New year, new marketing wishes!
I’d like to take a few minutes to give a few basic SEO tips to streamline your marketing in 2016. This is by no means a complete list but simply what I consider the very basic actions any website owner should take.
- Be Mobile!
Mobile visits are increasing like mad! Make sure your website is completely mobile-friendly. If you have a shopping cart on your site and sell products/services, just know that more people are buying from their mobile devices. Also, Google mentioned prioritizing websites that are displaying their pages in a mobile-friendly way. - Publish Regularly
Add new content on your site on a regular basis. Content = pages, blog posts, videos, images, PDFs, newsletters, etc. The idea is to show Google that your site is being updated with new content. This doesn’t mean to change the text of your existing pages (this is a whole different topic). Here, I refer to publishing new pages, new blog posts, new videos and images, etc. How much is enough new content? It really depends on several factors including time and money. Start with what you can do. Perhaps, publishing one article per month is all you can do for now. Well, that’s a good start. Then, try increasing it to once a week. It really depends on the goals you have set for yourself. - Track your Efforts
You should have Google Analytics (or similar visit tracking software) on your site. And you should spend a little time every week looking at where your visits are coming from. Once you know what is successful you can reenforce it, right? Looking at the analytics statistics you can see if people are just bouncing off your site (visiting one page and leaving) or actually navigating through several pages. And that is just one of the statistics you can analyze with that program. When you track you have a much better understanding of what is happening on your site. - Is Social Media part of my SEO Efforts?
It should! Social media has a panoply of functions and one of them is to help your SEO. Posting regularly on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc usually helps websites. Also, those accounts can position for different keywords than your website hence more chances to make yourself known. - Continue Learning
Search engines change the way they operate at a fast pace. How do I keep up? I suggest reading 1 article per week on the subject. After a few months you’ll have that much more knowledge. If you’re hiring a SEO company to do your work, you’ll have a better idea of what they do. You could even start suggesting cool things to do. As an executive, you may not have to know SEO but knowing some about it certainly opens a few doors.
There are many other things you can do to improve your rankings and get more free traffic through the search engines. The above is really just a very condensed list. Work minimally on those points and you should start seeing results providing that you are consistent.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Patrick Debel
