SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has and always will be important for any business website. What are the latest best practices? Here are five important aspects to SEO you may want to implement this year:
1. Optimize for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are here to stay. The first place to start would be any keywords that rank on page one of a search result that includes a featured snippet box. These are your best opportunities because you are more likely to be featured if your content already ranks on page one.
One of the best ways to do that is to provide accurate, easy-to-read summaries of your page’s content. Google will be more likely to pick these up and use them.
Not sure what a featured snippet is? You can learn more about that here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en
2. Recycle, Repurpose, Reuse
If you’re creating quality, useful content it’s a great idea to repurpose it! Take that blog post, and turn it into a slideshow or video. You could even turn it into an audio transcript. Whatever works for you and gets your audience engaged.
This could help expand your reach online as more people interact with the different versions of your content.
3. Improve and Fill Out Low Quality / Low Engagement Pages
This goes without saying, but constantly working to improve your site and its content will result in better SEO. Once Google sees you have updated and page and users are engaging with it more, it will rank you higher.
Have a page that you think is useful to customers, but not first time visitors? Change it to meta no-index so it doesn’t impact your ranking.
Learn more about the no-index tag here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en
4. Find New Keyword Opportunities
As with everything on the internet, keywords are constantly changing. Maybe a keyword you ranked a page for last year no longer has the search volume you are looking for? Or maybe a keyword that didn’t get much traffic now has a much higher search volume.
You may also find that you are getting a lot of impressions for a particular keyword, but few people are clicking on it. It may be time to update that page.
Whatever the case, it’s always helpful to use the Google Search Console to find new opportunities for keywords.
Learn more about Google search console here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9128668?hl=en
5. Cover the Basics
Of course, you should still practice the basics of SEO with title tags, meta tags, alt text, etc. You should also ensure your mobile page speed is optimal, as Google now assesses your websites mobile speed for SEO ranking, before your desktop page speed.
Even though Google is getting much better at identifying images, you should still provide alt text to ensure your website is accessible for all users.
SEO Never Ends
There several more things I could go over, but I find these five areas of featured snippets, repurposing content, improving your page quality, keyword opportunities, and continuing with basic practices are some of the more important areas of SEO for this year.
If you are brand new to SEO, or want a bit of a refresher course, I recommend this SEO starter guide: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Want to learn more about SEO, improve your search ranking or website? We’d love to help. Call us at 225-341-4147 to get started.
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