By John Eberhard
If you’re just starting out doing SEO on your website, or considering getting into SEO, the question will come up of “How big a job is it?”
I think the first question that needs to be answered in order to answer the question of how big a job it is, is “How competitive is your business and your market?” The answer to that will give you an idea of how much work will be needed on SEO.
The goal of SEO is to get your website ranking on search engines, so that you get traffic to your site when people search for the products or services you provide.
If you are in a very competitive field, with lots of competitors, either in a local area if you are a local business or nationally if you market nationally, then the amount of work that will need to be done will be more extensive. Why? Because there will be numerous other companies that have been engaged in SEO for a long time, years or even decades.
Here are some of things those other guys have been doing:
- Keyword research: You have to find keywords related to your product or service that have some decent number of people searching for them, but don’t have tons of sites competing for them. Those are the ones you want to target.
- Metatags: These are tags that are invisible to website visitors but visible to search engines, that contain your targeted keywords and tell search engines what that page is all about. This should be done for all pages and blog posts of your site.
- Link building: This is the biggest job in SEO and the one that takes the most time. The idea is to do link building and just keep at it over a period of time.
- Boosting domain authority: This is a metric created by a company called Moz that is a predictor of how well your site will rank on search engines.
- SEO audit and technical fixes: It’s best to do an SEO audit once a quarter and fix any technical issues found that can reduce search engine ranking. Such as site loading speed for instance.
- Eliminating toxic links: Yes you want to build up links to your site, but you can also unknowingly build up links from what search engines consider toxic sites, such as siter China or other countries. You have to “disavow” these a couple times a year.
- Rewriting site text: There are tools today that can help you rewrite site text to make it rank better on search engines. And according to my testing these tools work.
Doing all that can be a lot of work and cost a lot of money. But it’s not all bleak! You don’t have to do all of that.
The key if you are just starting out, is to work with an experienced SEO consultant and figure out a series of actions that you can afford to do, and keep at it.
It’s not a one month job or a 3 month job. Ideally it’s something you work at and keep doing for a year or more. But the rewards can be great. One of my clients, for whom I have been doing SEO for several years, currently has 348 keywords where their site ranks somewhere in the top 50 results, and 56 keywords where they are in the #1 position.
If you’d like a free consultation on SEO for your website, contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
