How Can I Improve my SEO for Free?

Every year thousands of entrepreneurs start small businesses across the United States, and the majority of these business owners do not have huge SEO budgets. Consequently, you are more than likely wondering how you can improve your website’s SEO for free, which is why the SEO experts at On the Map Marketing have compiled a list of free SEO tools and techniques that you can use to improve your website.

4 Ways to Improve Your SEO for Free

1. Focus on On-Page SEO Techniques from Google

Google publishes a large amount of free information designed to teach website owners how to maximize their website’s performance from an SEO perspective. So, the first place you should begin your SEO efforts is at the micro level with on-page SEO, and the best free resource available for on-page SEO techniques is Google’s SEO Starter Guide. The SEO Starter Guide that Google publishes addresses each aspect of through on-page SEO practices, and it addresses areas such as:

  • Internal and external links
  • The creation of engaging content
  • How Google crawls and indexes your website
  • How to write meta tags and headers

Learning this information takes time, but there are several articles that Google publishes on an ongoing basis to address certain aspects of on-page SEO that are more in-depth than the starter guide. These articles are published in the blogs of various departments within Google. A few of the most important blogs Google publishes include the Webmaster Central Blog and Tools for Web Developers. These blogs publish information on on-page SEO topics like:

2. Establish Accounts with Every Free Analytics Tool Google Offers

Google offers a host of different programs that allow website owners to track and analyze how Google interacts with their website and how users interact with their website. Each of these tools are important because they allow you to improve on each web page’s performance and your website’s performance as a whole.

  • Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a program designed by Google that allows you to track information about your website’s visitors and how they interact with specific web pages. Data such as user demographic information, the number of new users that have visited your website each month, and the number of users that visit your website from a specific source are just a few metrics that Google Analytics tracks that will allow you to target specific customers and increase the efficiency of your website.
  • Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a program designed to allow website owners to understand how Google interacts with your website. It lets you view pages Google has indexed, search queries that have displayed your website’s content, click through rates, and more. All of this information allows you to identify potential problems with your website’s SEO strategy and gauge your website’s SEO performance.
  • Google’s Structured Data Tool: Google publishes certain guidelines on how you structure your website’s content based on the type of content you publish. Google’s Structure Data Tool allows you to analyze and understand how Google analyzes each web page’s structure, so you can design web pages that interact with Google in the most efficient manner possible.

3. Establish Your Off-Site SEO Presence

SEO comprises more than just making improvements to your website. You have to establish external links that drive traffic to your website. These sources include social media profiles, online directories, etc. Not only do you need to establish social media profiles for your website, which can be established for free, but also claiming and maintaining your company’s Google My Business account, a free directory feature offered by Google. This allows you to not only establish several external sources that can drive traffic to your website but also, a dominant local presence for your business. Moreover, all of these tools allow you to reach and target mobile users, which according to the latest, represent 70% of all online web traffic.

4. Test Your Website Regularly Using Google’s Free Testing Tools

Google offers website owners a number of different tests for their website each of which offers you recommended improvements that can be made to make your website more SEO-friendly from multiple perspectives. These tests include the page speed insights test, the mobile-friendly test, and the URL inspection tool feature in Google Search Console. Each of these tests focuses on a specific ranking factor that Google uses in its algorithm.

The page speed insight test gauges how fast each web page loads for both mobile and desktop users, because Google uses mobile page load speeds as a ranking factor. Mobile-first indexing was a recent update that Google has implemented because the platform is changing to better cater to mobile users. The mobile-friendly test encourages website owners like you to create websites that are mobile-friendly by allowing you to test how efficiently your website loads on mobile devices. All of the information these tests yield allows you to constantly make improvements to your website’s content and performance.

Do You Want More SEO Tips?

Give the SEO experts at On the Map Marketing a call today. Our team of SEO experts have helped business owners like you structure a marketing strategy that maximizes the value and performance of your website, and they are ready to begin working on your SEO strategy today. So, whether you simply have some SEO-related questions or are trying to determine the best way to improve on your website’s performance, our team of SEO experts are ready to help you today.