It can be frustrating paying for users to find your site through advertising when it should be possible to happen naturally.
Update Your Server Configuration
I would recommend starting off with changing some of your server configurations. This should have the highest impact with the least effort since it will likely affect every webpage you are hosting.
HTTPS
Simply hosting your website with a secure protocol like HTTPS sends a signal to search engines that your website can be trusted. This can be easily done for free with the use of Certificate Authority called Let’s Encrypt.
Compression
Reducing the amount of data traveling over the wire will drastically improve your SEO rating. The faster your website can be loaded the more likely it will be indexed by search engines. The most common strategy for compression is the use of gzip. The most flexible way of doing this is through the use of NGINX. NGINX can act as a proxy to your web server and provide scalability to your website in the long run as well.
Caching
Cache headers tell web browsers to keep file versions around longer. This can save users time when downloading resources from your site. It also gives your server some breathing room since it does not have to fulfill the same request for repeat users.
Update Your Page’s Meta Data
You will typically find meta related content in the head tag of your html or the headers of the html response. These help you to control the external resources of your site as well as tell search engines more about your page.
Minification
This part goes back to compression. Reducing the size of your html, css, and javascript via minification will have a huge impact on the ranking of your website. Web crawlers and users tend to give up on sites that take too long to load (Even 2 seconds can be too long for some). UglifyJS is a commonly used tool for minifying javascript code.
Link tags
Link tags specify the relationship between your webpage and other resources. Their most common usage is for external stylesheets. Additionally you can specify your site icon, the canonical version of a webpage, and the AMP version of a page. These tags are important when deciding where search engines will link when your site gets a hit.
Meta tags
Meta tags tell search engines and social media a little bit more about your website. They are useful for specifying Open Graph properties, Twitter Card properties, descriptions, and viewports. These tags are important for telling how a preview of your webpage should look when being shared with others.
Structured Data
Structured data is represented as a script tag with a special type. It contains a JSON configuration that tells search engines how to display results when your page gets a hit. With it, you can really help search engines to understand what kind of content your are trying to present to the user.
Content Changes
One of the easiest things to do to improve any page’s ranking is to simply add more relevant text to the page. Making sure you have the right text to html ratio is key to having a high ranking.
Organization
Make sure that you have tags properly nested. Little rules like illegally nested paragraph or div tags can add up to a bad SEO experience. This is mainly because it causes layout shifts as the tag will sometimes pop out of its illegal container and cause a visually unappealing graphic. Also consider using more modern grouping tags like section, header, and footer tags to help search engines to understand your page better.
Structure
Having completely valid html code is important when crawlers need to interpret your page. Missing closing tags or improper attribute syntax could cause search engines to give up on your site immediately.
Google Search Console
Your site is almost guarenteed not to show up in search results unless you register it with Google Search Console. Once registered you will get updates when things have gone wrong with your site and you can fix them quite easily in most cases.
Performance
This panel allows you to see what users have searched for in order to find your site. You can use this to help you determine what kind of content brings users to your page and provide more similar content.
Sitemaps
You can tell Google how to crawl your site by registering your sitemaps. It will tell you how many pages it found along with any issues you should fix. This should be one of the first things you set up after registering you domain.
Instant SEO
Get all of these checks and more with the free tool I built, Instant SEO. It will audit your entire website and give you suggestions on how to improve your SEO ranking. It is a great way to learn SEO and get ideas on what to prioritize next.