Five quick tips to boost your SEO in 2017

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It’s the right time of the year to evaluate your SEO strategy and examine the best ways to improve it during 2017. This doesn’t have to be a complicated process, though.

 

New year’s resolutions are not just about our personal goals, so it may be the ideal moment to focus on your business goals and seek for the best ways to boost your SEO presence to improve authority, value and ranking.

 

If you’re wondering how to start fixing your SEO for 2017, here are a few suggestions you might find useful.

 

Add value

As simple as it sounds, it’s important to create content that adds value, while it maintains its relevance for the target audience.

 

It’s not just about creating quality content, but also about knowing your audience, to the extent that the content is useful and has more chances to be ranked higher in the search results for the relevant queries.

 

Quick tips to add more value with your content:

 

• Examine your existing content and find the most popular topics
  
• Learn more about your audience and find the questions that you’re going to answer
  
• Find the best way to use combine timing and context, in a way that you’ll be able to beat your competitors
  
• Do not hesitate to expand your niche area, provided that you’re still useful for your target audience
  

Facilitate the browsing experience

User experience is critical to SEO, so it may be a good idea to test how it affects the traffic to your site.

 

In fact, user experience starts even before the user visits your site and according to Forrester, 93% of online experiences start with a search.

 

Thus, it’s important to proceed to the necessary tweaks that ensure a smooth visit:

 

• Test your site’s link and fix the broken links to minimise the error pages or the duplicate content
  
• Your content should be appealing both for users and search engines and thus, both readability and crawlability should be taken into consideration
  
• The navigation should help the user browse the pages without problems. From the menu structure to the link structure and the page’s design, even a slight detail may impact the user experience
  
• A page’s speed is crucial, so don’t forget testing it from time to time. From heavy images to unnecessary scripts, there is always a reason that your site gets slow.
  
• AMP may also be relevant to your site and Google seems to prefer the pages that start using it. Is it time to experiment with it?
  

Invest more time in your content

It was already clear from 2016 that search engines focus on the actual content rather than its optimisation.

 

There’s no need to spend more time on the optimisation if your content is not appealing enough for your audience.

 

Monitor the keywords, the site’s stats, the levels of engagement on each topic and find what users really expect from your page.

 

Think of new ideas to expand your content, or even to invest in evergreen content, and make sure you think like a reader, rather than a search engine.

 

Are the topics and the structure appealing to your target audience?

 

Remember, the combination of seamless user experience with quality content can have a very positive impact on your SEO rankings.

 

Optimise visual content

Visual content is more important than ever. It manages to supplement text in the best possible way (or even to replace it) and it certainly can affect SEO.

 

We tend to forget how visual content should still be optimised for search engines, but luckily it only takes a few minutes to boost its SEO performance.

 

• Think carefully of the titles
  
• Don’t forget to add alt text, metadata and keywords
  
• Pay attention to the file’s size
  
• Create a video transcript to facilitate your content’s discovery from search engines
  
• Consider the idea of hosting the video to your own site, not just Youtube
  
• Be unique, add personality and make your visual content shareable
  

Keep your online footprint up-to-date

Your online presence goes way beyond your site. The problem is that we tend to forget how our online footprint may extend to all the different platforms we may try out at some point and then abandon.

 

It’s certainly a great idea to experiment with new platforms to promote your presence, but make sure you keep them up-to-date even if you stop using them.

 

Let’s say you have a Google+ page, but you’re not using it anymore (or you tend to forget to share your content there). Are the details accurate to help users find more about your business?

 

Here’s a new task for your calendar in 2017, create a spreadsheet that monitors your online presence and check once a month that the information is up-to-date.

 

You never know how useful this may turn out to be!

 

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