How to decide what SEO task to do first

SEO can be a very hard project to start for the inexperienced business owner. There are a lot of moving parts and it can be easy to get lost when starting out on a new project.

There isn’t a definitive playbook either when it comes to SEO. A lot of it will be highly tailored to your company’s website. That means something will be much more important than others.  Of course, when there are lots of things that are important, it can be even harder to start an SEO project.

Don’t procrastinate or put off doing SEO any longer. Here’s how you can prioritize your SEO tasks.

Don’t react to every new update

New SEO rules and recommendations are coming out all the time. When they do, a lot of website owners will overreact and try to implement them as soon as possible, even if it means ditching what they were doing before.

Just because Google makes an update, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it immediately. Just because Google has said mobile websites are better doesn’t mean you need to create a mobile website this second. This is especially true if people don’t use smartphones to look at your website in the first place.

Start with the basics and scale

When in doubt, start with the simple things that can make a big difference. There is only so much you can do in a day so why not try and have the biggest impact possible with the least amount of work. That means looking at your meta data, heading tags, title tags and all of the other basic but significant SEO work.

Do what you can, don’t overextend

SEO can be a big, exciting project. But it can also be expensive and incredibly time consuming. That means business owners have to be careful about not over-extending themselves. You may want to write the best industry blog in the world, for instance. But if you don’t have a team of writers, you’re not going to be able to.

Make sure your SEO matches your business goals

SEO should be intrinsically linked to your business goals. There’s no point trying to generate loads more traffic if you can’t convert those visitors into paying customers.

You may like the idea of creating a blog, for example. But if it’s not what your business needs and your customers don’t want to read content, it’s not going to help. You may be better off trying to create links instead.

It’s easy to get carried away trying to optimize everything and leverage every SEO tactic in the book. But some just might not be relevant.