With the New Year already underway, January is the perfect month to ramp up your business. And that doesn’t just mean streamlining how things run in your company! Yes, once again, it’s time to consider stepping up your SEO efforts. Doing so will help you improve your brand’s online presence, increasing its rankings on search engines and potentially booting your sales in the process. Aside from outsourcing premium marketing strategy services, there are also a couple of DIY SEO tricks that will help you boost your business’s digital presence. Check them out below!
Evaluate Last Year’s Performance
First things first: you need to check how well your business did last year in SEO. If you implemented an SEO marketing strategy last year, what techniques worked best for your brand and what didn’t? By separating these two, you’ll be able to replace useless tactics accordingly as well as build on good ones.
Also, you need to track a couple of metrics. Google has about 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, but you can focus on a few ones like:
Organic Traffic
This is the amount of visitors generated by your website. If your site appears on the top spot of SERPs whenever you type the related keywords, then it’s a clear sign that your organic search traffic has grown in the past year.
Keyword Ranking
This involves anything that can be searched on a search engine. Through conducting keyword gap analysis, you can check your current keywords’ performance as well as discover new ones.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rates (CTRs) are the percentage of people who clicked on your pages when they appeared after a query. It’s also a good way to check how effective your title tags and meta descriptions have been in the previous year.
Bounce Rate
On the other hand, bounce rates are the percentage of people who visited your website but left without interacting with it further. It helps measure the quality of your visit, as well as evaluate the appeal of your website to your target audience.
Backlinks
Lastly, backlinks help Google and other search engines crawl through and index your site. If your pages gained a few quality backlinks from other websites (most likely through guest posting), then it’s a clear sign of growth for your business SEO-wise. Also, you should track your current backlinks and see how they’re doing.
Monitor New SEO Trends
Evaluating your business’ SEO performance last year will help you prepare better for the next one. However, that alone won’t be enough! Aside from tracking a few important metrics and discarding a couple of useless techniques, you need to incorporate some of the new trends in the SEO industry, too.
Finding the best SEO trends this year is as easy as looking for those in other industries. By reading the right sources and using the proper trend tracking tools, you’ll be able to find and monitor the latest trends in SEO. for your convenience, some of these trends are listed below:
First-Party Data Collection
SEO is a great way for businesses and brands to gain more customers and drive in sales via their websites. More importantly, it has also become an alternative way to collect first-party data from potential leads. You can accomplish this by getting people to subscribe to your email newsletters, request quotes for your services, and what-not.
Evergreen Content
As you’ll learn from other marketing strategy services, content is still king this New Year. To ensure your website continues to bring in traffic this year, you need to create more evergreen content. That means making articles, videos, and other media that’s fresh and relevant to readers regardless of what year it is.
Omnichannel Digital Campaigns
Consumers now-a-days are all over the place. That is, they linger not only in various websites and search engines, but also in multiple social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc). By creating and executing omnichannel digital marketing campaigns, you can ensure your brand gets spotted by your target audience anywhere and anytime.
Google Discover Optimization
Google Discover is a feed designed to give you the latest content that’s relevant to what you’re usually searching for. Curated by Google, it relies heavily on images that correlate to specific topics and keywords. By continuing to create relevant content that matches the photo queries of your target audience, you’ll be able to use Google Discover to your advantage and bring in more traffic for your website.
Improve Your Website’s Technical SEO
Even if your website has great content, none of that will matter if the user has to navigate through a plethora of infrastructure issues just to enjoy it. Thankfully, these problems can easily be remedied by improving your website’s technical SEO.
Technical SEO offers several benefits, all of which will lead to your website becoming more user-friendly and more “crawlable” by Google’s algorithms. Additionally, it’s a great way to drive more traffic to your pages this year, as well as to turn those traffic into loyal customers. To enjoy these benefits, you need to follow these tips to improve your site’s technical SEO:
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
With more and more people visiting the internet through their mobile devices, you need to make your website as mobile-friendly as possible. This means giving it a responsive web design, regularly testing it through Hubspot and other marketing strategy services, and improving website speed.
Perform Technical SEO Audits Regularly
On-page SEO issues and other technical website problems are bound to occur no matter how careful you are. By performing technical SEO audits regularly, you’ll be able to keep them at a bare minimum. Some of the audits you need to do include scanning your pages for 404s, inspecting your Robots.txt File, and looking for security issues.
Install SSL Certificates for Your Website
Having an SSL certificate installed in your website helps protect your data, confirm your identity, and satisfy several PCI/DSS requirements. This will inevitably lead to better rankings on Google and other search engines, as well as improved trust for your brand. So if your site doesn’t have this certification yet, now’s the time to change that.
Start the New Year With These Tips!
If you didn’t step up your SEO efforts and marketing strategy services during the past year, then now’s the time to remedy that. Try the three tricks mentioned above, and watch your website’s rankings, traffic, and profitability gradually improve.
