First Steps in SEO: How to Build a Strong Search Engine Presence From the Very Beginning

The small and midsized businesses conquer the market, increasing both the economy and competition. If you don't have a strong strategy in mind and valuable tools to hand, be ready to give up your seat on the SERP's top to your rivals. If you're not happy with that, it's the right time to start working on SEO yourself or at least evaluate the performance of your SEO pro or agency. Better yet, there are tools – such as SE Ranking – that are easy to use and worth considering.

Stage 1

Create your project and do a detailed SEO website audit

When using tools like SE Ranking the first thing you will do is create a project and connect Google Analytics. Then run a health checkup of your domain and find errors that prevent your website from being ranked high. Start from scratch – begin with the first and simplest step – run a website audit.

The website audit tool from SE Ranking checks as many pages as you need and provides valuable tips on the go.

SE Ranking's audit will check your website's health for over 70 parameters and give recommendations how to fix all the discovered errors – technical, content and usability related. Learn how to improve your website performance from a comprehensive report in .pdf format or share it with the experts that you’ve assigned to your SEO project.

Stage 2

Research competitors and outsmart them big time

When starting with your competitor research, first and foremost answer the following questions: Who are your main competitors? What do they do and why? And then try to get as much info about your rivals as possible to get a clear idea of how you can outsmart them.

You have two ways to acquire the needed insights – explore all the details yourself or use powerful tools like competitor PPC/SEO research tool from SE Ranking. The latter saves you time and provides valuable info about your competitors' organic and paid traffic.

With tools like the one from SE Ranking you can do the following:

• Monitor your competitors' rankings: find out the data on their organic and paid strategies, explore their budget, traffic, and clicks volume. What's next? Select the keywords with lower rankings and run a campaign using them. By doing that you will know in advance that you are besting your rivals on their own playground.
• Discover their ads: see the text and images, and enhance yours based on this data. Moreover, you will be able to see the search volume and competition of the advertisements.
• Derive benefits from the largest local databases customized for USA, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Stage 3

Use a marketing plan to get things going

Have you wondered why long-term planning will help you to achieve your goals faster? The simple truth is right here: when you set a destination, you will know where you are going and have time to think how you can get there. So what you really need at this stage is a smart guide that will take you step by step through what needs to be done to accomplish your preliminary optimization goals. There are many checklists you can find on the Internet to help you get started but it would be better to use plans like Marketing plan from SE Ranking that offer best practices and a sophisticated walk-through while revealing errors and how to resolve them on the fly.

In addition to that you can also:

• Easily customize the plan by adding your own tasks that need to be implemented.
• You can delegate tasks to other users without logging into your CRM or using any other third-party tools.

The marketing plan by SE Ranking includes valuable recommendations grouped by:

• Strategy & Pre-Launch Care
• Keywords Research & Implementation
• On-page Optimization
• Off-page Optimization
• Social Media Management (aka auto-posting and analytics)
• Your own tasks

The plan also contains a lot of links to additional info sources such as articles with recommendations from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.

Stage 4

Check rankings regularly – preferably with 100% accuracy

There's only one way to control your rankings – keeping track of them on a regular basis as they may change very quickly due to the search engine updates. With SE Ranking, you can get 100% accurate data regardless of the algorithm changes and always in a timely way.

What are the options:

• You can set a target URL for each of your keywords. It means that when the system discovers that the keyword’s URL is different from the one you set up, it will send you a notification.
• You can track rankings locally up to the zip-code. For example, if you have a bike repair shop in Boston, you can check your rankings in this particular area and benefit from that knowledge.
• The mobile search trend grows every year and by 2020 it should exceed desktop searches – the overall mobile usage will be 51.3 percent versus 48.7 percent for desktop. That's why it's so important to track your mobile rankings and use this data in creating a successful promotion.
• In SE Ranking, you can check your rankings both on Google Maps and YouTube. There's no need to explain the great importance of this traffic share as it's pretty obvious if you explore the most significant SEO trends.
• There's no more need to wait a couple of days to recheck your rankings. SE Ranking provides you with accurate and relevant data whenever you need.
• SE Ranking has a user-friendly intuitive interface with a lot of filters and data viewing options that help you to analyse rankings and keep track of them within the preferred view.

SEO audit by TemplateMonster Service Center

Do you need your website be visible to your target audience in search engines and you don't know where to start? SEO audit is the first step to creating an online marketing strategy that really works. You will get the analysis and guidelines on how to implement the given recommendations on your website.

Stage 5

Be visible in social media

If you really want to get link juice from social media you need to be active and engaging. Developers out there have recognized this importance and tools like Hootsuite not only emerged but became ’must have’ tools for online marketers. But you can do the same using auto-posting tools within the SEO platform. Once again, SE Ranking offers social-media auto-posting and analytics so you don’t need to switch platforms or pay for extra tools and do all your social media management along with SEO projects on the same platform.

Make sure your SEO foundation is solid

If you run your own business it doesn't mean you can't run your own SEO. You can easily manage it if you know what your goals are and have adequate yet easy-to-use tools in your arsenal. There are many options on the market – try the ones you feel might be a good fit and use the steps that we've outlined above to build a strong foundation for your success in SEO.

And of course, you can try SE Ranking for free (no credit cards required or strings attached) and get to your first SERP's TOP quickly and efficiently. Here's a small hint for you, you can start your SEO company targeted at small businesses, but first of all, you need a SEO template.

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