Getting it done

Set up your analytics software to track specific goals – e.g. making a purchase or signing up for an email list – and the conversion point for each goal. If your analytics can’t do this, get one that can.

To create a goal in Google Analytics:

• Open Analytics and go into one of your profiles.
• Click Admin in the top navigation. It’s next to the Customization tab.
• Open Goals in the View column.
• Click New Goal and enter a goal name and goal destination URL. You can edit existing goals here by clicking the name of your goal.
• Specify match type depending on how you handle your confirmation page.
• Assign a monetary value to your goal, even if you’re not measuring purchases. This will allow Analytics to calculate a value for channel, landing page, and visitor.

Set up conversion funnels in your analytics suite as well so you can track progress step-by-step and identify points of friction for customers:

• Go into your goal by clicking the name on the Goals page.
• Click on Goals Details.
• Turn on the Funnel.
• Enter the URLs of the pages people visit to go through the conversion process. This will be different for every website.
• If you don’t have a predetermined path, go to the Reverse Goal Path report under Conversions to see the three pages visited for each goal conversion.

Install a heat map on your pages so you can monitor design and content elements that drive user engagement. Use these metrics to prioritize design, content, and marketing efforts that will impact your business most, and deprioritize efforts that don’t move the needle.

External resources

• Google Analytics
• The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• A Guided Tour of Search Console

Getting it done

Monitor user behavior on your landing pages by measuring time on page, bounce rate, and events. You can sync your Google Analytics account on the “Settings” page of your Project to see all of this information in your Page Reviews.

Make sure your landing pages have clear and compelling messaging and CTAs. The landing page is often the first step in the conversion process, so users should be able to fill out a form or add a product to the shopping cart right on the page.

Reduce the number of steps required to complete a conversion, and minimize the amount of information you ask for.

When creating your landing pages, design every element to direct visitors toward the CTA. Remove unnecessary images, links, and text that aren’t related to the conversion to limit confusion and clutter.

External resources

• Identifying High Bounce Rates
• 5 Key Elements To Test On You Landing Pages

Getting it done

Compare performance on a wider matrix than just daily or weekly. Compare your KPIs week to week, month to month, and year to year. This will allow you to see any short and long-term trends, and whether or not changes in performance were isolated blips or signs of changing trends.

Chart your metrics together so you can compare how each one impacts the others – a new keyword could bring in tons of new traffic that doesn’t convert, but this won’t help you achieve your conversion rate goal.

Research industry benchmarks and conducts competitor analysis to learn where you stand compared to your competition, where you need to improve, and to find gaps in the market that you can exploit to outmaneuver your rivals.

External resources

• Top Conversion Optimization Tools
• How to Increase Conversions with an SEO Audit
• What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Getting it done

Writing quality copy that ranks at the top of search engines, while moving prospects through the conversion funnel at the same time is one of the more difficult tasks for a marketer. Create a workflow to organize your content creation efforts:

• Follow the conversation: Find the content in your niche that has the most shares. People share things they find to be entertaining, useful, valuable, or all three. Use a tool that will show you the most shared articles on a particular topic. Tap into what people are saying about your business and industry using Twitter custom feeds or a paid tool like Mention.
• Learn your audience’s search behavior: Build your content around the words and phrases your potential customers use in search engines. Ideally, you covered this ground during the keyword research phase of your SEO strategy. If you haven’t already, create buyer personas to represent your different types of customers based on their needs and uses of your products. This will allow you to tailor messaging for a diverse audience.
• Make it quick and easy: You start to lose visitors after about seven minutes, so get your point across quickly. And make it easy: 79% of people only scan a page to pick out keywords and phrases. Lists are one of the best ways to achieve this: they reduce the mental work required to categorize and process information and by their very nature are highly structured, which makes it easier for search engines to interpret. Plus, they have lots of opportunities to use keywords in headers and subheads.
• Bond with your user: People tend to base decisions, especially purchasing decisions, on emotion. Your buyer personas are very helpful with this: the better you know your audience the better you can tap into their psyche to show how your business will make their lives better, make them successful or just bring them happiness. Create a sense of urgency and exclusivity by creating limited time offers, or unique offers aimed at certain user segments.
• Make them trust you: One of the best ways to build trust is to allow product reviews on your site and to publish testimonials or other social proof. However, you can also build trust through your blog posts and articles. Publish purchase and product guides, telling users what they should look for, what questions they should ask, and what they should know about the industry in general. Making decisions easy for customers improves new sales and customer retention.

External resources

• Free Infographic Tools
• How to Successfully Promote Your Infographics
• Quick Guide to Creating and Sharing Videos Online

Getting it done

Approach competitor analysis from two directions using a tool such as KeywordSpy or SpyFu (both of these are free): Discover which keywords your competitors rank for, and discover who your competition is for your target keywords.

You can also use PPC competitor analysis tools to learn who’s bidding on keywords for your industry.

Don’t base your own keyword strategy entirely on what the competition is doing, but use it to inform yourself of audience preferences and market trends.

External resources

• Keyword Tool from Ubersuggest
• How Do I Find My Competitors’ Keywords?
• Ubersuggest Extension
• Moat Ad Search

Getting it done

Signing up with Google My Business is easy: Go to https://www.google.com/business, click Start Now and enter your business information. If you have a service area, be sure to check “yes” under “I deliver goods and services to my customers at their location”. When adding your name, choose the one people would use to search for you in Google. So, for example, you’d want to use UPS instead of United Parcel Service.

External resources

• How to Add Your Business to Google Maps
• Google My Business: Your Essential Guide

Getting it done

Look for relevant and quality websites within your industry. If they already link to you, can this be repeated or improved for relevance? If they link to competitors, is this something that can be leveraged for your own website?

