At a glance

Quick summary

• Here are five simple tips to help you jumpstart your SEO strategy.
• These steps are written in order!
• They take a bit of time up front, but they’ll save you time in the long-run.

What is SEO?

• According to Moz, SEO is “a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.” (Moz)
• If you want free traffic to come to your site from search engines, particularly Google, it’s worth considering your SEO strategy.

Follow these steps in order

• Whenever I write a new post, I follow these steps
• I suggest that you follow them in order
• I’ve optimized this process over years of working with WordPress to minimize the amount of re-work you have to do (e.g., coming up with the keyword first so you don’t have to try to smush a keyword into an existing post)

1. Decide on the topic

• First, pick a topic you want to write about
• It should be something that both you and your audience care about
• Plan to write 500-600 words on the topic

2. Do keyword research

• Do keyword research before writing anything!
• I recommend installing Keywords Everywhere (link below) to help you uncover great keywords. This tool isn’t free, but the price is incredibly reasonable! (You’ll likely spend around $10 per year.)
• Here’s a video tutorial that covers using Keywords Everywhere:

• My recommendation is to select keywords that get monthly results, but have low competition

3. Write headlines

• Write headlines before writing any content!
• Here’s a post I wrote which will help you write great headlines.
• Follow the tips I outline in this post (link below), and be sure to do it prior to writing any of the content!

4. Install an SEO plugin and follow its recommendations

• SEO plugins guide you as you write content
• They provide recommendations and benchmarks for improving your SEO as you write
  

• My favorite SEO plugin is Rank Math SEO (link below). It’s free!
• I recommend that you install Rank Math and then use it to guide you as you’re writing new content. It’ll save you a ton of hassle and time in the long-run!

5. Be mindful of your website’s performance

• Google wants your pages to load in less than three seconds! Your visitors do too.
• If it doesn’t, your search rankings could (and likely will) be impacted
• Run your Home page and your post pages through GTmetrix to see how they perform, and then make changes based on the tool’s recommendations

Others? Questions?

Any thoughts or questions? Anything with which you disagree? Anything I missed?

Leave a comment below and let me know!