If you are here looking for the SEO checklist, chances are your business’s generates traffic online via the Google search, right?
With nearly 40,000 search queries typed into Google every second, and making up to 3.5 billion searches in a day, one thing is sure- you have some fierce competition to deal with. And thus you need to make sure ensure that your search engine optimization game is really strong.
A good SEO plan serves to be a bridge between the customers and business.
Do you know 93% of online experiences are born with internet search?
So you need to understand that your aim to reach the first page of Google is challenging as it gets 95% of the web traffic.
Meanwhile, the subsequent pages are left with 5% or even less of it. Hence, missing on the opportunity to come on the first page or getting ranked on the second page will not yield much.
Simply putting, your chances of success depend on your SEO plan. Not only it opens the door for Google’s traffic but also generate leads for your business.
For the coming year 2019, here are ways to boost your rankings. Explore:
Content With Great Quality
First thing comes first; your content must provide valuable information. This means creating pages with no real value will haunt back. All thanks to Google’s Panda and Fred algorithm updates. With search engines turning darn smart, it is time to pay attention to what you are offering.
Gone are the days when you had to force feed keywords. Today ‘machines’ have a pretty good understanding of the natural language, and the results are like never before. And this has certainly made ranking on Google quite complex. Here is a simple approach you can give a try to write a great content:
- Choose a topic for the piece of content to be written
- Step ahead with writing the best and most useful content
- Focus on the reader’s need and problems.
- When you are done, go back and try to incorporate the keywords in the right places.
- Lastly, create an enticing headline to get more eyeballs.
To conclude, the reader has to be your preference.
Voice Search is Going to Stay for Long
With the growth of AI assistants like Siri, Cortona, and Alexa, has emerged out a new way of searching. More than 72 percent of people who own a voice-activated speaker are found to be using it as part of their daily routine, states Google. You might be surprised to know that more than half of inquiry will be done by voice search around 2020. So now you need to optimize for the way people ‘speak’. Need to know how? you can proceed read here.
Boost the Page Load Time
Do you know slow page load time costs a business $1.6 billion in lost sales yearly? In fact, there are studies stating that 40% of the visitors leave a site if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Plus, 80% of the visitors will not return a slow loading website.
You need to understand that a website with slow loading speed will do a two-way damage. While Google detects the crawling pace and damages your site’s organic ranking and then slow speed will reduce the customer conversion rate. Both factors are linked with each other. Reason being when visitors aren’t able to engage with your website, it causes a loss to search engine ranking. On the contrary, visitors keep returning if the page loads fast. So it is highly required to find out the ways to optimize the page load time of your website. Check your website’s load time and upgrade the same if required.
Pro tip: You can optimize images to accelerate load time.
Mobile Remains First
Have you checked for much of your traffic comes from mobile devices? Though the stats can vary as per your business and industry, yet you cannot treat mobile as an afterthought. It is high time to put mobile first. As Google has rolled out several updates in the last year which might penalize your website in mobile search result, chances are you can lose some significant mobile traffic.
For this, first understand where your website traffic is coming from. Next you must test your website to see if it works well on mobile. You can start it at Google’s Mobile-ready test. Make your business and website ‘mobile ready’.
Explore More Video Content
With videos predicted to bring forth 80% of internet traffic by 2021, these are going to be inevitable part of your SEO campaign. Being highly shareable these tend to offer content in a more interactive manner. It provides an opportunity to consume information visually and keep users engaged for longer.
But not every video will work the same way. There are certain ways you can create a high-quality video which is not only entertaining and engaging but also deliver valuable information. And if you want to know what you can do to improve your SEO by using videos, check here.
Work for Featured Snippets
These are also referred to position #0 on Google. Basically, these have been designed to answer the searcher’s query in an immediate manner. As per HubSpot, “content that is selected to appear as a featured snippet can achieve double the click-through rates of organic search results.” So snippets are directly incurred from the article itself. These tend to answer the queries starting with why, how, what, does, should, which, and why. Moreover, Google also introduced the new rich result testing tool to provide an answer to why rich snippets are not appearing in SERP’s
Hence, the best way out is to try answering as many queries as possible when writing your content. Prepare a list of question are you trying to answer, and add in a summary of 2 to 3 sentences. It can be a concise bulleted list or in paragraphs. It is worth noticing that snippets are moving towards a more user-intent approach. Plus, it closely linked to voice search. For this, make use of conversational language and try to infuse potential questions.
Lastly, you have to win the race with the Google’s ultimate goal, i.e. is to provide its users with the most informative, highest quality, and relevant content. Whatever you share needs to satisfy user’s intent. Meanwhile, you must keep a check on algorithm updates, trends, and changes in your prospects’ behavior. 2019 appears to be another year of big change in the world of SEO.
The key to success is in updating, learning, and reviewing!