The search engines change their algorithms many times a year. That means you can be flying high in the search engines today, but tomorrow you may not be anywhere to be found. So if you want to remain relevant for 2015, follow these five steps…
1. Develop a Mobile Friendly Site
Mobile Internet use is eclipsing fixed Internet use, which means there’s a good chance that your prospects and customers are already visiting your site on a smart phone. For that reason alone you should have a responsive, mobile-friendly website in place to provide a good experience for your visitors.
Now here’s another reason: Google is now using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. If your site doesn’t pass their mobile test, then your pages may relegated to no-man’s-land in the search engines.
Wondering if your site is ready to go? You can check it here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
2. Integrate Social Media
Social media is more than a platform to share information. Today you can build your brand, develop relationships with prospects, generate leads, and even offer customer service across social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others.
For these reasons alone it’s important that you have a solid social media strategy in place. Now here’s another reason: the search engines include social media factors when they’re ranking your web pages. That’s why you’ll want to have a strong social media presence, which includes other people sharing your links and content.
3. Focus on ROI
A lot of SEO “experts” focus on keyword rankings. When they get #1 rankings for your business, they pat themselves on the back and call it a day.
Problem is, #1 rankings means absolutely nothing if those top keyword rankings aren’t translating into money in the bank. For example, I could put your site at the top of the search engines for something like “lime green hats for llamas,” but if it doesn’t generate revenue then the traffic is worthless. That’s why you need to make sure you or your SEO team doesn’t just focus on rankings – you need to focus on high-value keywords that produce leads that turn into customers.
4. Optimize for Other Search Engines
Remember when giants like Yahoo ruled the Internet? Then Google came along and toppled them. Here’s the thing: that could happen again as a new competitor hits the market or as existing search engines begin to claim more market share. That’s why you’ll want to optimize your site beyond just Google. It’s a good idea to learn about Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo so that your pages rank well in these search engines too.
5. Focus on Quality Links
It wasn’t all that long ago when business owners focused on building links like crazy, where quantity trumped quality. All that changed when Google brought the hammer down on websites who were trying to game the search engines with mass quantities of links.
Today you need to focus on two things:
Expressed links.
These are actual links, but they need to come from high-quality sites. One really good link from an authority site is worth more than dozens or hundreds of links from smaller sites.
Implied links.
This is what you get when someone mentions your website or brand without actually linking to it. Google is looking at these sorts of branding signals, so it’s important to get others talking about your business online in a positive way.
Conclusion
Search engines like Google use over 200 factors to determine how to rank your web pages, and these factors – as well as the weight given to these factors – are constantly in flux.
Chances are, you don’t have time to keep abreast of the latest changes in SEO strategies. Worse yet, if you know just enough about SEO to be dangerous, you may be inadvertently doing something that could get your site penalized and or even banned from the search engines.
The good news is you can find out right now, for free, how you’re doing with regards to dozens of the most important SEO factors. Is your website optimized for the search engines? Is there anything on your site that could get you penalized?
Find out the answers to these questions and more by requesting your free website and SEO audit; you might be surprised at the results!