Businesses are often slow to adopt significant SEO changes, and many business owners are being left behind by today’s shifts to digital marketing because they haven’t updated their websites in years.
Eventually, not changing with the times can potentially impact your business growth.
SEO is the process of making your website more “friendly” for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!, helping them categorize your site and display it in relevant search results.
Optimizing your website can help to improve its organic search result ranking, making your business easier to find when potential customers search for products and services related to your business. A key element of SEO is consistent use of identified keywords, phrases and search terms based on your specific business type, across your website.
Here are a few areas you can focus on to help keep your website up to date, starting by conducting a year-end SEO website review:
High-quality content more important than ever
Generating high-quality content that serves your website visitors can be the most important change to make for 2019. Visitors expect highly engaging, informative, and useful content available in a format that works across devices. To maintain a healthy website, do an overall audit on all your website content, to determine what to keep, what to remove, and what to make more robust with an SEO consideration.
As part of the audit: review your blog content to make sure articles are more than 300 words and are highly valuable to your visitors. Ensure posts are linked to other relevant information on your website as well as valuable outside sources.
Make your content scannable with keyword-rich headings and helpful visuals. Be sure to check your website’s main pages for outdated information and make sure contact forms and contact information is up to date. This can all contribute to increased SEO optimization for your website.
Make keywords more natural
A website keyword tool can be used to help optimize your website’s visibility and search engine rankings. GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility tool can help generate those ideal keywords for you to incorporate into your website, to help to enhance the visibility of your website in displayed search results.
With the rise of more advanced voice search technology, you may want to think about natural speech patterns when conducting keyword research as a part of you your SEO audit.
Research semantically related keywords to target new, but related, areas to expand your website’s reach. For example; if you sell pastries, you may want to expand your keywords to include breakfast or desserts. Review your content creation plans and adjust for new search trends in your industry.
Review your links
Knowing where your links come from is important as it can negatively affect your SEO if there are bad links to your website. It is also important to take into consideration your website’s linking practices between your web pages and other websites. Check your website regularly for any broken links and webpages with links back to your website.
Take precautions to protect your website
To help keep your website up to date and secure, take technological precautions to help protect your website and visitors.
This includes implementing an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate for your website, if you ask visitors to login, purchase, or submit information on your site. An SSL Certificate creates a secure tunnel through which customer information can pass more safely. The Certificate automatically creates a secure, encrypted connection with their browser and is more protected when SSL is deployed on all website pages including subdomain page.
Once the connection is complete, a padlock icon and HTTPS appear in the visitor’s browser bar to show them that there are further protections on the website for sharing personal information.
You can also consider additional protection with an automatic monitoring service and guaranteed malware removing, resolving issues more quickly.
In addition, routinely check your website for outdated plugins, themes, or code.
The Importance of SEO
As you conduct your website assessment, it is important to think about how SEO information can impact your business decisions beyond website maintenance and digital marketing.
Think about gaining more from SEO than just getting more traffic from search results. SEO is no longer something that stands separate from other parts of your business. And if you are planning on expanding later in the year, get an early start on determining your SEO strategy.
As part of a comprehensive strategy, a focus on SEO can help you make more informed decisions about new market opportunities to pursue and better approaches to connect with your customers.