As a business owner, your primary role is to take care of your customers, not to please Google. Our SEO geniuses put their heads together this morning to give you a few simple things you can do everyday to earn higher placement in Google and other search engines for those important keywords you’d like to rank for.

Setup Tasks

The catch to our guide is about 1-2 hours of initial planning. Below are a few steps to help you get going:

1. Setup a Content Tracking Workbook free using Google Drive
2. List the keywords you’d like to rank for in the spreadsheet (separate sales from non-sales pages)
3. Get semantic keyword variations from the new Google Keyword Planner
4. Setup a Link Tracking Spreadsheet free using Google Drive or Buzzstream
5. Identify and list websites you’d like to earn a link from in your spreadsheet
6. Create separate tabs in the workbook for “Relevant” Blogs, Directories, Portals, & Social Influencers

When done, you’ll know what pages to work on within your website to improve your relevancy, and what links to go after to build your popularity. Next, the daily SEO work you’ll need to do for 10 minutes per day.

The First 5 Minutes

In your Content Tracking Workbook, commit to completely just one thing per day. For example, today I’m at main heading and my job is to make sure that includes my focus keyword. Login to your website, make the change and call it a day with on-page SEO.

Over the next several months you’ll look back and realize that you’ve optimized dozens of web pages and are seeing significant lifts in ranking as a result.

The Last 5 Minutes

Open up that link tracker and grab the first website on your list. Decide what your outreach approach will be. We recommend the following, in sequence:

1. Reference – get them to link to something educational on the website
2. Cross-Promotion – offer a featured post on your blog in exchange for the same
3. Contribution – offer pre-written (unpublished) content they can post on their blog or article section
4. Sponsorship – bribe them with anything other than money (Google frowns on paid links)

Connect with the link partner through their various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). If they connect back, send them a direct message with your pitch, else locate their contact information on the website or through whois.sc and send them an email.

Add a note for yourself to follow up in 3 days if you don’t hear back in the NOTES column of your tracking sheet.

Eventually, you’ll have dozens of related websites sharing your content or cross-promoting with you, which will not only help your search ranking, but may actually drive relevant referral traffic to your website.

What If You Don’t Have 10 Minutes?

There’s always someone on your team who can parse out 10 minutes to help with daily SEO tasks. If you’re bottlenecked in procurement and don’t have a budget to hire a professional SEO company, such as Digital EYE Media, try the local colleges. Interns are looking to get job experience everyday and probably more technology savvy than some of the older employees you have in-house.

With this in mind, even you can improve your Google ranking in 10 minutes a day or less. Just get past the initial 1-2 hours of setup, calendar some time in your daily routine and start enjoying the free search engine traffic!