Here are the ten top things to do to improve your SEO, or searchability All of these changes are free and relatively simple so you can do them yourself. There are two types of SEO. On page and off page.

I recommend testing your SEO score with this free tool before making all of these changes, to see how much improvement you’ve made as you move through the steps.

Optimize your off-page SEO

1. Create and Optimize your Google Business Profile.
   This means creating an account if you don’t have one. You will have to verify your listing but this is easy and doesn’t take long. Once you’re verified you will be able to

2. Consistent Descriptions. Make sure your business social media matches the description in your Google Business Profile and website. Google likes consistency!

Optimize your on-page SEO

3. Only use one H1 header tag per page. Make sure your site clearly says what you offer at the top of the page. Bonus points if it matches the url of your page!

4. Use keywords to describe your offer or service in a concise and relevant sentence. If you’re not sure what keywords to use you can pretend to be a customer, open a private browser window, and try to find your website without putting your name or website in. What words would you type to find yourself? Those are your keywords. Be as specific as possible. There are many free tools you can use, but here’s one to get you started.

5. Write a meta-description that uses the exact sentence above. Bonus points if your page meta descriptions matches text that you’ve put in your Google Business Profile and other places online (remember the consistency part?)

6. Optimize your images. As a photographer you know I’m going to say this. This goes for video too. The appropriate size for images on your website is 1600p wide, 72dpi and a maximum file size of 200kb. You can stretch this a little if you’re a photographer and want higher resolution files, but for fast page load speed, you want small files.

7. Add image descriptions and alt text. In addition to image size, we want to use the image naming tools to make sure every box has a description. Nowhere should it say img_0335.jpg. We want your images to have names, I like describing a service that is related to the image. This is because when people do a Google Image search, Google uses this text to show people images related to their search.

8. Backlinks and links in general. The more websites link to your site the better, as long as the pages they link to exist. If you have a business, make a resource page for people, and form partnerships with other businesses to refer each other. As a photographer my site might have makeup artists, clients I’d shot for, realtors, venues, studios, maybe even other photographers that offer different types of photography than I offer. We are looking for non-competitive collaborators. The key is to have them link to your site as well. It’s win-win. If you have a blog with lots of information, you might find sites linking to you as an expert. The more you can get out there and establish yourself as an expert in something, the better. But that goes beyond the scope of this article 😄

9. Have an obvious call to action. What do you want people to do once they get to your site? Make it easy for them to do that. Whether it’s buy a service or product, make sure you have a nice obvious “buy or book now” button, or whatever action you want them to take. Number one rule, make it super easy for people to find what they want. If you don’t, they will lose interest and leave, and your SEO score will go down.

10. Update your site regularly. Write a blog post and offer content with value. I know there’s a lot of content out there. Try to resist the urge to data dump. Ideally you will write compelling, unique content, related to your site and expertise. If you don’t like writing, having a mechanism that automatically adds content from another feed such as Instagram will tell Google that you’re updating the site, and give you some SEO points. If you can write a blog, answer commonly asked questions, or offer value to people who are your ideal audience.

I would add UI and UX to this list but basically if you’ve done all of the above, your UI and UX will have improved automatically. Your page will be load quickly, give people what they want because it’s clear and concise, they will make a purchase and be happy. This will give you a good SEO score and you will be ranked higher and you won’t need to pay someone to be on the “front page of Google”.

Phew, that’s a lot! If you do any one of these things it will help. If you do several of them, run your seo test again and see if your score has improved.

Enjoy all your new traffic!

We could go into much more detail, but these tips are a great overview to starting and improving your seo.
Did I leave anything out??