Target content types that appeal to industry websites. Do they tend to feature research, infographics, advice, etc.?

Use journalism tools such as Help A Reporter Out to respond to inquiries for experts within your industry. Responses often include your bio and a site or social media profile link.

You should have a mix of backlinks to your site that supply traffic and popularity for your search engine rankings. Avoid focusing solely on one or the other.

External resources

• How to Evaluate Backlink Quality
• How to Do an SEO Link Audit
• Google Alerts

Getting it done

Step One: Create an inventory of your competitor’s’ content. Visit their site and review their navigation for pages/categories that indicate the content: About Us, learning center, blog, and webinars. Be sure to check the footer as links to content are often hidden here. You can use a crawler at this point to compile a list of title tags, meta descriptions, and HTML headers to determine target keywords for each piece of content.

Step Two: Evaluate the content.

• Quantity: How much of each media type do they produce? Does the tone of voice shift between media?
• Frequency: How often do they publish new content? Does it change by the topic? Content-type?
• Topics: What sort of topics do they write about? This is very important as it indicates what areas they regard as being valuable to their business.
• Engagement: How successful is its content? Check the page’s comments section and backlinks. Content that gets a lot of on page engagement and links indicates that the topics, style, or highlighted features are important to customers. Use this information when planning your own content strategy.
• Quality: How well is it written? Content that has a lot of spelling and grammar issues won’t be successful and could make you look unprofessional. If your competitor is publishing a lot of low-quality content on a certain topic, this is your opportunity to excel by fixing their errors and using it for yourself.

External resources

• How Do I Find My Competitors’ Keywords?
• 12 Competitor Analysis Tools That Will Improve Your Traffic
• 10 Vital Components For Effective SEO Competitor Analysis
• Free online survey tools include SurveyMonkey or Crowdsignal

Getting it done

You can export your links yourself from Google Search Console in the Search Traffic section, or you can use a tool like Majestic or Ahrefs to find and export your links. Some people use all three and then dedupe the list to make sure they are using the most robust data set possible.

When analyzing your links, again, you can do it manually by looking at anchor text, IP address, page content and Trust and Citation Flows (if you’re using Majestic) or upload your links to a tool such as Kerboo that will score your links for you. While evaluating your links, take this opportunity to note any patterns with anchor text and page content.

While rare, negative SEO does happen and usually appears as repeated anchor text and content. Once you’ve evaluated your links, attempt to have the low-quality links removed or, failing that, use the disavow tool in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

External resources

• Dedicated link monitoring tools: Link Explorer, Majestic, Ahrefs
• Google Disavow Tool

Getting it done

Even though search engines can’t see images or watch videos, they can still crawl their HTML tags. There are two places you can use this to your advantage to optimize your images:

• Filename: Use filenames like you would a URL. Use your keyword at the beginning, be descriptive, and use hyphens instead of underscores as word separators.
• Alternative attribute: Also called alt text, the alt attribute lets you give a short description for users that can’t load the media or can’t see it. It’s used by screen readers to visually impaired users as well as search engines. When writing your alt attribute, describe the subject of the image and what it’s doing (if it’s a candid shot). Approach it as if you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – because that’s just what you’re doing.

In order to appear in image and video search results, your assets have to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Ensure this is happening properly by using <image> and <video> tags in your XML sitemap. If you’ve got a lot of images/videos, create a sitemap index file for your site.

External resources

• Google Image best practices
• Your Guide to Optimizing Images for SEO
• How to Use Alternative Text for SEO

Getting it done

Your title tag goes in the <head> of your page. Use your page’s target keyword at the beginning and keep it under 65 characters – any longer and it will get cut off. When added correctly it looks like this: <title>This Is the Page Title</title>.

Meta descriptions are just that – descriptions of what the user will find on the page. Keywords appear in bold so use them here. Descriptions don’t affect ranking, but they can affect CTR, time on site, and bounce rate. The meta tag looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”A short description of your page, around 160 characters.”/>

External resources

• What Are Title Tags and Do They Matter?
• Meta Descriptions and How to Use Them for SEO

Getting it done

Robots.txt files are made up of blocks of code that contain two basic parts: user-agent and directive. Every block can have multiple directives, but only one user-agent.

You can use a tool to create your robots.txt file or you can write one yourself, depending on how many directives you need to write. Beware of using a tool: if you use a different one to create your XML sitemap, you could wind up with a discrepancy that could block a page you want to get crawled.

Submit and test your file in Google Search Console before adding it to your site’s root directory. This will help you prevent errors that could keep your site out of the search results.

External resources

• Robots.txt In a nutshell
• Robots and You: A Guide to Robots.txt

Getting it done

Try to make your website hierarchy as flat as possible – your pages should be accessible in as few clicks as possible. Don’t try to link to every page though, best practice is 100 links or less per page, internal and external combined. Don’t optimize links to your homepage as you should have a home button or linked logo on each page.

To optimize the flow of link juice to your conversion pages, use in-text links (also known as editorial links). Use keywords in the anchor text, but not every time – over-optimization can be just as bad as under-optimization. Add links to your most important pages near the top of your content so they are crawled and weighted appropriately.

Finally, if you don’t do so already, regularly crawl your site to find internal links to broken pages or redirects so you can reclaim these links. Be sure to make outbound links nofollow if you don’t want to pass any link juice onto those sites.

External resources

• Check your internal & external links with Google Search Console in the Links section

Getting it done

Use Google Alerts to track your mentions in news stories, reviews, and blog posts.

