SEO is alive and well and still proves to be the most effective way for small businesses to get found online.
But regardless of how you achieve your goals with SEO, you’ll want to consider some new ways of thinking about optimizing for search engines as you plan your strategy for the year ahead. Here are seven of the most suggested strategies to get found online.
Optimize for voice search
Voice search is the future of search. In other words, voice search will become more and more popular as time goes on. And it’s not just limited to phones—it can be done via smart speakers like Google Home or Alexa-enabled devices (like Sonos), which are becoming more and more common in homes around the world.
This means that you should optimize for voice search wherever possible, including your website, blog posts, and social media pages.
Reclaim old content
Reclaiming old content is a great way to get found online. This means taking existing content and making it more relevant or better optimized for search engines. If you have old blog posts, articles, or pages on your website that are no longer ranking well in search engines, then you should consider refreshing them with new titles, descriptions, and images. The process of reclaiming old content will also help boost your overall SEO strategy because it gives you new opportunities to add links back to the root domain or home page of your website.
Consider structured data
Structured data helps Google understand your content, which means that it will show up in search results with a rich snippet and potentially rank higher.
There are many types of structured data, but some of the most important ones to consider are:
Topic markup: This tells Google what type of information you’re talking about on a page.
Entity metadata: This gives more information about entities mentioned in the body text. For example, if you mention “The Avengers,” then you’d include entity metadata for each Marvel Avengers character so that Google could understand that this is an important part of your article.
Relation markup: This gives more details about how two entities relate to each other.
Structured data is not the easiest thing to implement for those who do not have a background in SEO. This is why it’s important to find an SEO agency help that is experienced in your industry. For example, if you are a SaaS company, there are certain structured data quirks that need to be implemented. This is why you should consider hiring a SaaS SEO agency to help you with this.
Optimize for mobile users
As more people ditch their desktops and laptops in favor of mobile devices, your site must be optimized for users on the go.
There are several ways to ensure your site is ready for this shift:
- Use responsive design. Responsive web design (RWD) adapts the layout of a website to fit the device being used to access it. You can create an RWD site using CSS or HTML5 media queries so that your website changes depending on how large or small the screen size is. This makes it look good no matter what device you’re using.
- Use a mobile-friendly theme. There are plenty of WordPress themes that are designed with mobile users in mind, making them easy to navigate from any device at any time—and they’ll also save you money since many are free.
Optimize for featured snippets
Featured snippets are search results that include a summary of the page, a heading, and sometimes also an image. It’s important to note that featured snippets do not always appear as paid ads on Google.
You can tell if your page has been featured by checking if there is a “Snippet” label in the search results. This means that Google has chosen your website as the best answer for this particular query, and will display its content within the result listing on top of other websites. If you notice that someone else has stolen your content, or if you have copied others’ work without providing proper attribution, then it’s likely that your site will lose its ranking within Google’s index entirely.
Target new keywords
New keywords help you to reach new people. You can use them to find other people looking for your products or services, which means that you can attract potential customers from a wider pool of prospects than you would reach with just existing search terms. This increases your chances of generating sales and efficiently growing your business.
New keywords also help you rank for more competitive keywords because they are less popular than the established ones, so the competition is not as fierce. By targeting specific long-tail keyword phrases in this way, it’s possible to improve search engine rankings without having to pay as much money on AdWords campaigns as would be required if using broad-based terms instead.
Clean up your content
There are several things you need to do when optimizing your existing content for search. Here are a few of the top tips to help with this:
- Make sure that all the links on your site are working properly
- Optimize for search engines with keyword strategy and meta tags, but also make sure that your content is clear to human readers as well
- Write great headlines that attract attention and tell readers what to expect from the content below it
Conclusion
In the end, you will likely find that search engine optimization for your website is a slow and steady process that requires a good deal of patience. There are no “quick fixes” or “silver bullets,” so to speak—but if you follow the tips outlined above, it is certainly possible to improve your site’s SEO. And once it happens, the results from your hard work will make all efforts worthwhile.