30 Days SEO Marketing Challenge – Learn SEO Guide for more sales and traffic
This challenge assumes you already have some kind of website, hopefully not the free kind that does not lets you properly edit the content. WordPress is the best system to have and use (our examples will be based on this) but others like Squarespace, Wix, and Joomla are a good start. If you have an older site that doesn’t allow you to edit your site, this challenge may not be for you and contact us for a new website.
Stepping into the 21st century is already a challenge in itself for many businesses who fail to see the direction of marketing and how important is growth and sustainability. Younger generations are more used to certain styles of websites and navigation. Thus, sticking to old ways and thinking your business is the exception will send you to failure.
If you need any assistance with any of these steps, don’t hesitate to send us an email and we will try and help or at least point you in the right direction. Youtube has tons of videos for almost all different kinds of websites. You can also just contact us to do all the work for you as well.
To join the challenge go here: 30DaysSEOChallenge.com
1. Register on or claim your Google My Business Page: (Google Maps info)
2. Claim or Register the major citations: Some popular citations are Yellow Pages, FourSquare, Yelp, Merchant Circle. There are hundreds on these but let’s start here. Fill these out as completely as possible including images of your location, products or whatever you can do describe your business.
3. Sign up for Google analytics and search console: This is how you track your traffic, progress and any possible search errors on your website.
4. Register your business on Facebook: Complete your profile with your contact info, basic services, location, and number, along with at least 2 posts.
5. Competitor research: Type in your ideal keyword or industry plus your city name in Google. The top 5 are probably going to be your biggest competition to worry about. Study their website, content, page titles, they are ranking well so they must be doing something right.
6. Keyword research: A good place to start is google.com see what your competition is using in their titles and in their content. You can also look up Google’s Keyword Planner which gives great ideas for keywords and related keywords.
7. Edit page titles: Probably one of the most overlooked issues that can make your site rank very quickly. The basic structure of your titles should be your “keyword + city (if not already in your keyword) – (yes dash) your company name and if there is space another keyword or supplemental information to describe your business.
8. Alt tags or image tags: This basically means alternate text, this is what Google actually reads. It would be great if Google had eyes and knew exactly what our photo was about but it cant so this text tells your story. Normally you would add whatever your main keywords are in the alt tag area.
9. Meta tags: This is basically a short description of your pages. A homepage is a general description and other are more specific to that page. Always make sure include keywords and city if you’re trying to get local traffic.
10. Content writing: Your homepage is the most important page as that is the one that gets most of the traffic. You want to make sure it has at least 400 words which should include your keywords plus mention your city several times.
11. Be active on social media: On Instagram, add friends and potential clients. Give them some likes and comments. Add new images of your products or services. Do this also on your facebook page. Indulge in more and more social media activities to promote your business. Make sure to share your website to start getting traffic. Try to do this at least 2-3 times a week.
12. Ask clients for reviews: Send them to your Yelp and especially Google My Business Page. Everyone searches for stuff on Google, especially for local businesses, and that is where the first 3 sites show up. Business with reviews looks best.
13. Url structure: It is very important that your URLs include your keyword as that is part of what Google looks for. Make sure to change your page names to help in being found.
14. Write blogs or additional content pages: Although you may think that you are not a blogger but, content really just brings traffic. This traffic may not even lead to a sale but google will see you as an authority in your field which helps you rank.
15. Internal links: Within your content, put links to other pages, this helps pass what we call “link juice” to other pages.
16. Get backlinks: If you are a part of any chamber of commerce, groups or have friends with a website, get a link from them. If your friends happen to be a competitor those are the best links, sounds crazy but that’s what they want.
17. Improve old content: Google hates “thin pages”. These are basically pages with just images and one sentence. They like to see at least 400 words per page.
18. Sitemaps: This step is very important because this basically tells Google the structure of your website. It tells that your site starts here and these are the subpages. Google will check this often to see what’s new.
19. If you have not done so already, create a youtube channel: I know you may be scared now but putting a face to your business is great. It does has to be long. Things like a virtual tour, your process or even just live demos of your products are good. Share this on social media and add to your website.
20. Add social links to your website: Add logos and links to your social media profiles.
21. Mobile friendliness of your website: Although this step is hard to fix on some older sites there are ways to create mini sites that redirect to a mobile version of your site. Google prefers just having a responsive site, i.e. a site that adjusts properly to the device or screen size.
22. Site speed: Do a speed test on sites like Pingdom. Google wants your site to load in under 2 seconds. Sometimes this can be tough depending on the type of site you have but there are ways to fix this. Google Page Speed insights pretty much can tell you exactly what they want from you.
23. Speed up your website: If you’re a WordPress user, things like cache plugins reduce the need to reload all of your site’s data once stored in the browser. This reduced the reload time. Another quick fix is plugins like smush that compress image size, as that is normally one of the biggest factors in loading your site.
24. UI or design of your site: I know you may not be a designer but try and use appealing and quality images that relate to your business. The basic home page should be like the following: Menu, nice image header, call to action (what you want them to do, like a call, fill out a form), services, products and in the footer area your address, links, faq, policies etc.
25. Email marketing: Put together a quick newsletter and push them to your website and ask for referrals. Include blog topics, social media icons.
26. Get more citations: This is something that you started on day 2 but this is very powerful to help rank and get more traffic from all the major directories. You can find a list here of more sites where you can put your information. Remember Google likes links and this is free backlinks to your website.
27. Google Adwords: This is a great way to get instant traffic. You basically create some ads which are just text page, basically, a short description of your company, enter some keywords, set your monthly budget and when someone clicks on your add google takes a cut.
28. Facebook ads: This is same as above but with a twist. It targets more on a specific type of audience vs someone who is looking for a specific item.
29. SSL protect your website: This makes your website safer for people and browsers. Browsers like Chrome actually penalize you and tell people your site is not secure which scares people away. SSL also gives your website a boost in rankings partially due to above reasons.
30. Review your google analytics and search console: This part may be a bit confusing but there are many videos to help with this.
Hopefully, if you have done these works correctly, you should already start to see more traffic. It is important to see how you are doing. This not only makes you sure that you’re improving but also gives you an insight into how people are finding you, what terms they are finding you for and also their demographic info like mac, pc, desktop, and mobile.
Above is the basic break down of what you will be learning, to sign up go here: 30 Days SEO Challenge