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7 Tasks In 7 Days: Improving Your SEO

Day 1: Claim Your Local Listings

Google Business Profile (GBP) is essential for SEO. It’s a great way to increase visibility while adding legitimacy to your online presence. Adding your information (including a local number), social icons, hours and photos only takes a few minutes. If you haven’t set up GBP yet, consider making it your top priority, as Google sends the confirmation letter to your address to verify that you’re listing an accurate location.

Once they’ve confirmed your location, Google will be more likely to show your website and address to customers doing local searches.

GBP also helps you channel your customers to create content through reviews. New customers can learn about your brand by reading what others said. While you’re setting up GBP, make sure you also claim your Yelp, Yellow Pages and Urbanspoon profiles, if needed.

Claiming local listings is important even for companies that exist only online. Think of them as another way to present your products and customer service to potential new clients.

Day 3: Scan for Duplicate Content

When search engines read content, they’ll assign a value to it based on the information it provides. The more informative the content is, the more likely it is to perform well in search.

If the content exists on multiple pages, however, search engines will split the value they assign between every copy, forcing those pages to compete with one another, which makes it less likely for any page to appear in search.

Removing duplicate pages will consolidate the value and lead to improved organic visibility. Tools like Screaming Frog or Siteliner automate the discovery of duplicate pages, but be sure to click around on the site on your own to see if you can find any technical problems causing duplicates.

Once you’ve identified the duplicate content, it only takes a few seconds to set up canonical tags or redirects that will tell search engine crawls to skip it, so you avoid penalties.

Day 4: Add an XML Sitemap to Your robots.txt File

Step four involves two separate parts, but you should be able to complete them within the same day without an issue.

First, make sure you have a robots.txt file. The document tells search engines what pages they’re allowed to crawl and what they should avoid. Without robots.txt, search engines will try to find every page on your site. Crawling every page can present a problem for eCommerce sites, which use sophisticated search and filter options to help customers find the products they want.

If you don’t want search engines to access your site search or filter options, you can disallow them in your robots.txt. If you already have a robots.txt file, the next step is to add your XML sitemap to it.

XML Sitemaps tell search engines how to navigate your website. While Google and Bing allow you to upload the sitemap within their webmaster tools, placing a link in your robots.txt will help ensure it’s crawled every time a search engine visits your site.

Day 6: Check for Poorly Optimized Pages

After running your website for a few years, your knowledge of SEO is likely far better than when you started. However, chances are those pages you wrote when you were new to optimization are still hanging around, and their lower quality can harm your site’s overall authority.

Basic SEO steps you follow now (like optimizing images, linking, and tagging) might have seemed otherworldly back then.

This project won’t get solved overnight, especially if your weak SEO pages have poor content. But you can identify some easy wins – like using Hashtags and adding specific keywords – to boost your SEO value. Refreshing old content also signals search engines that you care about what users will find if they land on that page, which can improve your overall quality score.

Day 7: Look for Ways to Increase Your Site Speed

A slow website is frustrating to everyone. If your pages take more than a few seconds to load, customers will likely leave and find a faster site, meaning fewer sales for you. Also, a high bounce rate indicates your website doesn’t have the information customers want. As a result, search engines will show potential customers to your competitors instead of you.

Some of the most common causes for slow page speed include:

  • Oversized images
  • Lack of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which can increase load times for people who live far away from your server
  • Complex JavaScript that loads before the parts of your website that customers can see

Google’s Page Speed Insights is a great tool to help you identify things that slow down your user experience since they’ll suggest how to fix any problems they discover.

After completing these seven steps, you’ll have a website that’s a lot closer to aligning with Google’s best practices and one that provides a better experience for your customers.

Partner With OuterBox to Optimize Your SEO

SEO isn’t a task list; it’s a process. To ensure that your site continues to perform well, you’ll need to repeat these steps regularly. Over time, these quick fixes can lead to long-term growth in organic traffic and your bottom line. Want to leave SEO optimization to professionals with decades of experience? Lean on OuterBox. We can help with short- and long-term solutions. Contact us today for a free estimate and learn what we can do to boost web traffic on your site!

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