As we’ve just passed a third of the way through the year, it seems like everything and nothing continues to change in the world of SEO and search engine marketing. Here are a collection of important SEO (search engine optimization) methods that are essential for your business to be implementing for your website this year.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll refer to Google when discussing SEO. There are definitely nuances to marketing on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, etc, but these tactics should ultimately apply to all of them across the board.
Essential SEO Methods
1. Content Is Still King When It Comes To SEO
With Google’s continual changes in their algorithms, particularly starting way back with one they affectionately called “Penguin“, this is more important than ever. Penguin was being used to fight spam, poor quality links, and irrelevant websites from dominating search results. This is something SEO nerds like us got excited about, as it helped level the playing field for those who were trying to game the system and those who want to build traffic the right way.
While it’s always constantly evolving, these kinds of updates put more emphasis on relevant, engaging, and well-written content that is important to your industry. You’ve probably already heard the term “thought leader“, at least if you’ve been hanging around LinkedIn.
2. Social Signals Matter
Changes to search algorithms not only continue to put the emphasis on good content, but they also place a priority on “social signals”, which are likes, shares, votes, pins, or views people place on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit or other social media sites that filter out to the various search engines. This is why it’s so important to distribute that content once it’s been posted on your site.
The more your content is out there and the more people are engaging with it, and ultimately, visiting your site from these links, the more search engines will recognize that your website is what people are looking for and will push it higher in the rankings.
3. Security – Lock It Down
While we’ve emphasized the importance of security before, Google is now recognizing security-friendly websites as well, especially if your site is taking online payments or collecting personal information. If you’re processing anything more than a name and email address from users on your site, it would be worth it to add an SSL certificate to your site to protect them and yourself.
4. Mobile First!
It’s 2022 and we still come across websites all the time that still are not completely mobile responsive, even though we surpassed mobile being the preferred way that the majority of people browse the internet years ago. Beyond that, mobile user experience has been a requirement for SEO ranking for years, so like we’ve said in this space multiple times – if your site is not built for a mobile experience, then you are driving customers away.
Next week we’ll get into part 2, which will cover keyword phrases, link building, visuals, accessibility, and ROI. In the meantime, if you’re looking for an SEO solution for your small business, reach out to us! We would love to talk to you about increasing your website’s search engine presence.
