The New Year has arrived and your business, like any other person who makes a resolution to stop smoking or go to the gym, is preparing to enter the year with a fresh start and a goal for profit improvement. Part of what is required to give your business greater profit is figuring out what small tactical and strategies pieces need attention to help you get there.
One of the most important on the digital marketing front is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO dictates where your business ranks in search results for various keywords and phrases that your customers will be searching that relate to your business. For the New Year, there are a few things that need improvement in your SEO strategy.
Plan Your Strategy
The first is the most obvious – you need a strategic plan for your SEO improvement. You would be surprised how many business have no plan for their digital marketing practices in general, let alone their SEO. If you have no goals or ideas for how your SEO has performed in the past and where you need to improve, how can you get better?
Look at how you ranked in the previous year using Google Analytics and any other tool available online you used to help determine your rank. If you have none of these set up, now is the time to get them started and to keep track of how well you are doing. Make sure every keyword you are ranking for currently is a keyword that you want to rank for. If not, then you need to perform keyword research and find common phrases you want to rank for.
Once you have the basics lined out, decide how you will implement SEO. This can be with paid search campaigns, also known as search engine marketing, or other tactics such as content marketing and social media. Choose the SEO avenues that make sense for your business and that you have seen or expect to see success on.
Make Mobile A Priority
The idea of mobile optimization for search is not new and it has been the biggest talking point in 2015. Still, many businesses are ignoring the power of mobile search or are not taking mobile platforms seriously when people are searching. It is important you make a plan for mobile search and optimize for both desktop and mobile. This should be applied in mobile optimizing your website, increasing your mobile site speed load time, creating mobile friendly social media posts, and making mobile SEM campaigns.
Remember Engagement Matters
How people interact with your brand online and your content is a vital part of SEO but one of the most forgotten parts of an SEO strategy for many businesses. A couple of years ago, Google changed their algorithm to place a high emphasis on producing quality content that would be helpful to searchers. This eliminated what was known as black hat SEO tactics and keyword stuffing. Now that more businesses are taking quality content seriously, they now need to shape that content to what users want to see to shape engagement. Google will begin looking at how people engage with your content, from social media to your website. The longer people stay on your website and the more likes, comments, and shares you receive on social media, the better you will rank on search engines.
Social Media is Important
This brings us to our last tip for 2016’s SEO – social media marketing. For a long time, social media did not really matter for SEO (except concerning Google+ posts). Now, social media will start to slowly factor into Google’s search ranking. Twitter posts were announced to begin ranking in social media, but Facebook is still difficult for Google to index and place in search results. Regardless, using social media and having people interact with that content will improve your search engine ranking.