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In my role as a Siteground WordPress Community Ambassador, I’ve talked to a lot of business owners over the last year. I hear two stories over and over again. “I need SEO, but I don’t know where to start.” and “I’ve spent so much money on SEO, but I don’t know how much it is working, if at all.” There is a great deal of mystery surrounding the subject. I’m making it my mission to help small businesses and medical clinics demystify search engine optimization.

You shouldn’t just jump into spending a bunch of money on SEO campaigns until you have some foundational pieces in place. At a minimum, you should have these taken care of:

1. Analytics installed – to track what is happening on the site
2. Search console setup – to track performance and errors
3. Basic site health audit – to make sure basic functionality is working on all pages
4. Basic keyword research – to make sure your content is matching what people are searching
5. Directory listings maintained (if appropriate) – to standardize your information across business directories
6. A structured way to generate reviews – to improve social proof and help stimulate search engine rankings

Having these things in place can potentially save you a ton of money when you are ready to begin investing in SEO. If you never take the next step in your search engine optimization, you will at least have the basics covered and know where you stand. These 6 steps form the basis for my Getting Ready for SEO package. This package is great for those who want to make sure their bases are covered, but don’t have the time or inclination to do it themselves. Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to be discussing each of these and why they are important. Today we are going to start with the most important step.

I believe the first step in getting ready for SEO is finding out where you stand, at the most basic level. We do this through analytics. The most common tool used for that is Google Analytics. It is free and gives quite a bit of information. Here is some of the information you can track with GA:

• How many users visit your site
• How long do visitors typically stay on your site
• Where do your visitors come from
• What time of day do users visit the most
• What pages do your users visit the most
• What is the demographic of your visitors

This is just scratching the surface of what you can accomplish in Google Analytics. This information is very easy to find in the GA dashboard. There are a few steps to install the code on your site, but the instructions are fairly clear. Google has a great guide that walks you through the process. Once your site is setup, you can begin to collect information that will steer your future decisions. Maybe you find out you are getting a lot of traffic from your Facebook page, but not many from LinkedIn. That is great information to have if you are deciding where to spend your energy.

Before you set up analytics, maybe you thought no one is coming to your site because potential customers aren’t contacting you. If you set up analytics and find out you are getting lots of traffic, now you know you are either targeting the wrong buyers or your content on your site isn’t converting. Analytics can be a very powerful tool. If you are interested in getting ready for SEO, I’d love to talk to you. Give me a call or book yourself into my calendar below.