Before you dive head first into the deep ocean of SEO you need to lay some ground work. Having these things in place make the overall process a lot either regardless if you are planning on doing the work in house or via a third party.

These starting points are quick and easy to implement and will become the basis of your SEO work as your campaign progresses. So without further a due, these are the starting points that all websites should have in place before starting their SEO Australia.

Analytics and website analysis

A very important procedure to have in place before you progress is to set up Google Analytics. Google Analytics is essentially how you will measure the success of your SEO campaign. It has several sets of data to show you how people are visiting your website and what means. Some examples include:

  • Demographic of audience
  • How they found your website (organic, PPC, referral etc)
  • What websites they came from
  • What pages have the most interaction
  • Bounce rates and session durations

If you do choose to operate through a SEO company or digital marketing agency, they will normally start your campaign by installing this code anyway. Doing it yourself beforehand saves time from both ends and will give agencies a base line of what kind of traffic you were receiving before their services.

Having it implemented before you use these companies as allows you to measure their effectiveness and judge whether the cost you are paying is worth the results.

Implement a blog

A great SEO starting point that a lot of businesses tend to look over is the implementation of a blog. A blog is another avenue to implement more content into your website without it seeming messy or “stuffed”. Content plays an important factor on your website as it determines what your website is all about and the keywords that go along with them.

Having a blog also gives you an opportunity to bring your social media avenue into the game. Blogs and social media translate very well and can be shared across the platforms. This essentially gives you extra visitors by redirecting traffic and gives you an opportunity to have quality content shared between other users or even websites.

SSL certificate

Google takes security and trust very importantly. As a general rule you can think of your ranking increasing when your level of trust increases. When more people are visiting your website and others are linking to it, Google recognizes that other sources deem your website as trustworthy and from so should be seen more.

Regarding security you should have a SSL certificate implemented regardless if you are starting a SEO campaign or not. In a recent update Google made the decision that all websites listed as “http” are untrustworthy. When you try to click on these websites you are greeted with a big red warning which in turn can be the downfall for a small business. Having the SSL certificate in place changes the address of your website to “https” which is far more secure and will in turn boost your ranking.

Search engine optimisation can be a tricky avenue to get your head around but with the right foundations you can make it great. Before you start your efforts, be sure to go through this list and have everything already in place. If you choose to use a third party to run your campaign you will most likely find that they will do all these things so doing them before you start saves you money and time.