Overview

Why should you care about SEO?

SEO can be a large and perennial source of traffic for your site. Searchers are looking for specific resources, so this traffic is already pre-qualified. In the long term, SEO can generate “free” traffic that doesn’t require much on-going cost. 

When is SEO right for you?

SEO may be worth considering if you have a substantial number of pages on your site. But the process takes time, so it also requires a long-term perspective and a firm commitment to both content creation and distribution. 

When is SEO not right for you?

SEO may not be right for you if your service or product is so novel that customers aren’t searching for it yet. 

How does SEO fit into the big picture?

SEO can generate traffic from all parts of the purchase funnel, from the initial research to the purchase stage. SEO is actually the combination of many efforts: technical on-page changes, content creation, distribution, UI/UX, etc. 

What are the most important high-level SEO concepts?

In ranking webpages, Google prioritizes the best resources for a particular query. What is "best" is determined by the page's combination of relevance and authoritativeness, where relevance is based on the quality of on-page content, and authority is based on the number, quality, and diversity of inbound links and social mentions. The "Optimization" part of SEO simply refers to making the site as accessible as possible for crawlers, by implementing things such as an easy-to-understand hierarchy, and well-placed keywords that make it easy to parse what a page is about.

Where are the best resources online for SEO?

Moz, Backlinko, Quicksprout, SEMRush, SEOPowersuite

Checklist

Note: This list primarily refers to on-site elements, but search rankings are best achieved with content creation and content distribution efforts. See those checklists for more information. 

• Make strategic keyword choices
• Use readable and compelling Title Tags
• Use Headers (primarily H1)
• Write persuasive Meta descriptions
• Use Image HTML (alt tags and file names)
• Use clean, keyword-rich URLs
• Include an XML Sitemap
• Add an HTML Sitemap
• Have a clean site architecture
• Use a Robots.txt file
• Fix duplicate content issues
• Use Schema markup
• Fix any 404 Errors
• Include outbound links
• Add additional media
• Understand LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keyword implications
• Improve site speed
• Improve usability
• Ensure site responsiveness
• Set up the Google Search Console
• Focus on content length and depth