As mentioned previously, you need to step up your business’ SEO if you want to start off the new year right. But aside from the steps mentioned there, you also need to ramp up other things. And that means partnering up with the best WordPress SEO service provider, investing in new digital marketing tools, and including the following on this year’s resolution list.
Perform Monthly Website Audits
Chances are, you probably resolved to improve your health this year, visiting the doctor, eating right, and everything. Well, you should mind your business’ health, too! And one way to do that is by performing monthly website audits.
Now there are two ways you can go about performing website audits. You can either ask WordPress SEO service providers (assuming you hired them) and have them do it for you. Or you can do the auditing yourself. In case you opt for the latter, here are the some of the steps you need to take:
Check if Your Website is Indexed
Do your pages appear whenever you make relevant queries on Google and other search engines? If they don’t, then your website is probably not yet indexed and you need to fix the problems causing it in the first place. One you’re done with these, ask Google to re-crawl your site.
Inspect Your Site Structure
Site structure is how you organize content in your website. By keeping it simple and logical, users will be able to navigate through your pages comfortably. Moreover, you should check your site’s internal linking and see if it’s evenly spreading out link juice on your pages.
Check Your HTTPS Content
Most websites these days use HTTPS, so better consider following suit if you haven’t yet. Once you’ve migrated there, you need to include checking for HTTP issues as part of your regular audits. Common problems to watch out for include mixed content, as well as canonicals and redirects.
Сlean Up Duplicate Content
While Google doesn’t make much of a big deal out of duplicate content, it’s still something you need to clean up regularly. That’s because they tend to make your website look messy. And it can sometimes confuse search engines, as they won’t know which page to index if they find two identical ones.
Review Your Sitemap
The sitemap file contains all the information about your website’s pages, videos, and other files, as well as the relationships between each of them. By making sure you have one registered in Google’s Search Console, you’ll allow the search engine to constantly index your site. But before registering it, you need to check if it’s clean, concise, and up-to-date.
Improve Website Speed
Another thing you need to improve on this year is your website’s speed. As you’ve probably heard elsewhere, slow websites can kill your conversion rates and overall rankings. Aside from preventing you from properly engaging your target audience, it also makes it hard for search engines to properly crawl through and index your website.
Improving your website’s speed can be done in a number of ways. By including them in your to-do list this year, you’ll be able to gradually make your site perform faster. These include:
Minimize HTTP Requests
Loading an element in a website (i.e., images, scripts, etc) requires an HTTP request to be properly executed. The more components your website has, the more requests needed and the slower your loading time will be. By minimizing such elements (or combining certain files together), you can reduce your HTTP requests and maintain decent website speed.
Use Asynchronous Loading
Aside from minimizing or combining your site’s elements, you can also optimize the way they load. More specifically, your CSS and JavaScript files can be loaded in two ways: Synchronously or Asynchronously. Choosing the latter will help improve your website’s speed since it allows the files to load simultaneously instead of one at a time.
Load JavaScript Elements Last
To ensure your website’s content loads without delay, you need to defer JavaScript loading. That is, you have to prevent it from loading until the other elements do. Doing this will depend on the type of website you have. For HTML sites, you need to add certain lines of code to defer JavaScript loading. For WordPress sites, you can simply install the appropriate plugin, something WordPress SEO service providers can help you out with.
Minimize TTFB
Additionally, you have to reduce the amount of time needed by your website to start loading its content (aka Time to first byte or TTFB). This can be optimized by improving database queries, using Content Delivery Networks, and minimizing your HTTP requests. For optimal performance, Google recommends a TTFB of less than 200 ms.
Compress Your Files
As you probably know by now, smaller files load faster than large ones. By compressing some of the files containing your website’s elements, you’ll help your site load more quickly. You can do this by investing in tools like Gzip (which is great for CSS and HTML files) or jStrip (which is great for images).