Set up a Twitter custom feed to monitor conversations on that platform for mentions of your company, products, industry, and keywords.

Look for people talking about you on other sites with a tool such as Buzzsumo, Mention or PinAlerts (if you allow users to pin your content on Pinterest).

When you record your mentions, be sure to note any specific products or features, whether it was positive and negative and any contact information you can find for link building outreach.

External resources

• Free Media Monitoring Tools: Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Social Searcher

Getting it done

The first part of a mobile-friendly page is load time. Google’s criteria for a mobile-friendly page is to load above the fold content in one second or less. After taking the normal process of loading a webpage into account, you’ve actually only got about 400 milliseconds that you can do anything about. Optimize your page speed by:

• Minimizing image size: Don’t rely on HTML to resize your images – that just change their dimensions. Use an image editor like Photoshop to reduce the size of your image files.
• Use browser caching: Reduce the number of HTTP requests with caching. Use expires headers and cache-control headers to tell browsers that images, stylesheets, and CSS are cacheable.
• Reduce/eliminate redirects: Some redirects are unavoidable. But remember, every redirect is a new HTTP request, which adds to users’ wait time.
• Render in the first connection: New TCP connections are unable to use the full bandwidth of the connection, so the server is limited to 10 or fewer packets. This means your ATF content needs to be 14Kb or less. Keep your server fully up to date or you could be limited to 3 or 4 packets!
• Accelerated Mobile Pages: Consider using the AMP protocol. Developed by Google, AMP uses special HTML and a dedicated cache to load pages nearly instantly.

Make sure your site is also optimized for mobile user experience:

• Avoid Flash, Silverlight, and other plugins. They look nice, but mobile browsers don’t support them. Use HTML5 for special effects instead.
• Make your base font size 16. Any smaller and users will struggle to read your body text without zooming – a major source of frustration. Stick with mobile-friendly fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Times/Times New Roman, or Verdana.
• Keep touchscreens in mind. Missed or accidental clicks enrage users, so make your tap targets big enough with at least 48 pixels on all sides as a cushion.
• Structure your site so it’s easy to get around and consume content. 40% of mobile users will leave your site if they can’t navigate easily. Limit the amount of information on your landing page to your CTA and messaging encouraging them to convert. Remember, the point of a mobile search is to immediately complete a goal on the landing page.

External resources

• What Does Google’s Mobile-First Index Mean for You?
• How to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly for SEO
• Why Mobile Speed Matters in SEO

Getting it done

First, define your campaign goal and identify your target audience. Create a generalized, rough outline of your customers, called buyer personas. Dig into your site analytics to gather information like age, gender, and interest segments – some software will even tell you what your users are in-market for when they visit your site. For more specific information, use customer interviews or a form on your website to capture user information: job title, location, industry, communication preferences, family background, and status.

Use this information to inform your keyword research. What information are your buyer personas searching for, and what is the search intent behind their keywords? What problem does your business solve for them? Optimize your landing pages and content marketing to appeal to your various types of users at each step of the purchase process. The goals you established in step one will help you track your campaign and optimize keywords and content.

Before executing your SEO campaigns, establish KPIs so you can make informed choices when evaluating performance. Some good SEO metrics to track include:

• Indexed pages: Making sure your site is getting crawled by search engines is the first step to ensuring you are reaching your audience. Check for Crawl Errors in Google Search Console regularly.
• Keyword ranking: Once you’ve completed your keyword research and know which keywords your audience uses, track your site’s position to ensure that people are finding you.
• Search traffic and/or CTR: Ranking is important, but doesn’t mean much if you’re ranking for keywords that have no volume, or if your listing gets no clicks

External resources

• The Benefits of a Long-Term SEO Strategy
• Create Your SEO Strategy in 4 Steps

Getting it done

Create a list of topics for your website – start with your product or categories or by answering “what does my business do?” Use natural language and industry-specific terms, since that’s what people will use in search engines.

Check your analytics or Google Search Console account to uncover the keywords that people already use to find your site. Use tools like Ubersuggest and Google’s Keyword Planner to find more potential keywords.

Enter your potential keywords into the Ubersuggest Keyword Tool to see the average monthly search volume. Don’t target just the keywords with the highest volumes – those are generally highly competitive and hard to rank for. Use a mixture of head and long-tail keywords to drive both volume and conversions.

External resources

• Guide to Keyword Research
• Free Keyword Research Tools
• 6 Steps to Keyword research
• Keyword Tool

Getting it done

Optimize your on-page content to target keywords with local intent. Choose keywords that are relevant to your business location as well as industry, products, etc. Create locally-focused content around your keywords. Local “best of” lists, local guides, local employee profiles, local customer success stories, and seasonal guides are good content to post on your site.

When optimizing your pages’ meta tags, add your keyword along with your business name and your target location, using the pipe character as a separator. Use location in URLs and image alt text, when possible.

Add the LocalBusiness Schema markup to your contact page. Making sure your site is mobile-friendly will also improve your local SEO, as the majority of searches on mobile devices have local intent.

External resources

• Local SEO Starter Guide for Your Website
• Your Local SEO Reporting Guide
• How to Add Your Business to Google Maps
• 10 Free Local Business Listing Sites

Getting it done

Use your analytics to segment traffic by location, device, and referrer to find your most successful landing pages for each channel. Then, optimize your landing pages to maximize your reach for each audience:
Prominently display your name, address, and phone (NAP) information on your contact page, and include it in the page’s title tag.

Make use of semantic markup to get your information into local search packs and knowledge graph rich snippets, which you can then track in Ubersuggest’s Keyword Tool.

