Looking to get more aggressive with your digital marketing and improve your SEO ranking in 2021? Every year ranking organically becomes more competitive, so there is no better time than the present to define your goals and create a tactical plan to make website improvements to strengthen your strategy. Need help getting started? Read through our 5 tips for a successful SEO strategy in 2021.
1. Run a Comprehensive Website Audit
In order to make sure your website and SEO strategy is current with Google’s latest algorithm updates, you need to first evaluate the health of your website and the SEO optimizations that are currently in place to determine if there are any underlying issues that should be immediately addressed before you look at new opportunities. There are plenty of free website audit tools that can provide you with a free website audit, responsivescore.com is a great tool that can provide you with a score and comprehensive report in minutes.
Once you’ve generated a website audit, you should break down individual action items prioritizing anything that is broken, followed by enhancements to improve user experience and adjustments to improve page speed.
As part of this website audit, you should generate a list of keywords you’re currently ranking for organically, and those that you’d like to rank for, this keyword analysis will be important when we look at SEO-Friendly Content.
2. SEO-Friendly Content
Custom, high authority content is still one of the biggest SEO ranking factors. Creating intriguing, educational, and engaging content contributes to your Click Through Rate, Page Speed, Page Views, Average Time On-Site, and Bounce Rate, all of which can weigh into your keyword ranking. Before you start writing content, you should reference the keyword analysis from your website audit to identify the competitive and long-tailed keywords to target in your new content pages. It is important to post new or improved content regularly on your website, so you should plan to continue to evolve your content plan.
3. Onsite Optimizations
Having excellent, SEO-Friendly Content on your website is important, but that alone is not enough for SEO ranking. You also need to ensure you’re following best practices for onsite optimizations including a schema mark-up, H-Tag content hierarchy, title tags, meta tags, image alt tags, and links to content in an XML and HTML sitemap. These tags and maps may not be important to your users, but they sure are important to Google, which is the user you’re trying to impress the most.
4. Google AMP - Your Competitive Edge
You should also leverage new technology like Google AMP, which offers benefits to users that could give you the competitive edge over the business down the street. AMP pages load nearly instantly, allowing you to offer a consistently fast experience across all devices and platforms. With user experience and page speed becoming increasingly important ranking factors, if this is a tool in your website’s toolbox, it can certainly benefit your SEO strategy and is worth exploring.
5. Analytics
If you are investing any time or money in digital marketing and SEO, you should utilize at the minimum basic analytics to monitor website activity. Google Analytics is both free and generally the universal standard for Google Analytics so there should be no reason not to have this tracking setup on your website. Once set up, you should have a pulse on the Organic Traffic Channel, and monitor the most visited pages, user engagement for those pages, and conversely, the pages that are not seeing clicks and engagement so those can be revisited as part of your ongoing content strategy.
Implementing any of these SEO tips will be beneficial. In 2020, there were over 2 trillion Google Searches per day, and with that number continuing to rise, an SEO strategy should not be overlooked. Generally, users trust websites that rank organically at top of Google Search results with less than 10% of users clicking to results on page 2. If you’re not on page 1, you should be looking for opportunities to increase ranking and visibility. Still have questions? Contact us for a free website audit today!
