Updated: Feb. 17, 2014
We get asked regularly what tasks a business should be doing regularly. In addition to the article below (items that still hold true), businesses should:
A) Update their content – Utilize analytics to determine what your visitors are looking for and what content pieces are getting read the most. Continue writing in-demand pieces. Don’t simply concentrate on the blog. Go through your site’s main pages and make regular updates as needed.
B) Get social – Choose your social media platforms and then set aside time and resources to post regularly and interact with your audience. This includes responding to posts, generating conversations, posting on other people’s pages, and reading others’ updates.
C) Stay in the know – Continue learning by staying up-to-date on industry related news and updates.
If your small business has a website, there are some essential tasks you should be doing on a monthly basis to maintain or boost your rankings, traffic and conversions. Failing to perform SEO correctly could cost your business website visitors and customers.
1. Identify Your Demand
It is important to regularly identify your demand. In terms of SEO and Internet Marketing, this can be easily accomplished by performing regular keyword research using a keyword tool such as Google’s Free Adword’s Tool.
2. Measure Your Market
Learn how to read your website Analytics and peruse them regularly. When you can identify how is coming to your website, how they are getting there, how long they are staying and why they are leaving you can work your site to your benefit. Plus, your analytics can change by the season, the month, the day or even the hour. Additionally, if you are running additional advertising campaigns, it is always wise to search your website analytics for traffic that may be in correlation.
3. Build Your Audience Base
Establishing quality links to your website and content, engaging with current visitors and promoting your website should be a regular task. Offer new ways to share content with friends, hold a contest, or encourage customers to re-visit your website. You should also try and get a few websites to link to your website on a regular basis as well.
4. Check Your Competition
It’s important to regularly check your competition online. You may be able to uncover tactics that are working for them, find things to avoid, or discover new things. Check who is linking to them (so then try and get those same websites to link to you) and how they rank. If their ranking has improved substantially, can you see what they have done differently that may have prompted the change?
5. Pay Attention to the Details
It’s a great idea to regularly go through your website with fine attention to the details. Look at your metatags, your H1 tags, your links, your spelling and your grammar. Periodically change your title, descriptions and keywords. Make a couple changes to your headings. Make sure all of your links are working correctly. Then, fill out your ‘contact’ form to make sure it is working properly too.
6. Remember that Content is King
When you go through your analytics, have a look at what pages are receiving the highest number of visitors or have the longest time spent on the website. Take a look at what pages have a high bounce rate. Then, use what you uncover to update your content to take advantage of your visitors. In addition, you should create a content plan to grow your website to meet visitor demands. Whether you continue to add pages to your website or regularly post a blog or news item, adding new content to your website is great for your visitors and the search engines, too.
Ideally, you should check your statistics and website positioning on a weekly basis. You should also strive to write a minimum of one blog post and fine one or two new links to your website each week, too. The rest of the tasks you can tackle once a month. Paying attention to your website and learning how to make your website work for you does require regular work; however, the benefits will come!
