Today we want to focus our new blog post on some common concerns related to SEO. Is one hour of SEO Weekly enough? Is SEO too complicated? Is SEO requiring too much time? Is SEO something that will not bring results and it can be forgotten?
Those are simple concerns that every one of us is experiencing! From now on, everything will be different!
In the following infographic you can review what we are going to analyze:
If the previous questions are questions you need answers, you landed on the right place!
We are going to make an SEO plan for your website, that can take no more than 1 hour a week.
Optimize Your Business Time
Probably you have a business! We know that planning the time to spend on every marketing source is mandatory and difficult at the same time.
The time that SEO needs, might be used to optimize other marketing activities that you consider more important. Is that true? What’s the best strategy to optimize your time?
Forgetting about SEO and focusing more on other inbound marketing strategies? Or the opposite? What should we do?
In the following chapters, we are going to explain why SEO is important and how you can manage your marketing plan just including one hour of SEO weekly.
Yes, you understood well: only one hour per week! It will be enough!
We are going to analyze how to use that time specifically, making the best SEO strategy and sorting every single task by the time needed. We will consider seo brainrank algorithm as well in our strategy.
One Hour of SEO Weekly: Traffic Boost
Start optimizing your time, make in place an SEO strategy that only takes one hour! One hour of SEO weekly would be enough and you will have time to implement other activities.
You will be able to improve the PageRank of your webpages in just 10 minutes a day in 6/7 days: exactly one hour as we mentioned!
Understanding how to keep your website optimized following our next easy steps would be a winning strategy.
Isn’t it amazing? Let’s get started.
Starting From the Top of the Funnel
SEO can be the right strategy to implement the top of your marketing funnel.
That spot includes your potential audience: users that don’t know your business, but they are searching for topics related.
They are users interested in products/services like the ones you market.
You want to reach that target, in order to drive them to the bottom of your business funnel!
Set the timer on your mobile now: 60 minutes a week as we planned! That’s the time you need 3 SEO steps, comprised of On-Site, On-Page and Off-Site reviews.
Planning and Scheduling in 1 Hour of SEO Weekly
First question: how can we manage our SEO activities in just 60 minutes? The answer is simple: planning!
As we mentioned, we need to sort our 1 hour SEO plan in 3 different areas, connected together though.
We are going to optimize our website considering performance and accessibility.
How our main webpages are displayed in different screen sizes would be another important step. We said “main webpages” because we cannot review the entire website, of course, this would be a quick analysis, effective though.
The last part of our time will be dedicated to networking activities with other bloggers. Searching for high-quality backlinks is an asset in 2019.
Why is SEO not complicated? Because following our previous posts, you have already learned about it, and you have a “to do” list for SEO that works.
Also, don’t forget that you can review our book Top 100 SEO Tips, released last month.
Switch to the mood “laser focus” now! The question is: do you know what you should focus on to optimize your 1 hour SEO plan? Probably you don’t because you have several doubts.
No worries! After reading this article you will think “fine! I did everything that was necessary: I can wait for results now!”.
First 20 Minutes of Weekly SEO
What is the first thing to do in our first On-Site 20 minutes? You should focus on your Google Search Console for 11 minutes.
Check if there are some errors messages, some positions changing, something that is not going well.
Starting from Google Search Console is a mandatory SEO step!
After that, check the robot.txt file. Make sure that everything is made properly, having an SEO-friendly url strategy.
Always follow the best structure and script practices, reviewing the index and noindex URLs. That requires 1 minute. Why should you do that?
Maybe you made some website changes during the last week, or you installed a plugin that has modified the structure of the robot.txt file.
GoogleBot needs to access every section of your website, that’s why this step is really important. Are your articles, media, pages, categories indexed? If yes, you can go ahead, reviewing the next SEO step.
Analyzing Traffic Performance in 2 Mins
It’s important to spend 2 minutes analyzing the performance of your website.
How? Using Google Analytics you can check if your website speed is stable and if it respects a positive trend.
Maybe you are gaining more visitors landing on your webpages and the hosting server cannot properly follow up.
This change might affect the site performance! Be sure to have the right numbers.
You can use tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom to check the speed performance, reviewing a score.
According to that data, you should be able to identify the eventual issue, either having a confirmation that everything is fine.
We are at 14 minutes of our “One hour of SEO weekly” plan, and we did a great important job. What to do in the next 6 minutes?
SERP Analysis and Competitors Scraping
Let’s split the time into 2 blocks of 3 minutes: 3 minutes useful to check the SERP and other 3 minutes to check how your website looks on mobile and desktop!
First 3 minutes of 6 minutes: check the pages indexed by Google related to your website/domain!
How? Open your browser, type google.com and search for “site: www.domainname.com”.
Doing that you can review the SERP for your website pages!
You will have the number of pages that Google considers indexed.
If there are some pages that have been hacked, either pages that look spammy, you can immediately see and fix them.
Of course, you can also check the pages that are “index”. For example, it can be that you would like to have some of them as “noindex” because they don’t add any value to searchers and to your target.
If everything looks good, you might have time to check what your competitors are doing. It can be useful to have ideas about how to get traffic.
The procedure is the same already explained! Just type “site: www.competitordomainname.com” and try to grab some ideas to implement your webpages Meta Description and SEO Title.
Different Website Versions: What to Check
Now it’s time to use your eyes for a quick check of your website. Before that, it’s important to analyze how your users access your content.
Do you have more visitors on the mobile version or on the desktop version of your website? Open Google Analytics to get the answer!
The procedure is simple, just a few clicks: audience, mobile, overview.
Here you can see 3 sources of traffic, sorted by desktop, mobile, tablet. What to do now? If, for example, 70% of your traffic is coming from desktop, use 2 minutes of the time planned to review the desktop version.
