2019 is just around the corner and many businesses are making plans and setting goals for the new year. If you goal includes ranking higher on search engines to gain more online exposure for your business, you will want to implement these 5 SEO tips.
Page Speed Optimizaion
Recently Google has move to a mobile first index that takes page speed into consideration for ranking purposes. If your website is slow on mobile devices you may have already noticed the decrease in rankings and traffic to your website.
To find out if your website is slow, I suggest running a few page speed test to determine what is slowing down your website.
The first test to run is from Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This test will provide you with a page speed score and an optimization score. However, if you do not have enough real-world speed data, you will not receive a page speed score.
Whether you receive a page speed score or not, Google will still provide you with detailed information and give you suggestions on how you can improve your page speed.
The next test to run is the Pingdom Website Speed Test. This test will give you an overall performance grade and will also let you know how long it took to load your website. In the fine details, you will also see which type of content is slowing down your website.
The last test to run is the GTmetrix Speed Test. This test will give you a PageSpeed score and a YSlow score along with very detailed information about the overall speed of your website.
Using the data from these 3 test can help you pinpoint what is slowing down your site so you can make the necessary changes to increase your websites speed and increase your SEO rankings.
Update Meta Data
Meta data is extremely important when it comes to the overall ranking of your website. Components of meta data include your title tag and your description tag. Keyword meta data used to be important but because it was easy to spam Google and other major search engines no longer use Keyword meta data for ranking purposes.
Title Tag
In a previous post I covered Title Tag SEO pretty extensively. The title tag makes up 9% of each web pages ranking factor and is the first thing search engines index.
I suggest going through each page of your website to determine whether or not the title tag that is already assigned to the page uses the keyword you want to rank for.
You can use tools like SEMRush’s keyword tool to see how many searches a keyword receives on a monthly basis and how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. This is a great tool that can help you uncover potentially traffic changing keywords that can improve your websites positions in search engines for the keywords your customers are searching for right now.
Description Tag
Your description tag is the content displayed on search engine results pages just under the clickable title. This tag doesn’t have a direct impact on your on-page seo but it does play an important role in your click through rate.
The purpose of the description tag is to tell searchers exactly what your web page is about in under 160 characters.
The key to a good description tag is to include your main keyword early on in the description tag and to make it as compelling as possible so searches will want to click through to your website.
Repurpose Old Content
Repurposing old content is a great way to get the most out of the content you already have and the pages your visitors are already reading.
Over time the content your wrote can become outdated and be a major turn off to your visitors. In order to determine the pages and blog posts you should consider repurposing, head over to your Google Analytics account.
In your Google Analytics account, find the content that has a high bounce rate and a high exit percentage over the past year. If these pages are still getting a lot of traffic but are resulting in people leaving your website, chance are the content outdated or just not that good.
Consider making changes to the content on the page and possibly even the layout of the page. Because these pages are still receiving traffic, they are still relevant to your potential customers. A good refresh of these pages can lead to longer visits on your website and ultimately more leads for your business.
Inbound & Internal Linking
Inbound and internal linking are as important as ever when it comes to your SEO rankings.
The first thing you want to do is check for broken links. If you have a WordPress website, there are a number of plugins you can install that will detect broken links for you. If you have a different CMS platform, this free broken link tool can help you find broken links on your website.
Inbound Linking
Next, you will want to devise an inbound linking strategy heading into 2019. There are a number of different ways to reach out to other website owners and ask them for a link to your website.
Here are a couple resources to check out the provide great content on how to effectively reach out to other websites: Neil Patel, Backlinko
Internal Linking
Internal linking is also just as important as outbound linking. Internal linking refers to the internal linking of web pages on a website.
When going through your old content and creating new content, keep an eye open for keywords that are relevant to other pages on your website. When you find these keywords be sure to link to a page on your website that is relevant to that keyword and provides your visitors with more quality content on the subject.
Create New Content
Finally, you need to be creating new content on a consistent basis to keep Google and other search engines coming back to your website. Additionally, new quality content keeps your audience engaged and has the potential to become viral!
According to a recent study from HubSpot, companies that blog get 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and have 434% more indexed pages. If that isn’t reason enough to create a content marketing strategy, I don’t know what is!
Conclusion
Ranking on the top of search engines is only going to get harder and harder as more businesses turn to the internet to generate leads and sales.
Staying on top of search engines means you need to be constantly monitoring your traffic, updating your content and creating new content on a consistent basis.
I would love to hear of any other suggestion you may have to improve your website rankings in the upcoming year. Please tell me in the comments below.
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It is great to read content that really understands the complexity of the art of ranking. This article is through. It is on point and if followed can result in great rankings. Thanks!
Thank you. I try my best to share in depth knowledge of what I have learned from optimizing websites over the years.
[…] Site speed is critical when it comes to your rankings on search engines and user friendliness. A slow website will not rank as well as a fast one and users typically expect a website to load in under a second. […]