For mobile landing pages, avoid interstitials, pop-ups, and splash pages. Reduce your reliance on forms and increase the size of your CTAs to make clicking on a touchscreen easier.

Set goals and KPIs for individual social media platforms – it’s unlikely Facebook users will convert as well as Pinterest visitors.

Use Google’s Campaign URL builder to create custom tracking parameters to track external campaigns for each channel and set up events to evaluate the effectiveness of internal messaging and CTAs.

External resources

• Google Search Console
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics

Getting it done

Optimization these days is all about natural language and semantics – your content should be written for human readability first, with keywords used strategically for SEO. Important places to use your keywords to optimize your content are:

• URL: Search engines look at URLs to tell them what to expect on the page. The best practice for optimizing URLs is to use the keyword at the beginning (similar to your page title), use hyphens as word separators (search engines don’t recognize underscores), and keep them to the point.
• Title tag – Title tags are one of the most important pages ranking signals. Like with URLs, use your keyword at the beginning. This is a spot that’s really easy to over-optimize, so be very careful about adding more than one keyword. Do it if it works naturally and they’re very closely related. Never repeat a keyword more than once – that’s a really great way to look like spam.
• HTML headers – <H1> through <H6> tags give your content structure, which makes it easier for search engines to interpret it and humans to consume it. <H1> tags, or header tags, are the most important for SEO and work like the article or post title. Note that it’s not necessarily the same thing as the page title. Using your keywords in your HTML headers will tell readers, both human and robot, what they’ll read in each section.
• Body text – Don’t worry about using keywords a certain number of times, or a certain density. What’s important is using it naturally at the beginning, middle, and end of the article. This is why writing long, in-depth content pays off: you’ll naturally use keywords and semantically-related words all over the place.

External resources

• Guide to Duplicate Content
• On-page SEO Checklist
• Plagiarism Checker Tool: Copyscape

Getting it done

The quickest way to check your pages’ HTTP status is in Google Search Console’s Site Crawl. That will crawl your site and return any issue impacts your site’s usability, accessibility, and visibility.

Check response codes in Google Search Console in Crawl Errors and fix the pages that appear in the URL Errors section. You can also use a tool such as Screaming Frog to crawl your website and return the HTTP status for each URL.

Search engines are looking to provide the best sites to their users, so following their guidelines will generally result in the best user experience for your visitors.

External resources

• Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools
• Site Crawl

Getting it done

The first step is to determine your brand’s tone of voice. This will vary depending on your industry, products, and business, and should remain consistent across media types and channels. Experiment with different language to establish the best fit for your audience. A typical rule of thumb is to adopt a professional tone for B2B services and a more relaxed and personal tone of voice for B2C industries.

Next, create a content calendar. It doesn’t necessarily need to be exact, but use guidelines for how frequently you will publish new content on each channel. Be sure to include special occasions like holidays, special offers, and seasonal changes.

Finally, segment your content and messaging by the audience in order to target customers at every point of the conversion funnel.

External resources

• How to Develop a Content Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide

Getting it done

Measure your current mobile audience in Google Analytics under Audience > Mobile Overview and Devices, and Internet browsers under Technology > Browser &OS. You can also check Operating Systems, Screen Resolutions, and more.

Ensure your website is checked across Screen Resolutions and Mobile Devices whenever design changes are made to ensure both compatibility and usability. Virtual emulators allow you to check devices you do not own.

Use Segmentation to reference Device and Screen Resolution with conversions to prioritize further optimization.  Do certain settings indicate higher conversion rates or bigger purchases?

External resources

• Cross Browser Testing

Getting it done

When you have pages with duplicate content, or content similar enough to be considered copies, add <link rel=” canonical” href=”http://example.com” /> to the <head> of the duplicate page with the URL of the original page. Search engines try to honor this link, but it’s not a directive, so don’t use it in place of 301 or 302 redirects.

URLs in the canonical link tag must be 100% matches to the actual canonical URL, so decide ahead of time if your URLs will use www., HTTP/HTTPS, trailing slashes, or not. Tell Google how to handle the www resolve by setting a preferred URL in Google Search Console.

Each page can have only one rel=”canonical” tag – using more than one will cause search engines to ignore them all. And while you may think that your web pages are all unique, there are a number of common circumstances that can cause duplicate pages, so it’s often best to include self-referencing canonical tags on all pages.

External resources

• Google canonicalization advice
• What is a Canonical Tag?

Getting it done

Use common, industry-specific naming conventions that are popular with your audience for your folders and subfolders – those are the words they are most likely to use when performing a search.

Category and sub-category pages should be optimized landing pages for their keywords. Remember: Site hierarchy influences what site links are shown in search results. So a disorganized or illogical hierarchy could lead to a confusing and unoptimized search snippet.

Finally, create categories and subcategories that are clearly defined and mutually exclusive to avoid duplicate content issues.

External resources

• How to Setup an SEO-Friendly Website Architecture

Getting it done

The most important part of link building is to create content that’s worth sharing. The best, and easiest, way to do this is to use content that’s already successful as a model.

Use a tool like Buzzsumo or Ahrefs that lets you search articles by topic to find highly-shared pages. Content that has a lot of links tells you there’s the demand for content on that topic, which makes building links much easier. You should also identify the content on your site people is already linking to, so you know what your audience finds most useful.

Once you’ve identified your most-linked articles, improve them by updating, expanding, and/or redesigning them. You could also rewrite them with a new perspective. Blogs are usually the best place to publish this content, but they don’t make sense for everyone. If you don’t have the time or resources to consistently maintain a blog for your site, focus instead of writing a few evergreen articles that will stay relevant for months or years.