Continually Enhance User Experience
User experience is crucial since it aims to meet the needs of your target audience. By continually giving people a meaningful user experience, you’ll be able to win their loyalty for your brand. This will eventually lead to your business’ success.
Like your product or service, your website can leave a lasting impression on your target audience. This impression will depend on several factors, so you need to take these into consideration as you improve user experience. Some of the most practical steps you can take include:
Do Proper User Research
To deliver great user experience, you first need to get to know the people you’re making it for. You need to know what they like, what meets their needs, and if they can get it elsewhere. Hone your research efforts while tackling these and other questions. You can do that by being specific, focusing on what’s relevant, and by listing actionable steps.
Maintain a Simple, Responsive Design
Give your website a clean layout, using a maximum of three colors and three fonts to give it personality. At the same time, you need to implement a responsive web design, making it readable and navigable using different devices. Doing these will help enhance the user experience you provide, as well as increase your site speed.
Use Whitespace Generously
Speaking of design, the easiest way to improve your site’s for better user experience is by using generous amounts of whitespace. Not only does it make your website look simple yet elegant, but it also helps your design breathe in a sense. For best results, use whitespace to increase spaces between texts, as well as in long text blocks on the left and right margins. You can use it to group related objects as well.
Determine the Right Calls to Action
Used properly, calls to action help customers take the next step after encountering your brand. Basically, this is the part where you get them to buy your product or service. To make yours effective, you need to create it using powerful command words that can provoke the right emotions in your target audience.
Optimize Language Capabilities
Multilingual SEO has been a thing for quite a while now. It involves optimizing your content for different languages, enabling it to become more searchable by people in different countries. It’s also a great way to build loyalty and credibility among your customers. The simplest way you can optimize your site’s language capabilities is through installing SaaS language translation and interactive chat features.
Ramp Up Link Building Effort
Link building is an important part of SEO for several reasons. For one thing, it helps give your website credibility, especially if you have backlinks to more reputable websites within your industry. But more importantly, Google and other search engines rely on links to crawl through and index your pages.
So if you haven’t put much effort in link building during the previous year, now’s the time to step it up. Aside from knowing how to monitor your backlinks, you need to consider doing the following, too.
Look for Broken Links
Broken link building is still one of the most effective ways to gain new backlinks for your website. You can do this in two ways: you either look for broken links to your website and have it fixed, or you look for broken links to other websites and ask the webmaster if they’re willing to let you fix them.
Search for Unlinked Brand Mentions
Alternatively, you can look for instances where websites have mentioned your brand without linking to your website. You can rely on listening tools, analytics software, and even a simple Google search to find these. Anyway, as soon as you spotted one, ask the webmaster to add a link to your website or landing page to the content where they mentioned your brand.
Try Image Outreach
Or you can try image link building. This involves adding links to images, whether it’s a photograph or a picture made through web design. Basically, you post this on a stock photo platform like Pixabay, Pexels, and iStock. Then once a webmaster ends up downloading your photos, you can reach them out and ask them to link to your website.
Step Up Your Guest Posting
But if you really want to ramp up your link building efforts, don’t forget to include guest posting in your gameplan. Through this method, you’ll not only build good backlinks; you’ll also showcase your credibility and authority on the subject you’re writing about. And as many WordPress SEO service providers will tell you, content is still king when it comes to optimization.
Invest in Great Link Building Tools
Finally, you need to invest in the latest, most effective SEO tools if you want to ramp up your link building campaigns. Aside from the usual ones like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush, you need to use other apps. These include Basecam to organize your company’s tasks, Slack to smooth out communication among your team, and Notion so you can track your tasks in a calendar. it can also include certain WordPress plugins; ask your WordPress SEO service provide for any suggestions.
Step Up Your SEO Efforts This Year
Combined with premium WordPress SEO service, great digital marketing tools, and the right people, these items will help optimize your business and brand this year. So better complete your list of resolutions if you haven’t yet. And while you’re at it, try including the items mentioned above.
