Time to go LEAN! In this post, we will learn ‘Minimum Viable SEO’ and how you can optimize your website and content without a dedicated SEO team.
There are a lot of things we can learn from entrepreneurs but the most important of them all is learning how to go lean. Lean methodologies allow entrepreneurs to execute fast (and fail fast!).
If you’re an SEO expert handling multiple clients with different budgets, or if you’re a marketer or entrepreneur who wants to maintain and grow your search rankings without a dedicated SEO team, this method is essential for your SEO success.
The entrepreneur’s MINIMUM VIABLE SEO method is inspired by the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
RECOMMENDED: Learn all the startup growth hacking terms here.
Minimum Viable SEO has 5 major components:
Table of Contents
1. LEAN SEO AUDIT
As part of the Lean SEO Audit, make a list of the 5 most important on-site SEO factors and audit them at the start of each month.
These could be title and description tags, image ALT tags, and so on. Make sure you pick only the 5 highest impact ones.
2. LEAN SEO STRATEGY
Develop a lean strategy which allows you to perform SEO by dedication only a few hours each month.
This must include a lean audit at the start of the month (2 hours), a Lean Keyword Research at the start of each week (1 hour), a Lean SEO checklist whenever you publish content (30 minutes) and a Lean SEO Report at the end of the month (2 hours).
You should be all set for your essential SEO goals by just investing less than 8 hours a month on SEO.
P.S. Professional SEO teams would spend much more than this and work on various factors and optimizations however, as entrepreneurs and small teams, I want you to focus only on the top 20% factors. (And you know why!)
3. LEAN SEO KEYWORDS
Use Google suggestions and tools like Uber Suggest and you can come up with a list of 50 keywords in less than 30 minutes.
Try out these offbeat channels for SEO keyword research now.
4. LEAN SEO CHECKLIST
Each time you’re going to publish new content, just check for the top 5 factors in your content and make sure they’re optimized.
Just focus on the top 5 which usually get 80% of the content optimization done.
5. LEAN SEO ANALYTICS
Make a list of the top 5 factors which can best measure the results of your SEO activities.
Hint: Traffic source, Time on page and Bounce Rate are crucial.
Try these actionable steps and you’ll have your minimum viable SEO plan up and running.
Ready to scale up your SEO marketing? Check out my SEO hacking course here.
Cheers!
I’m a beginner at SEO… somehow it’s still new and has a lot of things for me to learn from. thank you for sharing these knowledges, Rishabh.
for me the hardest part is trying to fit my keywords into my post / article. have you ever experienced the same thing like me? 🙁
Could you give me some advices on this? thanks in advance.
Good question Jeet, my answer would be not to “try to” fit keywords into content and let them be part of the content naturally. Synonyms and LSI keywords also work and are usually already there in your content when you write in your natural tone. Additional to this, once you’ve written your content and analyzed the keywords and their frequency, just run through it and see if you can include some keywords without breaking the readability in case the frequency is very low. And make sure you look at offbeat keyword research sources. You can find some of those here – http://rishabhdev.com/seo-offbeat-channels-keyword-research/