Next, build a list of sites and/or authors to reach out to. Sites that have linked to you or your competitors in the past are a good place to start – you know they’re interested in your topic. There are other platforms out there, like BlogDash and AuthorCrawl, that will help you identify bloggers covering topics relevant to your site.

Once you’ve built your list, reach out to each blogger individually. Write your emails yourself – automation is obvious and will land your emails in the trash if they even make it past the spam filter. You can use a general template to get started, but tailor each email to the recipient and the content you’re pitching. And add your content info at the end, it will add credibility. You might struggle at the start, but that’s ok. Outreach is about building a relationship as much as a specific link – and a few high-quality links are better than a lot of low-quality links.

External resources

• Link Building Strategies
• How to Build Links for SEO

Getting it done

Decide which sort of international site structure works best for you: a subdomain, CCTLD, or subfolders (generally the recommended method).

Avoid duplicate content issues by using the hreflang tag to identify each version of the page. The hreflang tag for an English language page looks like this: <rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://www.example.com/en”>. If you have a global landing page, like a splash page, use hreflang=”x-default”.

Add the hreflang link to the page’s head, HTTP header or XML sitemap. Each page must include an hreflang tag for every language version available, including a link to itself. So www.example.com/en must include an hreflang tag designating www.example.com/en as the English version of that page.

Decide how you will handle multilingual page content. The best thing to do is to hire a native speaker to create your content. They’ll know how words and phrases will translate and how the language is used in search engines. Use a native speaker to help with outreach during link building. They will be much more authoritative and trustworthy and can possibly help you identify influencers in your niche.

If you don’t have an international site and only want to appear in search results for one country, use Google Search Console to geotarget specific countries if you want your site to appear in search results for just one country.

External resources

• International SEO: Site Structure
• How to Use Hreflang for SEO
• International SEO: An In-Depth Checklist

Getting it done

Record and track all of your local citations in a spreadsheet. Make note of the name, address, phone number, and website URL listed in each citation. Contact any of the directories that have inconsistent or outdated information listed. When possible, encourage your customers to leave reviews.

External resources

• Local SEO Starter Guide for Your Website

Getting it done

Replace the default 404 page with one that reflects your site design, brand identity, and company personality. Make it humorous, interesting, or entertaining to build goodwill and reduce frustration.

Add items like a more prominent site search, contact form, customer service live chat, a sitemap, or some other tool to help your users find what they’re looking for. Provide links to multiple pages on your site, particularly your most important and most popular pages so your users aren’t stranded.

Review your links – internal and external – to fix broken links that send users to the 404 page in the first place. You can find many of your pages returning a 404 error in Google Search Console’s Site Crawl, instantly.

External resources

• Why 404 Pages are Important for SEO
• What We Learned From Great 404 Error Pages

Getting it done

The best way to optimize your site for all screen sizes is to use responsive design. This will serve the same HTML on the same URLs and use CSS to change how the page appears on each device. To make your page responsive, set the meta viewport to the device length like this: <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>.

You could also create separate mobile pages using a subdomain, or serve different HTML based on user-agent. However, these methods take more development and marketing resources to implement and optimize, so they’re generally not recommended for mobile SEO.

External resources

• Mobile Compatibility and Touchscreen Readiness
• How to Use the Mobile Viewport for SEO

Getting it done

Search engines are looking to provide the best sites to their users, so following their guidelines will generally result in the best user experience for your visitors.

External resources

• How to Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly for SEO
• The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Technical Mobile SEO Audit

Getting it done

Clear titles, headings, and breadcrumbs help visitors know where they are in relation to the rest of your site and tell them how to get to any other information they might want. An HTML sitemap outlining the taxonomy of your site can be helpful if you have a lot of categories, subcategories, and/or products. Site search and live help options should be clearly available on all pages (if relevant for your business).

Monitor your site search – the most common searches can give you clues to problems with your navigation and site structure. When naming your categories, use established conventions and natural words. This will help your users understand what your site is about and will tell search engines that it’s relevant to search queries. Use your 404 pages as an opportunity to get users back on track quickly.

External resources

• What Is Website Architecture?
• Website Architecture and Internal Links
• Breadcrumb Navigation: a Guide to Types, Benefits and Best Practices

Getting it done

Avoid using Flash whenever possible. Fortunately, you can use HTML5 for special effects, images, and videos that were previously created in Flash.

External resources

• How Google Indexes Flash Content
• Saying goodbye to Flash in Chrome

Getting it done

Plan your posts in advance so you can build your audience and momentum over time. If you find yourself struggling to reach your audience, consider giving yourself a helping hand via paid promotion.

There are various marketing tools you can use that allow you to schedule posts in advance, so you can reach your audience outside of traditional office hours.

Keep track of engagement and click-through by day and time to discover the optimal times to post on each platform. Monitor likes and shares by media type so you can customize your presence for each social media channel – not all post types perform equally across all channels. This is an ongoing process – user behavior is constantly changing and evolving.

Create guidelines for employees interacting with the public – even if they aren’t controlling the brand’s account, they still represent the company when they are active on social media. Respond quickly to any feedback so you can turn complaints into positive customer experiences.

External resources

• Social Media Management Tools for Small Budgets
• Free Social Media Tools You Need to be Using

Getting it done

Familiarize yourself with the analytics platform provided by each social network. Take particular care to really understand the terminology of each one – “click” can mean different things in different contexts.

Use these tools to optimize your social media posts to drive engagement – video views, likes, and shares, as well as clicks. Is there a particular type of media or tone that works best? Does your audience seem to like emojis, or are they reacting to your more “no-nonsense” posts?

