The Ultimate SEO Checklist For Small Business In New Jersey 2023

If you are a startup or a small business in New Jersey that would like to get more traffic organically from your website, well, I have the solution.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an essential tool to drive traffic, acquire new customers, and get found online because you’re basically putting yourself in front of your customers the exact moment, they are searching for what you offer.

Every business wants to be on the first page but people don’t realize that only the first three spots get any real attention.

The problem becomes how does a small business compete for those spots?

SEO is technically free; you have to earn those spots but it can take a long time to get there or you can pay money to hire an SEO expert to help get you there faster.

So, in today’s post, I share a complete SEO checklist for success.

Ultimate SEO Checklist
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Ultimate SEO Checklist

1. Test for Mobile

75% of search is coming from mobile devices and Google has been penalizing any site that does not load optimally mobile-ready.

You definitely want to make sure your site is ready to go on mobile.

You can test your site here search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

2. Test for Speed

Most people will leave any webpage if it doesn’t load in less than three seconds. So, you want to definitely make sure your page load within that time.

Google knows exactly how long it takes for your page to load. It’s not even going to show your listings if it knows your site is running slow.

Here is a tool to check for load speed: tools.pingdom.com

This will show you improvements you can make but keep in mind, it does get very technical, and most likely you won’t understand the things it will tell you to do. Unless you are a developer yourself.

The best thing to do is to show this list to your developer to have them make the changes.

They will show you a letter grade, don’t worry about that. The most important thing is the speed of your website.

3-5 seconds is the boarding line.
5 seconds and up needs improvements

3. List Your Site in Directories

Get your New Jersey business listed on all Local and Business specific directories.

Every local area no matter what city you live in is going to have a specific business directory that’s associated with it, and the same for your business category.

Lawyers and doctors have their own and basically, you are going to want to find all those opportunities for being listed in these directories and make sure you are listed in all of them.

This helps SEO to let Google see you are there and you are a real business.

Another great thing with these directories, it allows you to get backlinks, and generally, these are replicable backlinks because they are from replicable directory websites.

At the time of this post, backlinks are still a huge ranking factor in the eyes of Google.

Directories are a great source for small local businesses to get links from, they are free and it is as easy as filling out the profile.

Getting listed in these directories will also get you rank higher in the Google Maps section.

You can usually find these directories opportunities that will work best for you in your area by going to

City

whitespark.ca/best-citations-by-city/

or one for your particular industry or niche, go to

4. Optimize Social/Review Profiles

Google loves brands and the more of these review sites and social sites you are listed on, the more Google is going to start seeing you as a brand.

If you claim all the proper social profiles, like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.

Next, claim your listings on any review sites like Yelp or any pacific review site for your industry.

Fill out your profile as completely as possible, complete with photos.

5. Research Your Competitors

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel when you can easily spy on what your competition is already doing.

What you will need to do is check out what Keywords they are already ranking for and what are they doing to get those high rankings.

Basically, you can see what links they are getting from other sites as well as what content they have on their other pages

So you can basically take that information and one up on basically whatever they are doing to land on top of that competitor.

The way you can do this is by using very expensive tools which I DON’T recommend.

Instead, you can go to Upworks.com and hire a freelancer to do the work for you at a lower flat rate.

All you have to do is set up an account at Upworks.com and after completion go to the search bar and type in – Keyword Research ahrefs which is the subscription service they will use.

This will find you, freelancers, for the job at a fee of around $50.00 which is well worth the investment.

Once you have the keywords the next thing you should do is Optimize Landing Pages By Topic.

6. Optimize Landing Pages by Topic

The way SEO used to work you would come up with a list of keyword phrases that you want to target and then you would basically build a separate landing page for each of those terms even if they were related. This technique was the old and spammy way to do SEO.

Now, Google has an advanced understanding of the overall topic of a page. So instead of Google counting the number of times you use the Keyword on a page, it now knows the relevant words it would expect to see on a page covering that topic.

For example, if you are an account offering tax preparation and bookkeeping, you probably want one page for each of those services.

Rather than stuffing the page with tax preparation over and over again you probably want to use it a couple of times such as once in the headline, and also supplement it with closely related work (Tax Help, Certified Public Accountant, IRS).

These are all words Google would expect to see on a high-quality page that’s built around the topic of tax preparation.

Here is a great place to check for Keywords: www.lsigraph.com

Just type on your Keyword phrase you want to rank for and it’s going to give you a list of related words you probably could use.

7. Optimize Your Search Listing

One of the major factors Google looks at is how likely is your listing to be clicked in the search.

There are a few things you can do to make your listing more appealing and much more click-worthy. For every listing, there are two different elements you want to focus on.

There is the title and there is the meta description.

The first thing you want to accomplish in the title you do want to use the keyword phrase you want to rank for. This helps make sure that it looks as relevant as possible to the searches.

But don’t stop there and you don’t want to waste your title by using your city and the business name alone. You going to want to use power or action words, also you going to want to try to convey a benefit as much as possible.

8. Optimize for “Dwell Time”

Google basically rewards sites that keep people around longer and that’s what they call dwell time.

The number of times people dwell on your site. It works like this, the longer someone stays the more Google thinks hey this page actually serves up something interesting to the searcher, that’s why they are sticking around so long.

The longer you keep people around, the more Google over time is going to start rewarding you with higher and higher positions in the search results.

But you are probably asking how I keep people engage and stay on my site longer.

The first thing I recommend is you really want to make sure that the people coming to your site knows exactly what you offer within 3 seconds of landing on your site. Don’t use any technical jargon words and don’t try to be overly clever.

Keep in mind, clarity beats cleaver every day of the week.

9. Make Your Pages Visually Appealing

You don’t want big walls of text. No one likes reading too much on the web, people mostly scan and do not read so you want to make it accessible for those people.

Well, how do you do this? You going to want to use lots of images and you going to want to use the proper web formatting.

This involves breaking everything up such as the headlines, short paragraphs, and bullet lists whenever possible, and using bold and Italics within the text to really highlight the important pieces of information.

10. High-Quality Links

To be honest, links are becoming less and less of a ranking factor over time.

Google has been more focused on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) on a given topic. But backlinks are still very important. This is defiantly a necessary factor you want to stay on top of.

The number of links you will really need is going to heavily depend on how competitive your industry is and your local area if you are more of a local business.

You may be able to get away with just a couple or you may need a lot.

The good news is you already have those directory listings. Those are a great place to start but you may need to supplement those with some more high-quality backlinks itself.

There are many ways to get links such as DIY with guest blogging which you will have to find blogs that are related to your industry.

You will have to manually reach out to blog owners to ask if can you guest blog on their site which will link back to your site. The only problem is it takes a lot of time and not everyone is a writer.

The other problem is there are so many spammy requests like this out there from other people that it makes it hard for you and your request to get responded to.

The best recommendation is to hire an SEO expert (Rodney Creations) to do this for you.

But not to be biased I also recommend THE HOTH. They have affordable plans that start at $60.00 if you don’t want to go that route of DIY.

In addition to getting links to your site from other people’s sites, start linking internally within your website where ever it makes sense.

You want to link your pages strategically to other pages within your own website. Think of it like a spider web over time.

I hope this post helps If you want a done-for-you system to build a custom WordPress website, SEO help, or Social Media Advertising that brings you leads every month.