With online business rapidly replacing traditional bricks and mortar stores, a company’s online presence is more important than ever before. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in a website’s successes, and while many companies employ SEO practices, rapidly shifting search engine algorithms can mean their techniques are often outdated. Tricks that yielded the first-place position in 2018 or 2019 search engine results pages are likely to be not only obsolete but potentially damaging today, possibly even leading to a dreaded Google penalty.
Staying updated with the best SEO practices can be really useful but can be very time- and resource-draining. The list below outlines the most reliable and effective methods of SEO: focusing on these rather than shifting trends allows for a more consistent strategy. Only once you’ve nailed these should you move on to the more complex and short-lived tips.
1- Site Speed
2010 saw the introduction of site speed as a ranking factor for Google. To this day, the importance of website speed continues to be emphasized. It isn’t hard to understand why site speed has consistently been an effective SEO tool: a slow website makes its viewer impatient and frustrated, increasing the chance they’ll return to the search engine results page. Ensuring a website is fast on both a desktop and mobile device will have an impact on the rate of customer conversation, churn, and results page rankings. There are many free resources out there that can provide basic site speed tests.
2- Use Backlinks
Search engines have been using backlinks to determine the rankings of a website for decades. The reason backlinks remain such a vital tool to this day is due to their ability to quickly and easily validate the quality and authority of a site.
Although linking has remained a vital tool, the particularities of linking successfully have changed over the years, with search engines becoming more aware of the ways in which links can be easily spammed, e.g., through comment sections. Having links to and from a high-quality and reputable page will ensure better results than spam links. Employing a specialized company like clickintelligence.co can increase your link building efficiency, and ensure that your backlink strategy is genuine, allowed, and optimized.
3- Don’t Ignore the Data
Utilize resources like Google Analytics to access key data, which can impact your long-term strategy. Google Analytics works by tracking website activity such as session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate (among others), in addition to the source of traffic. This will help to identify the most successful SEO techniques that you are currently implementing and help inform an awareness of customer preferences.
4- Start optimizing for voice searches
It is predicted that 50% of all searches will be conducted by voice searching next year. Voice and text search results differ greatly: instead of providing a list of information, voice search results play the top snippet result as an answer.
This new style of searching requires a different strategy for successful SEO. Although voice search SEO theory isn’t fully developed, structuring titles as questions around long-tail keywords looks like it will be one of the best strategies you can implement.