1 minute to analyze the mobile version because 30% of your traffic is coming from mobile!
Go through your webpages, just to double check if everything looks fine.
Never forget: always focus on your SEO goals! It will be a way to improve your marketing plan.
Do you want to get the best results? Think like a user that lands on your content for the first time! Would you love your webpages?
We are at 20 minutes and we have already covered an important On-Site SEO part!
It’s mandatory knowing what you are doing and where you want to go, defining your SEO goals.
That will allow you to optimize your time, getting the best results.
On-Page Optimization in 20 Mins
Let’s get started with the next 20 minutes: On-Page optimization! What do we mean? How do we include those 20 minutes in one hour of SEO weekly?
It’s simply comprised of one specific and clear goal: reviewing posts in order to see if we can improve them!
Check for which keywords your posts rank and review your content! How? Using Google Search Console.
Include those keywords in the first paragraph, or just check if they are already there.
Check if the focus keyword is also included in the SEO Title, Meta Description, and H1, H2.
If you use WordPress as a CMS, be sure that Yoast plugin gives you back only yellow and green bullet points (readability), and no one red.
That requires 5 minutes and will be a good sign about the reliability of your SEO-friendly content for Google! Don’t forget about your visitors though.
Quality Check for Best User Experience
Next 7 minutes: quality check for users! Your webpages need to be properly written for users.
Avoid mistakes and make sure that every sentence is easy to understand, even for visitors that don’t know your brand or your product.
User first! This concept is going to positively affect SEO results.
Your visitors will be happy about the value you provide to them related to a specific query.
Google will reward your PageRank as well.
Every week you should spend 3 minutes to analyze the specific performance of the pages/articles you revised.
Pick 3 or 4 pages/articles of your website and focus on those, including it in your one hour of SEO weekly.
Will Your Visitors Love Your Content?
Now you have 5 minutes to read the content and experience your website as a visitor.
You can simulate that using some tool like Hotjar. You can see below a heatmap:
It will be able to analyze the behavior of your users on your content, according to real data.
It will provide you some videos that will be useful to check what on your website is missing and what needs to be added, according to users action.
How do your visitors interact with your content? You have the answer.
Off-Site SEO: 50% of Work in 20 Mins
Let’s start the Off-Site part now! It’s comprised of activities that will literally boost the authority of our domain.
20 minutes is the perfect time for it! Let’s use the first 2 minutes to check our internal links status, being sure we don’t have any broken links.
Broken Link Checker is the perfect free tool to do it, in one hour of SEO weekly.
Run it on WordPress and review your links, being sure that everyone returns a 200 status code.
You are proving the best user experience to your visitors, driving them to an optimized website structure.
In the next 3 minutes, we can check our backlinks.
Are they coming from high-authority domains? Check if they are not toxic or spam links.
You can use Link Research Tools to review every backlink, according to a score defined by Power and Trust.
Update your disavow file if you identified some backlinks that don’t add value to your domain authority.
What is the disavow file? It’s a file to tell Google which URLs pointing to your webpages you don’t want to be considered as sources of information.
Google mentioned several times that is doing that automatically, it’s better to do by your own as well though.
It’s good to do it weekly in order to check which types of new backlinks you got in 7 days, and make an action.
Forums and Blogs Screening
Next 3 minutes of one hour of SEO weekly? Leave comments on forums and blogs. Are you active on Quora and Reddit?
Open a profile there, answer user questions sharing your links and adding value to the web, providing an amazing solution.
2 or 3 comments per blog/forum would be great.
You are building links! This strategy would be useful to get new ideas about what your niche audience is looking for.
Are you considering to write a new post based on user signals? You should! Check what users are searching, based on keywords.
Write a new post related to that topic and then go back to that blog/forum sharing the article URL.
It’s giving you great exposure.
Bloggers Collaboration for SEO Weekly
We should create a relationship with other bloggers in the next 12 minutes. How? Search for backlinks opportunities, commenting posts on a website you would like to have a backlink.
After 1 week, send a private message to the blogger, start a conversation, maybe over Skype, and mention that you have great content.
You will have a chance to get a backlink through a guest post, either asking for a link pointing to your web page.
SEO is not difficult, you know what to do! One hour of SEO weekly can be enough!
We are done!
Focus on this strategy 1 hour a week and let’s boost our website!
Recap: One hour of SEO weekly will boost your organic traffic
60 minutes in 1 week
20 mins On-Site
- 11 mins
- Checking Google Search Console
- Review error alerts
- Track position changes
- 1 min
- Review robot.txt
- Check noindex and index pages
- 2 mins
- Site performance on Google Analytics, GTmetrix, Pingdom
- 3 mins
- SERP checking in Google
- Review competitors strategy
- 3 mins
- Check the mobile version of your website
- Check the desktop version of your website
20 mins On-Page
- 5 mins
- Use Yoast plugin to review posts
- Keywords checking in content, SEO title, meta description, H1, H2
- Be sure to don’t have any red bullet points
- 7 mins
- Check content avoiding misspellings
- Use Grammarly and Hemingway app editor
- 3 mins
- Check 3/4 webpages performance of the posts you reviews
- 5 mins
- Read thinking that you are a visitor
- Check User Experience
- Use Hotjar to analyze users behavior on your webpages
20 mins Off-Site
- 2 mins
- Check internal links
- Make sure everyone returns a 200 status code and not a 404
- Use ScreamingFrog or Broken Link Checker
- 3 mins
- Check backlinks quality
- Update disavow file
- 3 mins
- Answer questions on social media
- Get inspired by new content ideas on Quora and Reddit
- 12 mins
- Find backlinks opportunities starting a collaboration with bloggers
- Ask for a guest post or propose your new stunning post to them