Posted: January 6, 2015
It’s been well over a decade that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been one of the key digital strategies and it continues to be one of the most important factors of a business’ online success. Keywords in content, page titles, meta descriptions, and headings are all a “given” these days as the competition has become wise to these basic techniques.
To keep a competitive advantage in 2015, focus on the following 5 SEO strategies:
If you don’t have a mobile accessible website, this is the first leap to make in 2015. Google has been pushing for all sites to get a mobile strategy and they use a different spider to index mobile-friendly content. Towards the end of 2014, search results with “mobile-friendly” text started appearing next to sites who were properly mobile accessible. This only suggests that more weight in the mobile search results is given to those who are mobile accessible.
The “Mobile-friendly” text started appearing in Google search results for mobile users.
Videos are an important selling tool and Google’s integration with Youtube makes having videos for your products and services even that much more important. Google has included Youtube videos in their search results for various products, recently displaying videos at the top of the search results. Of course, videos should be hosted on Youtube to gain maximum benefit from Google as Google will continue to put more weight on content hosted on their platform.
Example above: Searching Google for a specific product, the results show:
1. A Paid Ad
2. A Youtube video demonstrating the product
3. The official website of the product.
4. An online retailer selling the product.
One significant change that may be coming in 2015 is doing a web search with an iPhone will no longer default to Google. The contract between Apple and Google is set to expire in Q1 of 2015 and, with both companies having a long running dispute between mobile and market share, it’s highly likely Apple will change the default setting to another search engines, like Bing or Yahoo. Already, this has happened with one of the popular browsers, Firefox, who now defaults to Yahoo as its main web search. Users can always change their settings so that Google is the default search but how many will do this?
Review your rankings in Yahoo and Bing and optimize for both search engines.
Social Media is increasingly being used as an indicator for SEO and it’s more important than ever for your business to have a Social Media Strategy. Start by reviewing your social media accounts and making sure the profiles for those accounts are optimized. Have you posted something recently? Make sure your posts are reasonably up-to-date as nobody, including the search engines, likes to see that a post hasn’t been made for 3-years or longer. Also, Google+ is something that cannot be ignored if you want to have an advantage in your search rankings.
Incoming links to your website has always been one of the most important factors of SEO and it continues to be today. The difference from a decade ago is the algorithm of search engines has improved greatly to avoid giving benefits to those abusing the system. This has made it more challenging to gain incoming links, so you will have to earn those links by producing really, really good content. If your content is interesting, correct, and thorough, bloggers and other websites will link to it. Built your audience through trust and focus on becoming “the” key player for your industry as this will really help to build links from other websites.
Leave a Reply