SEO
How to Rank Higher on Google: A Small Business Guide
How to rank higher on Google, step by step: choose the right searches, improve your pages, fix technical problems, earn trust and measure what works.
SEO takes time: results build over weeks and months rather than days, so the earlier you start, the better.
If you want quick results, put some money into paid advertising. Just remember that it’s a short term gain, and if you want to keep seeing the same spike in website traffic you must continue to pay for it.
SEO is an entirely different beast. It’s more of a long term investment and strategy, but the rewards are much more satisfying and long lasting.
Fortunately, there are a couple of really simple SEO tips and tricks you can start incorporating into your website routine that take hardly any time once you’ve mastered them, and make a tangible difference in getting your site ranked on Google over time. In this article, we’ll be talking about two that you should focus on before your site even goes live.
Include Google Analytics tracking code from Day 1
Before your website goes live, sign up for a Google Analytics account so that you are set up to track your site traffic from Day 1. You’ll need a Google account in order to do this.
Next, you’ll want to grab the tracking code. In Google Analytics 4, go to Admin, open Data streams, choose your website’s stream and view the tag instructions to copy your Google tag.
Lastly, you need to add this tag to your website. There are a few ways you can do this: either by manually adding the code to your site’s header (only attempt this if you’re familiar with HTML), installing a plugin, or using your website platform’s built-in Google Analytics setting. Our Google Analytics 4 guide explains what GA4 tracks once it’s set up.
No matter which option you choose, be sure you’ve done it correctly. The last thing you want is to find out you haven’t been tracking site traffic all along because your tracking code wasn’t added properly. Open the Realtime report in Google Analytics, then visit your site in another tab: your visit should appear within a minute or so. If it doesn’t, check the tag was added to every page.
Set up an SEO-friendly permalink structure
A permalink (or permanent link) to a web page is its URL, or the exact web address at which you can reach it. It’s a quick way for Google to ascertain the topic of your page without crawling much further.
To that end, you want to let Google know what your website is about. The simplest way to do this is by setting up an SEO-friendly permalink structure. If you’re building a WordPress website, you can configure this from your dashboard under Settings > Permalinks.
The first few options listed are not very SEO-friendly because those URLs contain extra junk that make Google crawl further to learn more about your website. Avoid using permalinks with numbers, dates, and question marks; instead, opt to include just the page or post name.
Once you have the basic permalink structure set, you can alter the permalink when editing any page or post on your WordPress website. You’ll definitely want to do this when your page or post title is especially long, or else you’ll end up with a massively long URL string. Remove any stop words like “to” or “and”, and aim to include one of your keyword phrases whenever possible.
It’s really important to set your permalink structure early on, otherwise if you want to change it you’ll have to worry about setting up 301 redirects so that your old permalinks redirect to the new ones, and so that your site doesn’t break. Better to get this right from Day 1, set it, and forget it.
