Starting a business is an exciting step. It’s a time when we’re full of energy and want to change the world. But in the online space, we face many difficulties. So how can an SEO freelancer help your SME?
I admit I have made many mistakes on my “entrepreneurial journey”. Although I started on this path only 2-2.5 years ago, I have already run into a lot of mishaps. This was also because I had to learn everything from the beginning, coming from a completely different field. However, after completing an entrepreneurship course, you don’t become Elon Musk. Since then, of course, I’ve done a lot of other training and reading. Now I feel I can use my knowledge to help others.
Typical mistakes in the online space
We made a lot of typical mistakes when building our first website before I became an SEO freelancer. No wonder there were hardly any visitors from Google search. WordPress is a very good option for beginner entrepreneurs because the entry threshold is very low. I’m thinking here of the fact that the cost of hosting is now very low, registering a new domain costs almost pennies and WP is free.
So, with 20-30 thousand HUF, you can “get by” for the first year. This can obviously be even cheaper, depending on whether we manage to get a special offer for new users. Let’s see some typical mistakes to avoid at the beginning.
- Indexability of your WordPress site
- Permalinks
- Naming images
- Submitting a sitemap and linking Search Console
- Google Analytics
1. Indexability of our WordPress site
When you have freshly installed WordPress, you should tick the box next to Search Engine Visibility. This can be found under Settings / Readability. This is a good step because while our website is under development, people won’t see the half-finished product, and Google won’t store data that we might revise or delete in half a day.
Google’s indexing has slowed down recently, so it may take longer for it to crawl your site. However, a typical mistake is that when we are done with our site, we forget to uncheck this box and fret for months about why we are not found in the search engine.
2. Permalinks
A nice way to translate this ugly word into English is that it’s a link to different pages on our website. Let’s see an example to make it clearer and why we should change it.
Imagine the following two links. Which one would you prefer to click on? Which one seems safe and reliable?
https://marketing17.co/nalfadglsafélaks.html
https://marketing17.co/seo-basics.html
The first is a link that people would be reluctant to click on. The second is a much cleaner, friendlier link, and we even know what to expect when we click on it.
3. Naming of images
Although this is a much smaller bug than the ones mentioned above, it can help a lot in getting the images on your website to show up faster in the search engine.
Use a name that is relevant. For example, instead of naming the image 123baafsf.jpg, we could use phone-case-black.jpg which is a much better solution.
Although Google’s robots are already pretty good at interpreting what’s in an image, it’s important to help them and to enter an alt (alternative) description when you upload them.
4. Submit Sitemap and link Search Console
The next important step is to link your website to Google Search Console. This is important because this is where we can check the search data, see if there are any errors with the indexing of our website, and also see which pages are performing the best.
Install an SEO plugin such as Yoast. This will help your website to show up better in search engines if you fill in the data correctly. Another benefit is that it will generate a sitemap for us, which will see new pages, product pages, blog posts etc and update it automatically.
Log into your Search Console account, or if you don’t have one, sign up with your Gmail account. Select register domain, here we will need to upload the confirmation code for DNS zones and save it. After waiting a few minutes, we can verify domain ownership.
After a few days, we will see what data Search Console is collecting for us.
5. Google Analytics
If you really want to know where your website is getting traffic from, you should definitely set up Google Analytics. This will give you plenty of options for analysis. Not only will you be able to see organic traffic, but also if someone has come to your website from social media, newsletters, or other websites.
This is the main difference between Search Console and Analytics. While the former will only show us organic traffic, the latter will show us in more detail where visitors came from.
Summary
Hopefully, this article has helped you avoid basic SEO mistakes, and prepare your site to measure and receive visitors.
An SEO freelancer can help you with these and many more if you don’t currently have a solution in-house or it’s too expensive to hire an agency.
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