SEO Checklist for Startups
10 Essential SEO Tips/Tricks for your new website
!Before digging into these tips consider this!: It does not make sense to think about technical SEO optimisation if you do not know what is the core of your business yet. You need to know what your value proposition (lower price? smaller/faster product? disruptive service?) is before you can find people looking for it. There are no quick routes to rank well!
That being said. Have fun and don’t forget to follow me for more tips for startups! @inovpedro
Topics:
- Background check on name and new domain
- New domain (with or without www.)
- Analytics tracking
- Verify domain ownership of the website in webmaster tools
- Fetch as Google
- Site Structure
- Copy
- Content
- Goals/Conversions
- Social media
1. Background check on name and new domain
Before committing to a new domain you should perform a Google search using [site: domain.coutrycode](ex: site: myhatshop.co.uk) to find if the domain has been previously hosting any unwanted services or scammers. You can also search for the domain without the suffix code (.co.uk/.com), see if people are complaining about it sending unsollicited email or use archive.org to look at previous versions of the page.
Domain age is one of the 100s of variables that Google uses for website authority and you shouldn’t worry a lot about. Google normally uses crawled data to find a date for a domain (you can use Google’s custom search range to get more info) and as long as the domain is a couple of months/6 months old, this shouldn’t be a major deciding factor on your rank, the same applies to expiration dates of domains.
If you have questions about having keywords in your domain name, just think that its easier to “elevate yourself above the noise” if you have something a little bit more brand-able than just a bunch of keywords.
2. New domain (with or without www)
After you choose one, you have to decide if you are going to use www subdomain or not. In any of the cases use a redirect 301 (permanent redirect) to send people from one you are not using to the other. This way you will transfer all the indexing properties from one to the other.
3. Analytics tracking
You want to start collecting data as soon as possible, even if you are not ready to use it. In case you hire someone you will have some historical information about your website. Some great options to start with are Google Analytics, Mixpanel, KISSmetrics.
4. Verify ownership of the website in webmaster tools
Use Google analytics, webmaster tools code or tag manager to verify ownership and setup email forwarding. This way you will get an email in case Google detects any issues with your website (such as malware, possible hack, or crawling issues/errors).
In addition you should check the keywords listed in webmaster tools and see if you see any unwanted words. If you think your website has been used by scammers before and is being penalised go to the manual actions or submit a reconsideration request.
5. Fetch as Google
Google should be able to crawl/index your pages fairly quickly, so in case you are not ready or want expose limited content, configure your robots.txt , so that Google doesn’t index them. Consider submitting a sitemap.xml in case you have a new website, a complex/dynamic structure or if Google is not indexing all your pages.
In case you want to increase Adrelevancy in pages behind a login, make sure you give the Google bot crawler a login.
If you just updated a page or created a new one you can just submit a “fetch as Google” request to the pages you want to get crawled and/or indexed. This way you can see exactly what Google downloaded. Beware that exposing 1000s of pages might trigger Google to block it/manually review it, since its highly unlikely all your pages are of high quality. Google advises dividing this process in large batches (500 unique pages/week might be a good number).
6. Site Structure/Strategy
Plan your website according to your different customer segments/personas. What are the most important parts for the different stakeholders (investors, press, customers, etc..). In addition consider what your competition is doing well, what are they missing and what you can do better.
Questions to ask yourself during this process:
- Utility: Am I meeting the needs of each of the personas?
- Navigation: If a person lands on this page as a first page, will they be able to understand where they are in the website, and where to go next? do I understand the persona workflow coming from different channels?
- Focus: Does each page/channel have a clear topic?
On the technical side try to define a friendly url structure/nomenclature that makes sense for your users and as you scale. Although it is not of major importance you should use lowercase and dashes/hyphens as a word separator, instead of underscores as a best practice.
Try having short load times pages (at Google they aim for under half a second) so that your users don’t go away. You can use Google’s page speed insights or speed suggestions in Google analytics to see what you can improve both and speed and user experience.
7. Copy
Include relevant keywords naturally and avoid keyword stuffing. Make use of natural language and not just synonyms and tag clouds. Also consider the queries a person would do to land on this page and if you can approach these directly. (Ex: reviews, privacy policy, terms & conditions, satisfaction policy, etc…)
You can make use of Google’s keyword planner if you have an Adwords account or other free/paid tools to get more relevant keywords on a certain topic. When using hyperlinks, anchor text should be descriptive of the link and not a generic term such as “click here” or “download”.
8. Content
Every page should include a unique non generic page title (example: homepage is not the best one), topic, content, meta-description (for the description snippet under the title in search results). In case Google is unable to find a meta description and/or your relevant information on the website it will try fetching this data from the Open Directory Project. Feel free to test different meta-description’s to get better click-through rates.
Websites with duplicate information should use rel=”cannonical” to link the original page or try to provide more unique content, so that the page is not just a copy of the original.
Use extra meta information such as the “alt=” tag and the image names to describe the content of your images. When in doubt of what to write, think that a screen reader will read this content, so you want to make it as seamless as possible for accessibility purposes.
9. Define Company Goals/Conversions
What is your business goal? What does success look like? Make these goals accessible from every pages with obvious calls-to-action, after all this is what you want your users to do. Ex: Sign-up/Login, Download X, Buy Y, Contact etc..
Use your analytics tracking to monitor metrics (conversions) through time and changes made. Use funnels to monitor conversion rates and Google Analytics experiments to test new variations.
10. Social Media
Distribute your content/products/services where your users are: ex: forums, social networks, blogs and other communities. Engage users with the right tone and message and be reactive. Make use of your google+ profile as an author and publisher to become an industry influence. Test it using Google’s structured data tool and measure your performance in Google’s webmaster tools.
References:
[1] Google Adwords blog
[2] Google Adsense blog
[3] Google support
[4] Google Analytics blog
[5] Maile Ohye’s blog
[6] Matt Cutts’ blog
[7] Search Engine Watch
[8] Search Engine Land
[9] Social Media Today
[10] Unsplash — background image
[11] Vanessa Fox — “Marketing in the age of Google”
[12] Webmaster tools youtube channel
[12] Matt Cutt’s on domain background check
