SEO is always evolving and growing, to be ready for these developments you need to have your site in tip-top shape.
SEO is always evolving and growing, to be ready for these developments you need to have your site in tip-top shape. 2014 saw many changes to the dynamics of SEO including the phenomenal increase in mobile phone web browsing and the launch of Google Panda 4.1- amongst the Google crackdown on poor quality sites.
There are some important strategies that will help you be ready for the changes 2015 holds including optimizing and developing your mobile site, implementing conversational keywords in SEO, tracking and earning quality links and developing good content for your website.
Optimize for mobile
2014 saw the highest rate of mobile web browsing and it doesn’t look like that’s going to slow down. What does this mean for your company? It means one of your major strategies for 2015 should be getting your mobile site or mobile-responsive site optimized. Failing to have a mobile-friendly website can have a negative impact on your website’s click-through rate.
Use Hummingbird-friendly keywords
Your next strategy should focus on tactically creating Hummingbird-friendly keywords. With the introduction of Hummingbird came the new strategic way to optimise keywords based on niche-specific word combinations. These days people aren’t just searching basic keywords instead they’re entering in questions and phrases. So it would be valuable for your SEO to shift to a conversational style that resembles what your targeted audience are searching.
To capture specific audience intent, your approach to keywords could be informational, navigational, and/or transactional. Informational searches would involve creating educational content that links to your product or sales pages. Navigational queries would include searches that are looking for your brand name, product name, or website. And lastly, transactional queries would be commercially intended searches looking to buy or review products.
Create good links
As Google’s algorithms become more stringent in 2015, it’s best you clean up all of your links before the next update hits you and your rankings suffer. From your end you should make sure you’re not participating in any black hat links. Go through your website links and double check if there is any poor links still existing, then focus on gaining relevant high quality links such as editorial and co-citation links. Editorial links are those coming from media sites or original content-filled articles that you have written and published on social media.
Co-Citation is when another site mentions your company with a similar company. By grouping your companies together it suggests to Google that there is a similarity between your businesses and this information is then used as a significant search engine factor. If the company you’re grouped with is authoritative and dominant in your business niche then Google will look favourably on your website, determine it as reputable and rank it accordingly. In order to strategically achieve co-citation you’ll need to create quality content; write about trending and original topics, and maintain a good online presence on social networking sites.
Develop quality content
So far all of the strategies discussed involve the key element of quality content. It’s simple, the more user and topic-focused content the stronger the SEO results. In 2015, the only way to benefit from links is to obtain them organically. In order to do this you need to write engaging, high-quality content that is shared with people who are interested, and who’ll want to link to your site.
Good content also includes appealing aesthetics and tasteful formatting that isn’t visually straining however guiding and captivating. Your goal is to keep visitors on your pages by making your site easy to navigate, relevant to the search query and valuably unique.
If you apply all of these strategies to your business websites your SEO will succeed in 2015 and you’ll be ready for the next thing Google rolls out.