What has been great is that so many business owners are choosing to use this time to pivot not pause their business and work on tasks that will allow them to emerge stronger from this crisis.

Which is why now is a great time to look at how to improve your SEO, increase your website visibility and keep your business in the mind of your ideal clients.

4 Easy Steps To Improve Your SEO During Lockdown

Step 1 – Set a SEO Goal

First Set an SEO Goal. Like most things we do for our business, it’s vital that we set goals for us to work towards, so our SEO plans have focus and targets.

Decide what your SEO aims are? What do you hope to achieve? Look at where your website is now in terms of SEO and then decide where you want it to be in the future.

It’s a good idea to set yourself short, medium and long term goals when it comes to SEO because SEO isn’t an activity that will give you an instant return, but it will give you wins along the way and all of it will have an amazing impact on your overall business results.

You should be looking at the overall SEO:

Increase visibility > improve click through rate > increase conversions.

So what you are looking for is for searchers to find your content on Google, click through to your website, consume your content and then take action.

Be flexible, you may have to adjust things as you go along. Have multiple searches you are targeting some that are easier to rank for and others that will take more time and work.

Review your SEO goals as you go along, to help keep you on track. It will be really important that you have ways of measuring and tracking your SEO work, so you can do more of what is working and less of what isn’t.

Step 2: Keywords and content

Keywords are a training session all on their own however there are some simple steps you can take to tidy up your keywords.

When it comes to choosing your keywords look at your overall niche and micro-niches within that as well as keyword phrases.

It’s important that you follow keyword best practices when it comes to choosing your keywords.

Don’t be afraid to target keyword phrases with lower search volume. Sometimes people think they have to target keywords that have thousands upon thousands of searches each month but that really isn’t always necessary and certainly not in the beginning.

It’s good to get rankings and clicks on the board as soon as you can to help your overall site authority so don’t be afraid of targeting keywords that have less search volume but also less competition.

If you run a location based business then you will want to target local keywords. Local keywords normally always have a lower search volume but they tend to also have a higher than average conversion rate.

Look at Google trends, google suggest, see what your competitors are ranking for.

Keywords with a longer word string tend to be less competitive and normally they are further down the action taking road. Therefore try to choose keywords that have at least 3 words in the keyword string.

Then you want to look and see what keywords could be expanded and made into blog posts. If you are doing this try and target topics as well as keyword phrases.

Look at seasonal keywords if relevant to your business and start with plenty of time to spare

Map out around 6 months worth of content, creating a few blog series around certain “topics” and make sure you create a linking silo amongst them.

Step 3: Upcycling your website onpage SEO

Your on-page SEO is one of the most important parts of your SEO that you can work on yourself, at home and improve your SEO.

The reason you can improve your SEO by fixing key elements on your site is that fixing crawl issues and on-page issues can give your site a boost.

I’m not going to focus on technical SEO as it is much more involved and in-depth and again like keywords, it can have dedicated training just for that.

However, when it comes to your site there are still a number of things you can do, yourself, to improve the overall SEO on your site which will give it a rankings boost.

When we are looking for onsite fixes for ourselves and clients we run the site through a number of tools

We use paid tools, like SEM Rush, Moz, ahrefs among others. However, there are free tools or tools with free trials you can use.

Screaming frog has a brilliant free version. Moz, SEM rush offer free trials and Ahrefs offers a 7 day trial for only $7.

Ubersuggest has a low budget option that’s under $10 it’s not as in-depth or accurate as other tools but it still does the job you would need it to.

Run your site through one of the tools I have mentioned and what you are looking for it a snapshot of things on the site that can be fixed to improve rankings.

Not all SEO tasks are created equal so you will want to look to prioritise the ones that will have the biggest SEO impact.

Using whatever tool you end up choosing Crawl your website and it will show you any problems it finds.

Below is a snapshot of crawl issues found on a new client site when we ran it through Moz:

Crawl issues example:

Don’t get too daunted by the issues it shows up.

For example, it could tell you hundreds of broken links on your site but when you look at it you realise it’s something as simple as a footer link that’s broken

So all you have to fix is the one link on the back end of your site and it will fix all those broken links

Or in the case of canonical tags, it can simply be a setting on your site that either has been activated at all or activated incorrectly.

If your title is too long or your URL too long it could be that your site automatically adds your business name to each title or URL. Change that setting and it fixes the problem.

In terms of prioritising start first with the biggest issues:

• Broken links
• Duplicate content (including meta descriptions / tags)
• Redirect chains
• URL structure / page title structure
  Missing canonical tags

Those are the crawl issues that are most likely to help you boost your SEO
Then you want to look at on-page elements as well

• Does your content have H1- H3 headers?
• Does it have internal and external links?
• Is the content in easy to read, small paragraphs
• Does it have images on site
  Is your keyword mentioned naturally throughout your copy?

Focusing on these on-page steps will help you improve your SEO, we have had clients who have seen their search engine rankings jump 40 + places just by implementing these steps.

Step 4: Offsite SEO

The next thing for you to think about is how can you build authority for your site? Another great way of improving your SEO is to increase it’s authority.

One of the best ways to do this is to build links to your site, get shares of your content and blogs via social media, increase online mentions.

Can you be a guest expert for any blogs or publications in your niche? Or perhaps you can be on an industry related podcast or write an article for publication in a magazine or newspaper.

Blog outreach is a great way of building links , choose the blogs you reach out to carefully. Make sure they are of a decent quality and relevant to your business industry.

But be wary of low quality links, not all backlinks are created equal and backlink tactics that worked a few years ago might not work now above all else keep it as relevant to your niche as possible.

These are just some simple steps you can take during lockdown to improve your SEO and see your website climb in the search engine rankings and be ready to master your SEO in 2021