With 2020 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to examine and implement a new set of SEO strategies to bolster your online presence. Now more than ever, digital marketing is key to the successful positioning of any business. The pandemic will come and go, but behavior has shifted in a more permanent way – and people will continue to work and shop from the comfort of their homes.
Investing in SEO and other forms of digital marketing has never been more important. The landscape does change quickly, so it’s important to keep informed of new trends and strategies that can attract visitors to your site. While some digital marketing strategies fade away over time, we believe that these trends will be here to stay.
1. Optimizing for voice search will be critical in the coming years. According to com, nearly 60% of searches on mobile devices in 2019 used voice. Projections for voice search continue to soar as consumers find it more and more relevant in their daily lives. Imagine how many people use Siri or Alexa on a daily basis – that’s how much opportunity there is to capitalize on this relatively new but exciting technology. There are a few ways you can optimize for voice search:
- Use conversational language in your content
- Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing
- Consider questions in your keyword research
- Include FAQ’s in product descriptions and blogs
2. Invest in Local SEO. Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store or not, people have begun to prefer purchasing and supporting local. Local SEO, like voice search, is vital to attracting the right traffic to your website. You want qualified leads engaging with content and filling out your forms, so targeting keywords for local audiences points people in your business’s immediate area to your website. According to Chatmeter, the search for keywords “near me” and “tonight/today” increased by 900% in the past two years. Mobile searches for “open now” grew 200%. Here are a few strategies to bolster your local SEO efforts:
- Find and capitalize local keywords
- Use online business directories
- Develop content around local events
- Create and claim your Google My Business
- Optimize your website for mobile and voice search
3. Remember that all SEO is mobile SEO. Mobile phones account for nearly half of all internet traffic and that number continues to grow with 3.5 billion smartphone users on the planet. If there is one SEO trend that’s going to stick, it will be mobile optimization. Making your website mobile friendly will be critical to your overall SEO strategy. Google has begun to all but ignore desktop websites and rank solely based on mobile pages. Google switched to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020. When Google switches a domain to mobile-first indexing, it will see an increase in Googlebot’s crawling, Google’s crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebo Don’t fret though, here are a few steps you can take right now:
Stick with a simple design
- Review your pages to ensure that they are easy to navigate and that you’re not hiding useful images and content on mobile devices
- Instead of creating a separate mobile site, invest in a mobile responsive site
- Improve your site speed and make it more responsive
4. Focus on user experience (UX). Sometimes it’s too easy to optimize for SEO – but then we forget how a web page might make a human feel. Web pages must be accessible to web crawlers and real people to be truly successful, but this is entirely possible without sacrificing too much on one end or the other. Google has also begun to rank sites for UX, so UX impacts traffic even before prospects arrive to your site. Consider the following to improve your user interface and your UX:
- Use high quality images and fonts in a simple layout
- Ensure faster loading times
- Make dashboards easy to navigate
- Persuade visitors to explore your site
- Ensure that site navigation is intuitive
- Make it easy for users to find the info they are looking for on your site
5. Practice the EAT concept. According to Google – experience, authority and trustworthiness are important factors in their search quality evaluator guidelines. Using high quality content is a good place to start. It’s even better to have a running blog with accurate facts, as that displays authority and experience in a given subject. However, maintaining a blog can be time consuming, so there are other strategies you can employ to improve your EAT factor:
- When possible, link to domains with high authority
- Fact check your content and keep it up to date
- Get more user reviews – this provides trustworthiness
- Create a portfolio page or a place to showcase work that demonstrates skills and experience
- Create a Wikipedia page
6. Invest in long-form content. Longer-form content not only helps to boost your aforementioned EAT score, it appeals to emotion as well. Blogs with 2,000 words or more often outperform blogs with 1,000 word or less, and this trend will likely continue moving forward. The internet is so rife with short and incomplete content that long-form content (white papers, E-books, brochures) has begun to command much more authority. Long-form content isn’t easy to create, it takes time and expertise, but its well worth an investment. Here are a few reasons why just one piece of long-form content can help you:
- It gives you something to promote on social media or other channels
- It creates an excuse to get in touch with prospects or partners and solicit their feedback
- Longer-form content leads to increased time on site
- Long form content performs well on social media and it displays authority
As we head into the new year, it’s important to remember how much opportunity exists to expand online presence in 2021. People are now more inclined than ever to conduct business online, providing plenty of room for your business to grow whether it is B2C or B2B.
While the six strategies listed above are what we believe to be the most important, this is not a one-size-fits-all. Each business demands its own special approach, and we’re happy to speak with you about the most effective SEO strategies for your business.
If you’re struggling to get traffic to your website, schedule a time to analyze your site and digital marketing processes. We provide digital marketing services, as well as Lead Capture tools. We’re always happy to answer questions. Contact us today to put your best foot forward in 2021!