Marketing is all about constant improvement. Why isn’t 2020 your best year yet? While search engine optimization has been around since 1997, it’s never too late to adopt a best practice or two for your next year. Below you’ll find a few easy SEO tactics, more technical about strategies, and how to use the Market Path CMS to make your content better. Yes, I mean write more content. It’s one of the best ways to improve rankings. Start by adding 1 more blog post per month. If your site has project galleries, case studies, or client testimonials, aim to add one every three months. Just make sure you are realistic in your goal.
Easy SEO Tactics
Be an Expert
Google values “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T).” By creating new blog posts about your company, industry, or customers, you signal to search engines that you and your company are experts, authoritative, and trustworthy.
Be Transparent
As part of E-A-T, Google also evaluates your site for transparency. The following are used as indicators by Google. Start by doing a site audit and add any that may be relevant to your program.
About page, external links to resources, privacy policy and terms of service, author attribution
Fix zombie (dead) pages
As your website grows, old blog posts, pages, and blog tags will start to become obsolete. It’s okay to have a few of these pages. More than a few? Rewrite your content. If you have pages that have the same content and topic, create a category page or create a long blog post. Don’t forget to add redirects.
More TechnicalSEO
Online Videos
According to Cisco, online videos will account for 80% of all online traffic by 2021. If your business is focused on videos, which is what most businesses do, then take advantage of this trend. Start a YouTube channel, optimize your video for SEO, make a copy, and don’t forget to upload your video somewhere on your site. You’ll gain search engine benefits everywhere, especially since YouTube is the second largest search engine.
Featured Snippets
We all want to rank #1. To rank as a Featured Snippet, a.k.a. #0, you first need to find opportunities and then format your content like other snippets. Don’t skip targeting a list or table of snippets.
Use a CMS to help with SEOMarketplacePath
Meta Descriptions
Check all of your pages to make sure they have meta tags. A quick way to do this is through export and import. Here’s a short video to show you how.
Alt Tags
With the rise of visual search, thanks to Google Lens and Pinterest, we can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure your image alt tags are optimized. Optimization isn’t just about keywords – these descriptions need to be easy to understand. Screen readers read these words out for the visually impaired. Here’s a video that shows you what images need to be updated and then shows you how to update them.
Getting started and staying committed
It’s easy to plan but hard to stay on track. Create SMART goals to have your best year yet for SEO. Check in on the first, 15th, or end of each month; whatever works best for you. Here are some SMART goals for you to add to your SEO to-do list.
- By the end of each month, I will post a post to help with SEO on my website.
- By the end of Q1, I will export and update all image alt tags to optimize my images for visual search.
- By the end of Q2, I will create and customize my company YouTube channel and upload an SEO-optimized video that includes text.
- By the end of Q3, I will review my website and edit Zombie Pages into more concise and complete content.
- By the end of Q4, I will create a plan for 2021 and give myself credit for having a job well done in 2020.