SEO to Consider for the New Year
Having a SEO strategy is important to keep your website’s competitive edge in the new year. Tactics have evolved over the years and different strategies have been used to receive better rankings. For example, the Google Penguin update has caused a number of changes that have changed how SEO ranks websites. Using measuring tools and metrics can help create an understanding and actionable insights to how your SEO efforts are gaining traction. There is a number of different strategies that can help rankings in the new year.
Mobile Design
Mobile-design is one of the top ranking factors that Google used in 2016. Mobile favoritism will only increase starting in the new year. Creating a mobile friendly website, requires optimization for the website to perform well for the user. Specifically, focusing on mobile experiences, not just response or m-sites but creating online interactions on the mobile that are convenient, intuitive, and successful. Targeting the needs of millennials is the most important thing to consider as the use of mobiles becomes more of a priority than any other medium.
Low User Engagement
User engagement is one of the most important aspects of a website and one of the biggest challenges that websites face. Gaining insight into user behavior can help uncover what preference the target audience have. Proper link building is important to make your website more popular. Creating more links to other websites will encourage other websites to link to you. Testing for performance through A/B testing can help create an understanding of what designs create better user engagement. A/B is testing which two different designs to see which design works better and more efficiently.
Poor User Experience
A bad user experience can damage a website’s search engine ranking drastically. Signs of bad user experience can devalue the website and whether it satisfies a user’s need. For example, if a user quickly clicks away from the website and back to the search results then that can be an indicator that the user is not satisfied with the content and the user query. Having poor choices with colors, fonts, and content choice can result in poor user experience. The expectations of users have grown so high that unless your website addresses all the needs of a user, then it will result in a poor experience.
Content Quality and Creation
Content is still considered king. With the recent controversies of content online not being of a reliable stature, it is important to create content that is accurate. Creating information that is not only quality, but content that is unique can help rankings. Using natural language in your content, rather than repeating terms in your content is importance as abnormally high concentrations of words can count against you. Focusing specifically on search phrases can also help to cater to specific searches. Furthermore, remembering that titles should be unique and on every page can help, but unless your business your business is already a household name this will not increase your SEO.
Advertisements
Google announced that they will start counting it against a website’s ranking, especially mobile websites, if they are using interstitial advertisements. These advertisements can block out relevant content and make it hard for users to see the content they wish to see, thus creating a horrible and frustrating user experience. Furthermore, being able to find the small x to close the advertisement can be very frustrating. Using these types of advertisements will automatically make your mobile website not friendly and it will be down ranked.
SEO is all about text, links, popularity, and the sites overall reputation. Remembering that SEO is not simply a one step process, but a series of decisions that will help increase your ranking. Google is becoming more aware and keen on the tricks that websites are using to creating higher ranking, so finding loopholes and following strategy can help lead to better SEO results.