Use your site analytics to track how well each social media channel performs when referring users to your website – low time on site and high bounce rates indicate there’s a disconnect between your social media marketing and your landing pages. Conversely, monitor what’s successful for each channel so you can take advantage of that elsewhere.

External resources

• 5 Facebook Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
• 5 Ways Top Brands Use Facebook
• Facebook Page Promotion Tips

Getting it done

You can write your XML sitemap yourself if you have the time, or use a tool to do it for you. There are several free tools available online and many web services will create a sitemap for you as part of your subscription.

When creating your sitemap you must first decide which pages you want to include, and which pages you want to disallow via robots.txt and the meta robots tag. Then, you must decide what your canonical URL will look like (protocol, www resolve, capital letters, etc.). This is essential because you have to use absolute URLs in your sitemap; they can’t lead to redirects.

After you’ve created your sitemap, make sure it’s not too big. You’re limited to 50,000 URLs and 10MB. If it’s too big, break it up into smaller sitemaps and create a sitemap index (a sort of sitemap of sitemaps) file for your site. Ensure that the URLs in your sitemap don’t have parameters like session IDs and that special characters are properly escaped.

Before adding your sitemap to your site, ease the load on your server by compressing it. Use gzip to compress your sitemaps as search engines struggle to access .zip files.

The last step before adding your sitemap to your site is to test it using Google Search Console’s Add/Test Sitemap tool. Fix any errors it finds and add your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing (via Bing Webmaster Tools). Add your sitemap location to your robots.txt files to make it easier for search engines to find.

External resources

• The Official Sitemap format
• Technical Guide to Creating a Sitemap

Getting it done

For large paginated listings, adding further sub-categories will help indexing and user conversions. And it’s far better than trying to link to every piece of paginated content from one page.

Check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.

The preferred choice for most issues is to create a separate ‘View All’ page and canonicalize to that from each paginated option.

Where this is impractical, use Rel=”prev”/”next” HTML attributes to create a chain through your pages.

The last option would be to remove paginated content with no value from the search engine index by using a Meta Robots NoIndex, Follow tag on those pages.

Try to benchmark how paginated content is currently performing via your server logs to judge the success of your work, and double-check the implementation, particularly rel=”prev”/”next”.

External resources

• Pagination in SEO: Guide to NoIndex, View All and Rel=prev/next
• What is Duplicate Content?

Getting it done

Start by claiming your business on popular review sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List, Google My Business and TripAdvisor. Of course, there are other review sites that might make more sense for your business depending on your industry. Then, incentivize your customers to leave a review.

The best places to do this is on the order confirmation page, emails and in your store, if you have a physical location. It’s also a good idea to send a follow-up email after completing a customer’s order encouraging them to leave a review.

External resources

• Building links from Unlinked Mentions
• Free Media Monitoring Tools: Google Alerts
• 88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Personal Recommendations

Getting it done

The first step is the easiest: fix your broken internal links. Crawl your site to find URLs to pages that return 404 errors (broken or nonexistent pages). You can fix these links via 301 redirects, but that’s not necessarily the best way. Usually, you’re better off just fixing the page (or link). If reclaiming your internal links resulted in you fixing a lot of broken pages, there’s a good chance you’ve fixed a lot of broken backlinks as well.

Find your links using a tool like Majestic or Ahrefs and export the list. Then, you can crawl them to find broken links, or map them to your list of 404 errors using VLOOKUP in Excel. Fixing any remaining broken links should now be a matter of emailing the linking sites’ owners with updated/corrected URLs. These should have a high success rate – they don’t want broken links on their site either.

You can also work to convert any (positive!) mentions of your site into links. There are two ways to go about this. First, find instances of people “borrowing” your content. This isn’t about finding people plagiarizing your content, although plagiarism detection tools will help you here. It might be people quoting you, or using a statistic from the research you’ve published. Think of the Content Marketing Institute; their definition of content marketing is published across the Web, and not everyone using it links back to them.

Second, set up a tool for tracking mentions, so you’re notified whenever someone is talking about your brand, site, products, etc. Be sure to use specific keywords to avoid overwhelming yourself with alerts. Unlinked mentions should have higher than average success rates when doing outreach since they’re good for their own sites’ user experience.

Finally, Do a reverse image search to find instances of people using your infographics, illustrations, photos, and other images without attribution. Unless someone is trying to blatantly plagiarize you, most people will happily drop a link for attribution.

External resources

• Guide to using unlinked brand mentions
• Google Alerts
• How to Reclaim Links for SEO

Getting it done

Research which sites in your niche has a large audience, good reputation, and quality content. Look around the site or do a Google search for any writing or guest blogging guidelines. If the site functions primarily as a publisher, they likely have some. Do a quick content audit of their most recent articles. Make a spreadsheet to track topic, content type, date published, engagement (likes, shares, comments), and links.

When writing content to pitch for guest blogging, avoid topics that they’ve covered recently or frequently, or offer a new angle or analysis to stand out. Pick keywords that are relevant to you and the publisher; this shouldn’t be too hard because ideally, you have a very similar audience. Use this opportunity to build a relationship with these publishers to increase the likelihood of future content and link opportunities.

If you do put links back to your site in your guest content, make sure you’ve optimized your landing page – publishers don’t want to recommend bad user experiences to their visitors. Finally, promote your guest blog post as if it were published on your own site. Link to it on your site and share it via social media. When appropriate, respond to comments to keep the audience engaged.

External resources

• Guest Blogging for SEO

Getting it done

Use an SEO crawler or backlinking tool to conduct a link audit of your competitors. Create three lists, one for their most valuable links, another for dead links, and the third for their most linked content.

