One aspect of your business that you really cannot afford to slack on is your SEO. However, ensuring that your content ranks well on Google does not have to be a daunting, tedious task. SEO for beginners, or even those that want to brush up on it, can be easy and engaging.
Keeping up to date on the SEO best practices year after year is a fantastic way to ensure that potential customers see your content. Here are our 25 top SEO tips for 2019.
1. Use a CDN
Believe it or not, the speed at which an image loads is very important for building authority with search engines and user satisfaction.
One method that’s available for you to increase that speed is a content delivery network (CDN).
A CDN is an entire network of servers that are located around the world. They are designed for delivering multimedia like video and images.
How does it different from a web hosting company? Essentially the design that minimizes the distance between a user and the server providing them with content. When you reduce the number of network points between the server and the user, the content is able to be delivered quickly.
When it comes to text, A CDN isn’t really necessary, but it’s huge for images, videos, and other multimedia.
2. Create a Fast, Mobile-Friendly Website
Another great SEO tip is to create a user-friendly, fast mobile-friendly website.
This can be easily done with simple, well-known plugins for your CMS, like WordPress. Making your content mobile-friendly is extremely affordable and can be done very quickly.
Having a high quality mobile site that is optimized for fast load-speed will make a huge difference with your competition.
3. Use Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool that offers tons of information about how your website is doing in Google search. On top of that, it will point out any errors and issues on your site that you should address.
This tool is one of the best ways to improve your SEO and your website without spending any money.
Google Search Console will provide you with keywords that Google thinks are relevant for your website, let you know if your site is mobile friendly, and whether the site has any problems. It’s a great place to start on your search engine optimization tips.
4. Fully Understand Your Online Audience
Once you completely know and understand your online audience, you will be able to see what is needed to engage them further.
Ask yourself what kind of content they like to engage with, how they spend their time online, and what they are looking for. Which websites and social media networks do they spend the most time on?
When you know where they’re spending their time, you can focus more of your efforts in those locations.
5. Focus on Keyword Research
If you only focus on targeting the same keywords as big competitors, you won’t be able to cover as much ground as they have more of a presence online.
Instead, use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to spot gaps that aren’t being filled. These will be easier to capitalise on.
6. Always Be Genuine
One of the best SEO tips for small businesses that we can offer is to always be genuine. This is especially important for small business owners. While it might be tempting to hire someone to handle your marketing for you, it needs to be genuine and have a personal touch.
No one is going to know your customer base and business better than you do, so connecting with those people personally is the way to go about it.
7. Be Careful About Agencies
If you decide to hire an agency, you need to keep a close eye on them and ensure that they are doing their job correctly.
There are many agencies that will use subpar link-building to get results fast. While you will see them quickly, they are only short-term and could expose your website to possible long-term penalties.
For those of you just getting started, you don’t necessarily need to hire an agency to improve your SEO right away. Go out on your own first, and see what you can accomplish.
8. Don’t Rely Too Much on Google
While, yes, you should be working hard to improve your keyword rankings and SEO, try not to put all of your eggs in one basket.
Make sure you are also using social media, email, and other sources to attract customers as well. Google is constantly changing and evolving, and they can alter the way they rank sites and display their results at any point in time – they could change in ways that could seriously affect your search traffic.
9. Stay up to Date on Industry News
Ensuring that you stay up to date on your particular industry will help you search for the best keywords and keyword rankings, and it will allow you to create content that consumers want to engage with.
10. Go for the Evergreen Content
While it might be incredibly tempting to simply hop on the latest trends in your industry when it comes to the content you create, that content will be short-lived.
If instead you decide to go with “evergreen content,” which is quality material that directly addresses customer issues, it will have a longer shelf-life. This content will also achieve search rankings for a much longer time period.
11. Use a Blog to Create Content
Content is really the key to help you rank for target terms. Whether it’s your homepage, product pages, or a blog, it’s vitally important to have.
However, you shouldn’t just create a blog for the SEO aspect of it. Having a blog will allow you to discuss your products and services freely with your audience.
If you are still working to build an initial audience, creating a blog full of high-quality content can be a great way to get started.
12. Don’t Focus Too Much on Keyword Rankings
While yes, you want to make sure you are targeting terms that your customers are probably going to search for, you don’t want to overdo it.
You still have to create high-quality content that makes sense. Too many keywords can make it confusing and difficult to read.
13. Use Effective Internal Linking
When you use internal linking effectively, you are linking themes and topics together in a more practical way for search engines and readers.
A good example of this would be if you are providing party planning services, you will see lots of articles using that same phrase. Since they are not all going to rank for that, choose the page you would most like to rank for that term and have the links pointed toward that.
14. Set Up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free and it’s a great tool for you to use to understand your traffic sources, customer behavior, and more.
15. Optimize Your Images
Using lots of attractive, clear images is a great way to make your content more engaging for your readers.
Here’s a fantastic, simple guide to optimizing your images.
16. Find Out Who Is Linking to You
You can actually view the links you are receiving with tools like Majestic.
Question who you are attracting links from. Are they from relevant sites? What kind of content is attracting those links?
17. Always Use a Unique Title
Google will give you about 55 characters to make the topic of your blog post or web clear to search engines and potential customers. Make the most of those characters, and create engaging titles.
18. Write Your Product Page Copy
If you are selling items that other websites will also provide, you are going to want to make sure you have unique product descriptions.
Writing them yourself makes them better for conversions, because the manufacturer descriptions aren’t tested for effectiveness, where as yours could be.
19. Consider PPC
If you have the money available, PPC can assist you with delivering traffic more quickly.
On top of that, it’s a great help with informing your SEO efforts. You are able to improve your landing pages as well as which keywords will work best for conversions
20. Utilize Google Ads
Utilizing Google Ads is a fantastic way to convert more potential customers on mobile devices. Creating “shop the look” ads is easy, and very effective.
21. Experiment With LinkedIn Ads
If you can, experiment and play around with LInkedIn ads. LinkedIn will allow you to track conversions for the number of users from your ads and sponsored content are converting.
22. Clean Up Your Duplicate Content
If you come across any, make sure to clean up duplicate content that’s hosted externally or internally. By doing this, you are also removing any duplicates or scraped content on your website.
For duplicates of content on any other sites, email the webmaster to have it taken down.
23. Recreate Popular Older Content
Sift through older content and find what was really popular. If the popular blog posts and other content you come across is outdated, try to recreate it to boost it for a new, current audience.
24. Consider Voice Search
Voice search will become more and more popular as time goes on. Make sure that your content is written in a more conversational tone in order to rank for those voice search queries.
A good idea for this is to incorporate words and phrases like “near me” into your ad strategy and content.
25. Be Patient
Last but not least, you need to try and be as patient as possible.
These SEO tips that we have provided for you will produce good results, but change is not going to happen overnight.
Great SEO takes time, so keep up with the trends and try not to worry too much about immediate results.
Our Final Thoughts on Search Engine Optimization Tips
We hope that you have found our information helpful in optimizing your own website and content. While it may seem daunting to improve your SEO, using these tips will make all the difference in the world.
Which search engine optimization tips are you the most excited to try out for yourself and your business?
Share with us in the comments below!
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