SEO Guide 2018

Web page visibility makes all the difference in the online world. It could save you a lot of money that you would have to spend on expensive campaigns in order to gather as many visitors as possible. However, due to constantly changing search algorithms it is almost too difficult to keep a website optimized down to the beat. This leads us to a conclusion that SEO is not a task that we could perform once and get it over with, rather it’s a never-ending process that requires constant attention.

So let’s say that you’ve noticed a slight drop in your website’s visibility and overall SEO performance. What do you do? Here are some actions you can take in order to boost your SEO.

Website audit

There are numerous things that could be the reason behind poor SEO performance of your website. We could never know what’s going on without a detailed analysis of each aspect of the site. This is especially important for those websites that are active for a while and have a lot of new content coming in regularly.

Performing a full-scale website audit is not a simple process, it can take hours, sometimes even days if the website is really massive and complex. It’s not a coincidence that there are so many SEO services that offer help with keeping your website SEO friendly. There are several stages of SEO audit process that each site should go through. With each stage completed, you will have a clearer picture of what you should improve and boost your SEO performance.

• Step 1 – Check for big issues (Google Index, brand ranking, website crawl, etc.)
• Step 2 – Find on-site problems that are easy to fix (loading time, data errors, duplicate content, etc.)
• Step 3 – Analyze organic search traffic (Use Google Analytics for this task)
• Step 4 – Backlink analysis (check backlink issues both from and to your website)
• Step 5 – Content audit and content gap analysis (remove underperforming posts and find out which keywords your competitors are using and you don’t)

After a full-scale audit process, you will be able to see everything that’s holding you back and fix it. For some of these steps you could use some audit tools (some of them are free, some you need to buy and we’re not advertising anyone here so just Google it)

Recheck keywords

This is one of the most daunting tasks for a lot of website owners and SEO specialists who deal with optimization issues, at least that’s what a recent survey says.

Nevertheless, the importance of keyword research and optimization cannot be disputed. Let’s say that you run a shipping company. Up to a certain point, the most relevant keyword for your website could be “shipping” and you could create your content using this keyword as a guideline. However, a few months later, a few of the competitors could start utilizing “transportation” in their campaigns and make that term the most relevant. What happens then is that a whole lot of people are going to look for the word transportation and, since you are using a different keyword in your content, there will be none of your pages in the search results. Simply put, if you’re not in the search results then you won’t get any new visitors. It doesn’t matter if you monetize through sales or PPC, both options will suffer from the lack of people browsing through your site.

So what can we do in order to optimize keywords to boost our SEO?

Evaluate keyword popularity

The popularity of a keyword is the reflection of the number of people that are looking for that particular keyword. However, the more popular the keyword is, it is more difficult to rank high enough on the search results page. The reason for this lies in the vast number of mature sites that already have a high reputation and thus have no problem with attracting people. It makes life difficult for less popular pages but there is a catch!

If you run or work on optimizing a more recent website, it could prove useful to search for less competitive keywords. Surely, this might sound like something you want to avoid doing, but there is a logic to this advice. While highly competitive keywords tend to attract more people they also bring strong competition. Terms that are not so attractive and yet show up as something that people are searching for allow you to rank high in the SERPs on account of fewer websites competing with you.

Optimize keyword relevance

This is a simple enough task and could prove to be of immense use. Make sure that the keywords in your content are relevant to what your website is about. In other words, if your website is about FIFA World Cup, then you most certainly don’t want to use keywords such as “wedding decorations”. Make sure that your keywords are always relevant to your content and the target audience.

Create long-form content that is rich with keywords

Research shows that average first page search results include content that counts around 1890 words. This means that when Google is searching for the most relevant page, those websites that include long-form content have an advantage. The reason behind this probably sits in the fact that larger content offers more information regarding the search terms.

Simply put, if you want Google to pay attention to your website, make sure your content carries some value for the visitors and gives an abundance of information relevant to the keywords that you use.

Conclusion

As we already said, search engines are frequently changing their algorithms to bring better and more relevant search results to their users. This is the reason behind the fact that there is no magic formula for SEO and there is no finite solution. In order to keep our website competitive and attract new visitors, we need to constantly work on improving our content and creating new, valuable content that Google and other search engines would notice. These were the three activities that we think should help you boost your SEO performance, what’s your favorite method?