Quickly Improve Your SEO With These 5-Minute Tasks

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There are small things you can do every day that make a real positive impact on your SEO. If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, spend it on any one of these.

1. Supercharge your images

While Google can’t read your images, they can read the filename, title, and alt tag of your image, so add some keywords in there! When you save an image, use a keyword optimized name and separate the words by dashes or spaces. You can even use this to provide variations on a single keyword, as we did in the example below:

2. Brainstorm topics for your blog

They don’t say “content is king” for nothing. If you’re serious about SEO, adding a blog to your site is a good way to attract new web traffic, improve your rankings for related keywords, and provide more value to your current customers. You don’t have to blog every day or every week, but blogging on a regular basis about content relevant to your industry (which your customers will find interesting) will help your SEO.

Take five minutes today to brainstorm blog topics. Answer common FAQs, give a recap of a recent industry event, or write a how-to post like this one. Need more inspiration? Search for your topic idea in Google, and check out the “People also ask” suggestions for related topics.

3. Add schema to your website

Have you ever been looking in Google and noticed product pricing or review stars in the search results?

These savvy websites added something called “schema” to their code. Because it involves code, schema seems more technical than it is and scares people off. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to implement without screwing anything up.  Search Engine Land offers a helpful how-to for the most common schema options, including local business, product pricing, reviews, event listings, and recipe posts.

Experts estimate only a third of websites are using schema today. Add yours, and chances are you’ll be one step ahead of your competition.

4. Optimize your meta descriptions and title tags

When your website appears in the search results, Google displays your title tag, URL, and meta description. Think of these as an ad for your website. Whatever show up here is your chance to entice the searcher to click through to your website.

If you leave these blank, Google will fill them in for you. Filling them in yourself allows you to optimize for keywords, and add some persuasive language. If you use WordPress, download the Yoast SEO plugin for an easy way to add these to every page on your website.

5. Monitor your brand mentions

Monitoring mentions of your brand online is a marketing no-brainer. You can gauge customer sentiment, respond to reviews in real-time, and sometimes you can even get a backlink. That third one is why it gets included in this list of SEO tips.

Backlinks are one of the top three things Google weighs in their ranking algorithm, and unlinked brand mentions are one of the easiest link-building strategies. Set up a Google Alert for your brand name, and you’ll be notified via email whenever a website mentions your brand. Then, simply reach out to the author or editor, thank them for featuring your brand, and ask if they wouldn’t mind linking back to you so their readers can learn more.

Replace your brand name in the example below, but keep the quotations. This tells Google to look for specific mentions of your brand, instead of things that sound like it.

Conclusion

Ultimately, to do SEO right takes a lot of work over a long period of time. But follow these tips on a consistent basis, and you’ll be off to a very good start.

Need help with your SEO? Contact us.