Most SEO advice is aimed at enterprises with dozens of pages and a team of marketers to manage it, but if you have a portfolio, small business site, or personal domain, you don’t particularly want to dedicate fifty posts to an SEO content calendar; you need a dozen things to do right to get on the first page.
Do Something with the Pages You Already Have Indexed
Before thinking about writing new posts, you need to figure out what you already have. Open up Google and search for site:yourdomain.com to see what’s out there, and head to Google Search Console to see what of those pages Google is even aware of. There’s probably a page in there, with a significantly higher number of impressions, so look into it and try to understand why, instead of making new content. Then, take a look at the rest of the pages and see what’s missing.
The Five Most Important Fixes for a Small Site
- Your tabs are full of generic terms like Home or Portfolio. Home says nothing about the kind of business you have, and Portfolio doesn’t indicate where you’re located or what you do.
- Every page has one main topic or purpose and answers one broad question. Google is rewarding content that directly answers a specific question.
- The mobile speed is somewhat fine, or it was until the last redesign, but you don’t have any other problems, and you’re unsure what to do. The easiest way to improve these kinds of numbers is by optimizing your page speed. If PageSpeed Insights is giving you a bad score, there’s a high chance you uploaded a bunch of images that weren’t compressed. You can compress them and resize them before uploading them back to the site and reap the rewards of a dramatically improved score with minimal effort.
- There are only a handful of relevant backlinks, and not a single one is high quality. You don’t need dozens of backlinks; you need a few high-quality ones.
- Most of the content answers a question at the top. Google is giving more traffic to pages with content that answers a specific question, and if you’re using an AI to write your content, it would be a good idea to remember to explicitly state what it is at the top rather than put it off for the eleventh paragraph after several hundred words of unrelated text that no one will read.
What You Should Stop Doing Immediately
- Thinking about building a big content calendar before doing most of these fixes.
SEO is shifting to favor sites with more targeted content. While large organizations with thousands of pages are fine, smaller sites that have less content but focus on one specific area, product, or topic will see much less competition. That means that one specific article you wrote is more likely to rank than something broad and generic. You want to avoid the latter and favor the former.
- Trying to stuff keywords everywhere.
SEO is shifting away from keywords and towards questions. You’ll see it in Google’s changes to its algorithms over the last year, you’ll see it in its increased favor of featured snippets. You’ll see it in its decreased favor of thin content. Keywords are still useful, but they aren’t nearly as important as they once were. Instead, focus on creating content that directly answers specific questions. That’s SEO for small sites because you have fewer options for content, so you need to make the most of what you have.