Where do we start and how should we prioritize?

[JobBiz]

Hello Moz Community!

We have been on Moz Pro for awhile but as a small business we have not had time to dive into this great resource. We are at a point now where we want to get some answers. It could be just some direction or actual hiring a consultant to help us through this process.

Attached is a screen shot of the New Insights email report we receive. Where do we start and how do we prioritize?

sOooMfb

[Roman-Delcarmen]

If you are a small business and you want to start to promote your site using SEO, first you need to define what are your goals. If you are a small business (local store, or local service) your main KPI is Sales or at least lead which conduct sales, so does not make sense get as many traffic as you want with no sales. That will fine for affiliates, advertisers or bloggers, but not If you are a retail store. Let me explain my point

Let's assume you are a flower store in Los Angeles or New York, with high competition level, and then you start a research and start to follow all those kinds of Gurus who give you advice that they never test, Publish articles, shares on social media, pay PPC, try to outreach to build an audience and then you realize that have some improvements but those results don't pay your bills. That is the main reason you need to define your goals and with your goals, you can have a plan with the resource that you have.

Your website needs to be center of all your strategy. Why? because you have 100% control of that, Google Adwords can change their policy, Facebook can change their policy and those changes can hurt your business. So keeping the example we assume that you are a small website, and you don't have the resource of the biggest player and also you don't have the knowledge or the experience, even if you don't have the money if you have the knowledge you can do it, but let assume this not the case

What can you do about it? you are a small website, let's take a local store as an example. with a limited budget. Well, the answer is pretty easy........then you have to become the most perfect small (local store) business website in the world. Or at least try to be

How?

• Create almost perfect internal site structure (this way Google will know who you are, what is your product or service)
• Create almost perfect technical SEO ( assuming that you have a small budget and that is a fact that you can not change at this moment, but fixing all your duplicated content, canonical errors, title tags, robot.txt is a great way to build your business around your website)
• Integrate Schemas on your site (there some schemas supported by Google, schemas is like content for crawler is markup system who help Google to understand your site you can add Local Business, Maps, Social Media Profiles etc)
• Integrate AMP, if you are a small website with limited resource this is a good step to make your site visible on mobile devices also is integrated with schemas so will be easier.
• And finally, work on your local mentions, if you are a small business like a flower store, the local mention are crucial to rank your site to your audience, I mean you are not a blogger you don't need thousands of visitors to get success, all that you need is quality traffic, if you can get 1000 visitors from your city, looking for flowers and you can convert 20 sales, then you have a business running. That is a real plan, not a fancy plan of a fancy guru, if every sale has a value of  $150 on average, then you have $3000 in sales, then you can optimize an scale.

Keep in mind this is just an example and I don't know your business. Also keep in mind that Digital Marketing is not magic, as, in the real world, the results are proportional to your resources, your effort, and your knowledge, a Good SEO Strategy can show you result in a range of 3 to 6 months, Also keep in mind SEO can be overwhelming, there is a lot of things to do, with many tasks on the table, so you can easily get lost if you don't have experience or you don't know what you are doing.

So divide your plan into small tasks or steps.

• Fix all the titles tag and content issues (week-1)
• Fix Search Consoles Errors such as sitemaps, robot.txt (week-2)
• Summit my site to major directories (week-3) you can use Moz Local or Yext
• Implement schemas on my site (week-4) Local Business, maps, social
• Create internal links on my site  ** (week-5) **
• Launch a Link Building Campaign and keep running that campaign **(week-6) **
• Integrate some lead gen tools (Such as Optinmonster or Unbounce) **(week-7) **
• Optimize your site's performance (compress cache, html,css,js) **(week-8) **
• Launch 8 articles related to my business and my audience  **(week-9) **

These are some pretty basic tasks but in my experience, 80% of the site has problems of duplicated content, orphan pages, sitemaps errors and so on. All those tasks can be ready in 4-6 weeks, honestly, I don't know I'm just given a number based on the example.

Once that, then you can start to work on your Content Strategy if that is the case, or Link-Building or PPC or Social Media or whatever you want

Good Luck and Regards