Start by going after the low-hanging fruit: “reclaiming” the broken links. Send an email to the website owner offering your site as an alternative to the dead pages to improve their site’s user experience and SEO.

Next, do a quick analysis of the type of content that gets the most links and the most valuable links. Build on and improve this content, if you don’t have better, similar content already. Use this content for a link building campaign targeting the competition’s most valuable links.

External resources

• How to Spy on Your Competitors to Capture Similar Links

Getting it done

Look for local and/or industry groups to join. If one doesn’t exist, consider starting one. Hosting online events via Google Hangouts, Zoom, YouTube, Facebook or other live streaming services make it especially easy to share that content later. Quality matters, though, so don’t get cheap with your webcam and/or microphone.

When attending community and industry events, write about it on your website before and after, and post on social media during the event, and tag people you meet or speakers you listen to. Take pictures and invite people to visit your booth, if you’ve got one. Video and image posts tend to do better on social media than regular text posts.

External resources

• How to develop a successful Coupon Marketing Strategy

Getting it done

Once you have set up your goals, multi-channel reports will be available for all goals in Google Analytics. To view assisted conversions, open Google Analytics, and click on the View you wish to use. In the Conversions reports, click on Multi-Channel Funnels. You can view data about assisted conversions in this section:

• Overview: This overview report provides the number of total conversions and the total number of assisted conversions. It also has a data visualization tool that allows you to see the percentage of total conversions each channel assisted in, as well as the percentage of conversions that were assisted by various channel combinations.
• Assisted Conversions: This report compares the number of conversions the channel assisted in with the number of last-click conversions the channel brought to your website. It displays this ratio as a number: the lower the number, the more often this channel served as the last customer interaction before conversion. The higher the number, the more often the channel served as an assistant for conversions. A value of 1 means the channel had as many assisted conversions as direct conversions.
• Top Conversion Paths: This report lists the various combinations of channels that resulted in a conversion on your site.
• Time Lag: This report shows how many conversions your site receives based on the number of days after a user first arrives on your site. For example, a user who arrives on your site and converts that day will have a Time Lag of 0. A user who visits your site, leaves, and then comes back to convert the next will have a Time Lag of 7.
• Path Length: This report tracks the number of conversions based on the number of marketing channel interactions (the conversion path length). For example, a user who visits your site from search results, and then later clicks on a display ad before converting will have a path length of 2.

External resources

• Analytics URL Builder
• Social Media Monitoring for Crisis Management
• 18 Social Media KPIs You Need to Track to Measure Success

Getting it done

First, choose your conversion goal and call to action (CTA). Think about who your ideal customer is and what they are looking for on your site. Create a CTA that fits their needs: are they looking for a first purchase discount code, a how-­to ebook, or a “stay up-­to-­date” newsletter?

Second, decide which information you need. It’s generally best practice to ask for as little information as possible in order to make the process quick and easy for your site visitor.

Third, choose a way to create your form and insert it on your site. You might use a form creation tool provided by your email marketing campaign software, a form service, or a specialized conversion tool, or ask your development team to customize one for your needs.

Basic Tips:

• If you choose to include a long form, try dividing it into two parts.
• If you’re offering a product or service, consider creating a pop­-up form on your homepage that offers a first purchase discount by filling it out.
• Assure your visitors that they won’t be spammed and their information won’t be shared.
• Make it clear which information you want in each field.
• Create a clear CTA for your form’s button, such as “Download the Free E-book”.
• Set up an auto­responder mailing system. Check if your country requires double opt­-in.
• Auto­fill information from the IP address.
• Optimize your forms for mobile.

External resources

• Top Conversion Optimization Tools
• What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Getting it done

Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find industry influencers.

Don’t focus solely on reach – audience engagement is just as important as total followers. In fact, someone with more audience engagement will be more influential than someone with a larger audience.

Make sure they publish and link to content that’s relevant to your business and/or products, and that their site ranks well in search results.

Start building the relationship by engaging with their posts and participating in relevant conversations with them – individual tweets and links aren’t the long-term goals here – you’re looking for something more valuable.

When reaching out, don’t pitch your content to them right away. Instead, tell them how much you enjoyed a recent article, congratulate them on an award, or thank them for sharing some of your content (if they have, of course!). When you do finally pitch them your brand, offer to collaborate on a piece of content. This will give them a sense of control and ownership, which will make them more invested.

External resources

• BuzzSumo

Getting it done

Don’t just track total conversions or conversion rates. To set up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics, first create a goal:

• Open Analytics and click “Admin” in the top navigation. It’s next to the Customization tab.
• Choose the Property then the View that you want to track and then click “Goals”
• There are many types of goals to choose from, including duration-based goals and goals triggered by events. For this example, click “New Goal” and enter a goal name and goal destination URL (for example, the /thank-you page that users see after signing up for an account). You can edit existing goals here by clicking the name of the goal.
• Click on “Goals Details”
• Assign a monetary value to your goal if you know how much the goal is worth, even if you’re not measuring purchases (currency can be updated in the View Settings). This will allow Analytics to calculate the value for channel, landing page, and visitor.

Now, set up your funnel:

• Turn on the Funnel.
• Enter the URLs of the pages people visit to go through the conversion process. This will be different for every website. If you don’t have a predetermined path, go to the Reverse Goal Path report under Conversions to see the three pages visited for each goal conversion.
• Click “Verify this Goal” to see how often the Goal would have converted based on your data from the past 7 days – if this reads 0% check that there are no errors.
• Give the funnel a chance to gather data, then head over to the Reporting tab and click “Conversions” from the bottom of the left menu, then “Goals”, and finally “Funnel Visualization”.
• Choose the goal you want to analyze and set the date range. Now you can see which steps in your conversion funnel cause users to drop off, with details of the pages they divert to (or simply where they exit), along with how many users make it through the funnel to convert.

