It's never been more challenging to stand out in today's crowded digital landscape. Not only does your business need to compete against direct competitors when customers search for your products, but you also have to compete against all the massive brands, informational resources, and media publishers trying to attract clicks.
With billions of searches happening daily, maximizing your organic search visibility is critical to rising to the top. However, small businesses often struggle with technical problems on their website that impact their traffic and rankings.
The graph below shows what we see far too often with small business website traffic from organic search. A drop like this can occur when a new website is launched or when something unintentionally goes awry. In essence, this graph means a website has achieved “online invisibility."
Use this short, actionable technical SEO checklist to tackle all the high-priority items that can improve your organic search engine rankings.
One issue that impacts many small businesses is that they may unintentionally block their site from search engines. If your website isn't allowed to be discovered by search engines, then your web pages won't get included in search results. Here are some of the most common technical fixes.
Verify your site ownership with Google Search Console to index specific pages. This ensures they show up in search, in addition to giving you the chance to see which keywords searchers use to find your site. These insights will give you a better understanding of how your site currently performs so you can make data-driven decisions about improving your search visibility.
Follow these steps to improve your search results:
What is a sitemap? Think of it as the roadmap search engines use to find your content. A sitemap provides a list of all the pages on your website, which the search engine uses as a starting point for finding, crawling, and indexing your content. While not required, submitting a sitemap makes it easier for a search engine to help searchers find what they are looking for.
There are four sitemap types to be aware of:
You'll want to focus on the XML sitemap to improve your search results — submit your XML sitemap in Google Search Console to help your site get indexed faster. You can also use Search Console to see how many pages have already been added to Google's index, along with being able to report any errors if pages are missing or no longer valid.
Learn how to build and create a sitemap to ensure you provide Google with everything it needs to index your site effectively.
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages can be discovered. You can also use a robots.txt file to indicate to Google certain pages on your website you don't want it to crawl and display in search results, which then lets you put more search authority toward more important pages where you want to direct traffic.
Check out these resources for how to fix common robots.txt issues. Plus, here are a few tips to make the most out of your robots.txt file:
The noindex tag is a line of code that tells search engines to ignore a specific page when adding your site to its search index so that it doesn't appear in search results. If you have a page that is not showing up, check to see if it has the noindex tag placed somewhere in the head section of the page and remove it if necessary.
You can use Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool or index coverage report to quickly find all the pages using the noindex page so you avoid accidentally leaving one up.
Besides the above technical tips, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of actions you can take to optimize your search engine visibility through your use of content. Here are a few areas to focus on:
If you go to your website's homepage and hover over your browser tab, does the browser tab text say the words, “Home | Your Website"? If so, create a concise page title tag that includes the search term that best describes your business to help raise your organic visibility and click-through rate.
Below are title tag optimization tips you can use to choose the right content for your home page title tag:
Keywords help increase the visibility of pages by attracting users who are searching for specific terms. Generate visibility with target keywords by choosing the keywords you want to rank for and then integrate them into your titles, body content, and meta tags.
You can also review competitor websites to see how they leverage the keywords you are targeting to find opportunities to improve your keyword choice and implementation.
Backlinks from other websites to your webpage tell search engines that your page is an authority for specific keywords, making it more likely that the search engine will display your page over a competitor.
A link-building strategy can help you proactively build quality backlinks by identifying opportunities to get your page linked across industry web pages, blogs, resource pages, and other websites.
Optimizing your images can help you improve both the user experience and the web crawler experience by making pages easier to load and navigate. The importance of image alt text optimization for web crawlers can't be overstated. This text tells the crawler what the image is so that it can return the image in a search.
Meanwhile, an image that has been properly sized will load faster, which improves both the user experience and the odds that others will provide a backlink.
Tips for optimizing images to improve page speed and SEO include:
Check the impact your images have on your site using Google's Page Speed Test tool. All you have to do is type in your website to get a list of the highest-priority issues bogging down your site, including a list of images slowing down the website loading speed and insight into what a reduction in size for those images can do for your site speed.
You can then use a tool like Compressor.io to reduce image file size. It's a simple fix and win for both the user experience and SEO.
An in-depth SEO audit can help you find other issues so you can act on high-priority items. For example, it can help you find duplicate content issues so you can find clusters of duplicate and near-duplicate pages and redirect them to the canonical page.
An SEO audit can also help you discover if any pages are being penalized by Google due to a change in their algorithm.
For more advice on improving SEO, check out these four steps to getting on the first page of local organic search results.
In partnership with three expert business owners, the PayPal Bootcamp includes practical checklists and a short video loaded with tips to help take your business to the next level.
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