SEO should involve every member of your team
Search engine optimization should be considered while in the process of building your website, but most of the time, it’s an afterthought. Another issue is when SEO is left to just one person on your team.
Optimizing for search engines should involve effort from everyone, from developers to content creators to designers. A comprehensive SEO audit can be divided into four sections (each with tasks that should be assigned to different members of your team):
Crawlable site
What it is: Search engine spiders crawl your site frequently to gather and add content to search engine databases.
Why it’s important: Google’s Fresh Bot crawls pages every few days to check for fresh content (it favors frequently updated pages). The Deep Crawl Bots index all website pages once a month to check for things like functioning (301) redirects, title tags and meta descriptions, etc. We have to clean up and prepare our site for the spiders to favor our content.
Content
What it is: There’s a number of items on a page that should be optimized for your keywords (titles, meta description, etc.)
Why it’s important: Quality content is arguably the most important part of SEO. For search engines to prioritize your website, it has to contain great content. Developing keywords and optimizing for them will help make your content discoverable.
UX
What it is: Site speed, page readability, etc. affect a user’s experience when on your website
Why it’s important: The usability of your website determines how much time people spend on your site and how often they’ll return. Search engines favor sites that are user friendly.
Off-page
What it is: There’s still work to do beyond improvements you can make to your site. Off-page optimization involves social media and link building.
Why it’s important: Search engines put a focus on site credibility, which is earned through social media, press articles, and backlinking. If others are talking about you, you’ll rank higher than if they aren’t.
Let’s get to work
Within each category, there are dozens of ways to optimize your site and content. For a useful tool you can share with your team, download the SEO Audit Checklist. Together you can tackle the on-and-off-page SEO tactics.