What should I focus on first with SEO?

What should I focus on first with SEO?

Once you start SEO, it can quickly become a rabbit hole of tasks. If you're new, start with the foundation.

SEO can get complicated quickly, but you don't need to tackle every technical detail, keyword, backlink, and content opportunity at once. Start by making sure your business, website, and goals are clear, then prioritize the work that can make the biggest difference.

Make sure your website clearly explains your business

Before worrying about rankings, make sure someone landing on your website can quickly understand:

• What your business does
• What services or products you offer
• Who you serve
• Where you operate
• Why someone should choose you

Search engines need to understand these things too.

If your website is vague about what you actually do, it's difficult for Google — or an AI search tool — to confidently connect your business with the right searches.

Understand what your customers are searching for

Don't start by stuffing keywords into your website.

Start by thinking about the questions and problems your customers have.

What would someone search if they needed your service? What would they want to know before hiring you? Are they searching for a specific service, a local business, a solution to a problem, or information?

Those searches can help you determine which pages your website actually needs and give you a structure for deciding what topics and keywords to target.

For example, if you're a therapist offering Talk Therapy, Somatic Therapy, EMDR, and IFS, having separate service pages can help you capture searches related to each of those offerings.

Each page gives you an opportunity to clearly explain the service, answer relevant questions, and show up for the searches people are making around it.

Make sure the technical foundation is solid

Technical SEO isn't the whole strategy, but technical problems can get in the way of everything else.

Make sure your important pages can be crawled and indexed, your site works well on mobile, your pages load reasonably quickly, your URLs make sense, and your website has a clear structure.

This is also where things like internal linking, sitemaps, canonical URLs, and structured data can come into play.

You don't need to understand every technical detail to get started. You just need to make sure there aren't obvious problems preventing search engines from understanding your site.

Don't ignore local SEO

If you serve a specific geographic area, your local presence is part of your SEO strategy.

Make sure your Google Business Profile is accurate, your business information is consistent across the web, and your website clearly communicates where you serve customers.

Reviews, local content, relevant business listings, and other mentions of your business can also contribute to your local visibility.

Look at what is already working

Before changing everything, look at the data.

Google Search Console can show you which searches are already bringing impressions and clicks to your website. Analytics can help you understand what people do once they arrive.

You may already have pages ranking for valuable searches that simply need improvement.

Then prioritize

This is where SEO becomes less about following a checklist and more about having a strategy.

You might discover that your biggest opportunity is improving your service pages. Another business might need to fix technical issues first. Someone else might have a strong website but almost no local visibility.

There isn't one universal SEO checklist because businesses don't all have the same problems or opportunities.

Start with the foundation, understand where your biggest opportunities are, and work from there.

Not sure where to start?

‍SEO can be a lot to untangle, especially when you're trying to figure out what actually matters for your business. If you'd like support and a clearer idea of where to focus

→ Let's talk