URL, Google counts that as a goal. This works well if you have a ‘thank you’ page after visitors finish requesting a quote or submitting contact information.
- You can also specify funnels you want to track – helpful when counting a goal completion that started with the blog as a landing page or search as the referral source.
- Event tracking for different call-to-actions such as email sign ups, product purchases, check out buttons and other actions a visitor takes to make a “purchase” should all be set up.
Enabling Interest and Demographic Tracking in Google Analytics
Google Analytics Site Speed Insights
- Using GA Site Speed Insights, you may find ways to make your website faster
Segmenting Email Lists and Signing up for MailChimp (or a Similar Service)
- MailChimp is affordable, user friendly email software with great tracking. I highly recommend it. Learn how to market your product via email and track opens and clicks.
- Integrating MailChimp with your Social Media Accounts
- Integrating MailChimp with Google Analytics
- How to use MailChimp
- Create an email list that encompasses all email subscribers
- Create an email list of all past customers
- Create an email list of all leads
- How to integrate MailChimp with Google Analytics
- Integrating social media profiles with MC
Redirecting All 404 ‘Not Found Pages’ to a Proper or Relevant Web Page
- Broken web pages are annoying to your visitors and bad for your sites search ranking in that any URL that points to a 404 not found page is lowering PageRank.
- WordPress has a great 301 redirect plugin
Yelp and Other Review Sites
- Google loves reviews. Any business or event that has a high volume of 5 star reviews will rise to the top of search. This is another case where you want to email as many people as you know who you think will give positive reviews and ask them to fill one out.
- Google Local and Yelp reviews are weighted the highest.
- If you’re a small business, following this local SEO checklist.
Establishing Google Publisher and Google Authorship
- Rel = Publisher and Rel = Author will be needed when you start to create content on these websites. (Problem: Depending on your content management systems for each website, there could be some difficulty in establishing these).
- Having REL=Publisher in place increases Google Plus likes (it gives searchers the option to follow straight from the SERPs) and Google Authorship also increases your click-thru-rate by having your photo.
Verifying Online Profiles, Improving Online Profiles, Taking Advantage of Different Features
- YouTube account verification
- Connecting YouTube account to social media accounts (Do not ask me about the music in this video, lol)
- Filling out your company’s LinkedIn profile page completely, including the products services pages
- Adding all social profile links to your company’s Google Plus page (This is the the ‘Links’ section on the lower right side)
- Adding the Google + button to all your web pages
- Adding the link to your blog and FAQ page to your company Google Plus page (Same place on the lower right)
- Filling out your YouTube profile’s about section, adding links to your social media profiles, and adding links to your website in the ‘About’ section
- Establish a company watermark logo
Why Create/Work on These Accounts:
Filling out all these profiles is essential for good SEO, regardless of whether or not these profiles are in full use. YouTube in particular (since it is owned by Google) allows you to connect your plus profiles with your YouTube accounts. (Local SEO boost with YouTube.) In many cases, these account provide a free “follow” link back to your home page. Account creation is a legitimate link building strategy. Having a presence on all these platforms will increase referral traffic as well.
Placing Call to Action Graphics on Your Website
- A strong call-to-action graphic urging the visitor to enroll in a workshop or upcoming class would be great to place on each web page or blog post.
(If Applicable) Moving Your Blog off of a Subdomain
- Details about why this is important can be read here. In a nutshell, your subdomain is treated as a separate site by Google, and doesn’t acquire the same level of domain authority that your main site has, thus lowering it and its contents ranking in search.
- This will require a lot of redirects!
Installing Plugins (or Other Blog Hosting Service Equivalents)
Bonus: Tips for speeding up WordPress sites.
By surfing around SEO Shrugged, you can learn a lot more about the initial work a SEO consultant or inbound marketing company will do with your website.
To schedule a free consultation, email corttafoya@gmail.com.
