Website Speed Testing
Page speed is a Google ranking factor, so it is important to have a quick loading website. Here are some useful tools that analyze website speed and provide recommendations on how to improve speed.
Mobile-Friendly test
Run the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your site is mobile-friendly. If it’s not, your site will be difficult to read and use on a mobile device. Google started including mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor for mobile searches in 2015, so you should have a responsive, mobile-friendly website for your business.
Help with Building Citations
A citation is a mention of your company NAP (name, address, phone number) on other webpages even if it doesn’t provide a link back to your site. Citations help to improve your local SEO, so you should seek out good citation sources and add your business to them.
Best Local Citations By Category
Whitespark provides a list of the Best Local Citations by Category. This specifies the top citation sources based on the type of business. If you want to rank favorably in the local search results, these citation sites are a great place to start.
Best Citation Sources by U.S. City
Whitespark provides a list of the Best Citation Sources by U.S. City. This helps you find the top citation sources based on where you live.
Help With Online Reviews
People use reviews quite frequently on the Web to determine the quality of a business. If you aren’t getting reviews for your business, you are missing out on opportunities for increasing your online reputation. Google review scores are an important ranking signal, so it is wise to develop a strategy for obtaining reviews on Google and a few other selected review sites.
Get Five Stars
Get Five Stars is a paid service that helps you get customer feedback for your business and much needed online reviews.
Review Handout Generator
Whitespark’s Review Handout Generator is a free tool that allows you to create customized, printable instructions for your customers on how to leave a Google review.
Learning SEO
If you update your WordPress site on your own or have a blog on your site, learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help you optimize your content for the search engines. Optimizing content makes you web pages visible to people who are searching online for keywords related to your product or service. There are many excellent online resources for learning SEO, but here are just a few of them.
Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Mox has an excellent Beginner’s Guide to SEO with comprehensive information on the topic. It is broken down into sections to make it very digestible for beginners.
Yoast SEO
If you have the Yoast SEO plugin installed on your WordPress site, the Yoast SEO website provides great online SEO training, plus eBooks and an SEO blog you can subscribe to. If you use Yoast SEO, I highly recommend you learn how to use it to optimize your content, including your blog posts.
Local Visibility System
If you want to attract local customers, Local Visibility System provides in depth guidance on how to succeed in local search. I recommend spending some time looking around the site to see what resources are available. The owner, Phil Rozek, provides some great free resources.
Learning WordPress
If you are maintaining your WordPress website on your own, there are many excellent online resources to help you learn WordPress. Here are just a few:
WPBeginner
WPBeginner is the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners. The site contains a blog, videos, dictionary of WordPress terms, special deals on WordPress products and services, and more. If you need to know how to accomplish something in WordPress, it is likely you will find it here including recommendations on plugins to accomplish specific tasks.
WP101
WP101 is a popular resource for WordPress tutorial courses. You can start with their our free Introduction to WordPress mini-course and then either purchase other courses on an as-needed basis or buy a membership.