SEO – Search Engine Optimization – can refer to the work you do to a website to make it more interesting for search engines like Google. The aim of doing SEO is to make sure that the site ranks in Google for relevant search terms to generate visits to your website. Some website owners just want traffic to their website, but many also want this traffic to produce contacts or online sales. For many businesses, time spent doing SEO will be a good investment as it will increase traffic and sales over a long period of time.
There are two popular misconceptions around SEO. The first is that SEO is fully built into a website when it is delivered. The second is that the person who designed your website is the best person to do SEO.
In reality, SEO is something that needs constant work, and it is usually carried out by search engine specialists (called SEOs, meaning Search Engine Optimizers) or by the website owners themselves. The latter may have little training or time to do SEO, but they strongly desire better ranking and traffic for their website. If that describes your situation – and your site is built on WordPress – then this guide is for you!
If you can set aside just 2 hours every week, we can show you how to best invest this time to improving your SEO. This plan may also help website designers who want to offer SEO services.
To start, chose a day and a time that you will set aside every week for SEO and add it you your agenda. If you use a calendar in Outlook or Gmail for your appointments, then create a recurring meeting with yourself to do SEO.
Setting up SEO Tools – your first 2 hours will be well invested
Speaking of misconceptions, there is a popular misconception in WordPress that you just need to install a great SEO plugin like SEOPress to improve rankings in Google. This is a bit like imagining that you just need to subscribe to the gym to get fit. No, you must go to the gym and work out! SEOPress is a tool that will allow you to do SEO tasks in WordPress.
Before getting into a regular weekly routine, spend your first 2 hours on setting up and understanding the most important SEO tools for your website. This step just involves setting them up, we will look at how you will exploit these tools in later chapters.
SEOPress – the best SEO plugin for WordPress
If you haven’t installed SEOPress on your WordPress site yet, follow the guide Getting started with SEOPress. In our guide we assume that you have bought a SEOPress PRO license. You will need the advanced features of this plugin to do some of the tasks listed in your weekly routines.
Use the installation wizard to configure the basic settings including replacing existing an SEO plugin. We will come back to some settings later.
SEOPress Insights
We also recommend that you purchase and install our SEOPress Insights tool. This plugin will allow you track ranking for your favorite keywords over time and detect new links to your site. Don’t run the installation wizard just yet, as you will want to determine a list of keywords first. You will do this later.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that will give you insights into how it crawls, indexes and ranks your site in search results. It will be an important tool for detecting issues with your site. Correcting issues can help improve ranking. Read our introduction and instructions for creating your account here: Getting Started with Google Search Console
Google Analytics or alternative
Whereas Google Search Console indicate how many visitors Google sent to your site over time (the indicator is called “clicks” in Google Search Console reports), a web analytics tool like Google Analytics will show you what those visitors did when they arrived on the site. If Google Analytics is correctly configured it will let you see if traffic from Google generated contacts and sales. See our guide: Getting started with Google Analytics 4.
Spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel our Google Sheets
There are a lot of small jobs to do in SEO. You will improve ranking by making small incremental changes. To keep track of these tasks we will guide you through using a spreadsheet to note a list of keywords, link opportunities and a to-do list for on-page and off-page optimizations.
Setting up your SEO strategy: target keywords
Before launching into your weekly SEO routine, it is important to establish your SEO objectives and your SEO strategy. Depending on your ambitions and complexity of your site, you may need a lot longer than 2 hours to complete this phase.
We recommend that you start by downloading and reading our eBook Introduction to WordPress SEO. This eBook is a 12.000-word document so you should be able to read through it in just over an hour. However, you may want to spend some more time going through the recommendations to find good keywords.
Before moving onto the regular weekly SEO routine, you will need a list of keywords that you want to target. Add these targeted keywords to a spreadsheet as detailed in the eBook. You can have anything from 10 to 100 keywords to target. We suggest starting with between 10 and 30.
Note: the word keyword is often misleading because keywords are usually a phrase of more than one word. Some people prefer to use the term “keyphrase”.
The weekly 2-hour routines
Once you have set up your tools and you have a list of keywords to target, you are ready to start on a regular 2-hour-per-week SEO routine. To make sure that you concentrate an equal amount of time to different, but important SEO jobs, we have organized tasks into 4 routines. Once you have completed week 4, come back to week 1.
We will deal with each week as a separate chapter, but here is a short introduction.
Week 1: Checking progress and finding issues
This is an important routine to check on progress and act on issues reported by SEOPress and Google Search Console. It is tempting to analyze SEO metrics every week but if you spend too much time drilling-down into data every week you may never get any actual SEO work done.
Week 2: Creating SEO optimized content
You can gain a lot of advantages in SEO just by regularly producing new, relevant content on your website. Even better make sure that this content is optimized for your keywords or supports other content that is being optimized for keywords. Even if you not responsible for producing content on your website, go through this routine to make sure that new content is being used to maximize SEO.
Week 3: On-page SEO optimizations
You should always have a full list of things to do on your website. Go through this routine every 4 weeks to make sure you are keeping on top of your to-do list. With your target keywords set up using the SEOPress metabox, you will have ongoing analysis of your content.
Week 4: Off-page SEO optimizations
Getting links and citations from other sites is important, but finding good sources of links and outreach can be very time consuming and not everyone’s favorite job. Having this routine once every 4 weeks make sure that you get round to doing some link-building work.
