This is meta data (a.k.a. Schema markup) that exists in the underlying HTML code that gives search engines information about your business, including things like longitude and latitude, address, city, phone numbers, business hours and more. As the name might imply, the data is structured in a way that ensures search engines understand exactly what the data is about.

Google and Bing (as well as the less relevant to US citizens Yandex & Baidu) have webmaster dashboards. Verifying your domain ownership to access those tools is invaluable as they allow you to see and analyze exactly how their services are crawling your pages & most important of all they provide accurate data on what search terms your website is ranking for, where it ranks, and how often users are typing those queries in during a given period.

Using sitemaps, and as an extension of that submission of RSS feeds with product data, lets search engines initially know you exist. More importantly though, sitemaps provide search engines with a structured hierarchy of your pages & some information about how often your pages change – though Google tends to crawl at their own self-preferred pace.

Lastly, as part of the bare minimum, page titles and descriptions should be manually adjusted to better summarize the page and prioritize the key concept search engine visitors are likely to be seeking. It’s not uncommon for businesses to simply have their business name in their page title, but what your business is called is less important than what you do. While a continuation of SEO plan is important, these initial titles and descriptions are the bulk basis of success.

A lot of small businesses could often benefit greatly by simply adjusting their page titles to reflect their industry first, location second, & business name last. The same thing holds true even for heading and sub-headings. It’s a minor change that has shown to benefit in search.

While not necessarily a component of key word research, highlighting certain key words and then expanding upon that key word by linking out to another page (internally or externally) is extremely valuable. A link strategy can be used to develop reciprocal backlinks with integrity.

This is a process where research is performed to find areas where longer key phrases could open up the potential for greater search volume for key words that might not rank well for just the key word alone. In some ways, these exist naturally in well written content.

Good content typically includes imagery and there’s a good possibility your website lacks alternative text on images. Alt text, while not seen by the vast majority if visitors, is valuable to search engines and visually impaired users, which is why it should be a part of your content strategy.

Occasionally, websites will change their page URLs or remove pages entirely, which can break links on your website that result in 404 errors when visitors exit your site. It’s important to keep an eye on these errors so visitors receive a fluid experience of trust that your site is well updated and relevant. It may even be deemed important to change URLs on your own website pages, which makes finding and replacing forgotten links that have been updated an important part of monthly SEO.

Backlinks to your website help create authority, drive additional traffic, and tend to improve rankings…as long as they aren’t created maliciously. Depending upon the intensity requested per the monthly SEO budget, I’ll work to improve the number of quality backlinks by brainstorming and reaching out to websites that might offer beneficial backlinks. This isn’t an easy task and efforts to often result in rejections for requests for backlinks, but sites can find value in guest posting, generating backlinks, and collaborating with other websites.

By reviewing keywords on a monthly basis, you’ll have a better understanding of the type of phrases visitors use to find your website. That’s important because it affects how you approach the content on your site, how titles might be adjusted, and whether there are trending topics that might be worth tweaking and adding to your site to catch. Keyword monitoring includes both a review of impressions on search queries and a review of changes in rankings for search terms.

Using the information provided in both keyword monitoring and the addition of new content over time, there often ends up being opportunities to retroactively adjust older content including page titles, URLs, alt text and nearly every other aspect of a site. A monthly SEO plan includes changes like superlative adjustments, finding phrases in old content to link to other pages from, finding phrases in content to link to old content from, among other simple tweaks and updates over time to build out a site effectively.