Search engine optimisation is getting more and more important every day. More and more businesses are catching on to the benefits, this means you need to try that much harder to get an edge on your competition. Here are 5 quick tips to kickstart your SEO for 2017.
1: Voice Search
The rising trend in voice search opens up new opportunities for keyword targeting. When conducting keyword research, try to include more natural sounding queries that are relevant to voice search. This is becoming a bigger and bigger opportunity for SEO every day with the growing number of technology based in home assistants such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, which rely almost entirely on voice search.
2: Avoid Risky Link Building Tactics
Even if you employ a mix of risky and white hat SEO tactics they may all end up being tarred with the same brush if Google detects any violations. This means that even your quality links can suffer if any underhand link building tactics are detected. Google’s bots are constantly evolving and improving their methods of finding and punishing sites that employ black hat tactics, so they should be avoided at all costs.
3: Improve Site Speed
Site speed has a strong link to user experience and how well your website ranks in SERP’s. Your site speed should be no higher than three seconds (meaning it should take no longer than 3 seconds to load your website), even faster if possible. Site speed is especially important if you want to rank highly on mobile, which is where the majority of searches occur.
4: Delete/Rewrite Subpar Content
Most websites will have some content that performs well and some that performs not so well. On closer inspection you might begin to see the reason is your content is too thin. This does nothing to help you and lowers the overall quality of your site, you should consider deleting the pieces of content or rewriting them so that they better address the issues your audience are facing and they no longer fall short of the mark.
5: Look Over Your Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions don’t directly affect rankings, but they can have a huge impact on click through rate (CTR), which is one of the most important factors of SEO. Take a look at some of the meta descriptions on some of your pages with the lowest CTR’s. How could you get your message across better and entice people to click? Often times even small changes can make a big difference.
Kickstart your SEO for 2017. Remember to include more queries for voice search in your keyword research, avoid black hat link building tactics at all costs, make an effort to reduce page load times, rewrite/delete thin content and make improvements to your meta descriptions.