It’s that time of the year to clean up your house and rid yourself of any clutter you’ve accumulated through the winter. This yearly tradition also applies to your SEO.
SEO strategy is constantly evolving and needs to be evaluated on a consistent basis to stay up-to-date and competitive.
Without further ado here are three tips to make sure your SEO strategy makes the cut.
1. Quality, Quality, Quality.
Ok so this shouldn’t come as any surprise. We’ve heard for years that content is king. And in the last year Google has rolled out a ton of new changes to the search algorithm that truly identifies and promotes quality content. Lucky for us they have been quite transparent (well, as transparent as we could hope for..)
Google gives a very handy play-by-play you can consult to make sure you’re on the right track with content. It should be “useful and informative, valuable, credible, and engaging.”
Oh and because it’s important to note: avoid keyword stuffing, broken links, and generally spammy content. Having your keyword on page 70 times might seem easy, but could result in penalties and actual hurt your ranking.
2. Do your research.
From Google Trends to Webmaster Tools/Search Console and even Keyword Planner, free tools and information are truly at your disposal. Stay up-to-date on the trends and follow the data. What keyword you optimized for last year might not be cutting it.
Google Trends is a great place to start, allowing you to see keyword data and traffic for your targeted location. Don’t assume you know the right keyword or synonyms for your company/product. You might internally refer to your product as a ‘full service management system’ but if that’s not what potential customers are searching for, don’t optimize for it. Compare similar words and phrases to find the high traffic results.
Webmaster Tools/Search Console has a plethora of information including site crawls that can show you any 404 error pages, which hurt your ranking factor.
3. Don’t forget additional content.
Figured out the keywords? Great! You’re on the right track to optimizing. But often times keywords are awkwardly thrown into the page copy and that’s it.
Don’t forget: title tags, alt tags, url, H1, meta descriptions, local listings, robots.txt, sitemap, mobile optimization, and backlinks.
Quick tip: boost your content through your social media, share your blog and encourage others to share as well creating additional backlinks to your content.