External resources

• Page-Analytics Chrome extension (Heat mapping code)

Getting it done

Use 301 redirects to send visitors to your homepage from alternate versions of your domain.

Registering your domain for multiple years normally results in a discount, so there’s really no downside.

External resources

• Best Long Term SEO Tactics

Getting it done

The meta robots tag, like the title and meta description tags, goes in the page <head>. To tell search engines not to index a page or follow any of its links, use this meta robots tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”/>.

You can use a combination of “noindex”, “nofollow”, “index” and “follow”, depending on how you want search engines to handle indexing and links for individual pages.

External resources

• Google’s Robots meta tag specification

Getting it done

Establish the brand identity of your company, including colors and other visual elements.

When laying out your pages, try to use a grid structure to help with a consistent layout. Desktop and mobile versions of your site should use the same color scheme and design elements, even when the layout changes by screen size. Your navigation buttons should be the same across the site, and they should be clear and accessible on each page.

External resources

• A brief Look at Grid-Based Layouts in Web Design
• Building Responsive Web Designs: Grids and Wireframe

Getting it done

Make sure interstitials and splash pages aren’t indexed over your regular page content by having them load asynchronously or by using JavaScript.

Use cookies to control when and how often users see interstitial pages. Many sites use splash pages for international pages, but that’s not optimal. Instead, use hreflang or IP detection to serve the right page.

External resources

• Google Interstitial Advice for Mobile Visitors
• How to Use Hreflang for SEO

Getting it done

Validate your code with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tests. Although this won’t directly impact your rankings, it does ensure that your website is accessible to search engines and visitors, including those who may be visually impaired or have other accessibility issues.

100% compliance is difficult to achieve, and most modern browsers can deal with some minor broken code, so prioritize when it comes to fixing issues.

External resources

• Official W3C Validator
• 6 Reasons Why Google Says Valid HTML Matters

Getting it done

How you optimize your social media presence for audience engagement will depend on the platform, industry, and audience. The good news is that you can use analytics to figure out what works best for each social network.

You can use the built-in analytics (Facebook Insights and Twitter Dashboard), or invest in a social media marketing analytics platform like Sprout Social. Image and video posts generally tend to do better from an engagement standpoint. Experiment with dayparting (the day and time you post) to find the optimal times to promote yourself via social media to drive more traffic back to your site.

Track social media traffic in your analytics platform to see which sites are best for conversions, which are best for shares, and which are best for other engagements (likes, comments, customer service, etc.).

Try the technique known as newsjacking: find a news story related to your business or industry and give an opinion or even just a witty quip. Staying current will keep you in front of people’s minds.

External resources

• Social Media Engagement: How To Do It Well

Getting it done

Search for directories for your area. Start with the big names: Yelp, Foursquare, Yellow Pages, and the Better Business Bureau.

Make sure your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is consistent to avoid hurting your off-page SEO. Look to join local community groups as well, such as your chamber of commerce, relevant business locations, charities, educational organizations, and tourism websites (both government and private).

External resources

• Quality Check Guidelines for Web Directories

Getting it done

Make a note of what communities your influencers are a part of and hang out there. Focus on quality, not quantity – choose websites that have consistent, valuable interaction instead of just joining as many as you can. Don’t bother with forums that have a lot of spam – associating with “bad neighborhoods” online will actually make you look bad in Google’s eyes.

When you do participate in discussions, make sure you are actually contributing something of value by answering a question or solving a problem – if you don’t you’ll just get lost in the noise. And don’t risk your credibility – only contribute when you know what you’re talking about. Don’t view these interactions as link building; the goal here is not to slyly insert as many links as you can into a conversation on Quora or Reddit. Anyway, most online communities are automatically nofollow links.

External resources

• The Best Online Communities for Promoting Your Content

Getting it done

Add your buttons in a prominent location on the page, but be careful not to distract from the content or any CTAs. Social media networks often use metadata when linking to a page, so make sure your title tag and descriptions are compelling and accurate.

Optimize your pages for rich media posts like Twitter Cards and Pinterest Rich Pins. You can check your site is optimized for Twitter Cards in the Structured Data section of our Review.

Set up your analytics platform to track clicks to your share buttons so you can track what content drives the most shares, and to which channels. Content can then be optimized to ensure higher rates of traffic and conversions.

External resources

• How to Create Social Media Buttons for All the Top Social Networks

Getting it done

Keep your website and server software up to date – old versions are one of the prime targets for hackers. Make sure all employees use password security best practices and regularly monitor antivirus blacklists to make sure you haven’t been unknowingly compromised.

External resources

• How Does Getting Hacked Affect Your Website or Online Business?
• Setting up a Free SSL Certificate
• Google: Malware and unwanted software

Getting it done

Optimize your social media profiles to rank for your branded keywords. Use the name that people most search for (Recreational Equipment, Inc. vs. REI) as your page title and vanity URL. Put your name first (that’s the keyword you’re really optimizing for), since it’s the most important part in Google’s eyes.

Fill out the About Us section fully and include your most important keywords – Google uses the page titles and descriptions to form search snippets. Optimize your statuses and updates by including a comment: The first 18 characters of your updates act as titles and descriptions in SERPs. Always add a call to action to your Facebook page.

Be sure to optimize your Twitter Cards on your website, as Google displays Twitter cards for branded keywords.

External resources

• The Social Lifecycle: Consumer Insights to Improve Your Business