Making On-Page SEO Work for You This 2018
December 8, 2017
The New Year is just around the corner, and the anticipation is growing. After all, the New Year means fresh opportunities for some—especially for brands and digital marketers.
Once 2018 settles in, there are bound to be changes in the field of search engine optimization (SEO). 2017 already had its share of "all things new": the growing relevance of voice search, optimization of mobile browsing, shorter URLs, and emphasis on local optimization.
This year saw experts and marketers scrambling to keep up with the trends and building bigger and better strategies to ensure more leads and user engagement. These current techniques may still work for now, but 2018 is just a few months away.
Strategies that worked this year may not in the next. Ensure your brand’s on-site SEO game stays on the right track next year following these steps:
- Mobile First Always
Mobile search has become more integral to people’s lives, and Google remains firm with meeting its users’ needs. After the controversial Mobilegeddon mayhem of 2016, the search engine giant followed up with the announcement of mobile-first indexing—its response to new search norms, in which more users choose to search on their phones instead of on desktop devices. This form of indexing will rank sites according to their mobile versions.
2018 seems to be the year of indexing. Brands unprepared for the change might find themselves lagging behind the competition.
Here’s how to do it:
How can you take advantage of this? First, Google reminds everyone not to panic.
If your website is not fully responsive and the content varies across mobile and desktop platforms, make the changes now. Remember: mobile pages should not be void, clumsy, or less informative in comparison to their desktop counterparts.
Focus on load time, too.
Loading speeds can drastically affect user experience and impact your webpage’s performance on the SERPs, which dictates the performance of interactions and likelihood of conversions. Speed up pages by:
- Minimizing redirects
- Optimizing images, keep the sizes to a minimum and save in JPEG format
- Checking your website’s speed using Google’s recommendations
If you haven’t considered implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), now is the best time to jump on the bandwagon. AMP improves user experience by loading 4x faster than regular pages, which explains why more than 900,000 domains rely on its speedy framework.
Nine hundred thousand might seem like a large number, but that’s not even half of the 1.2 billion websites on the Internet. Implementing AMP now offers no-risk benefits that your competition may regret missing out on a year from now.
- Improve on Link Building
The claim LINK BUILDING IS DEAD is a repetitive tale that haunts the SEO industry. As a result, brands and marketers continually brainstorm on new ways to gain links and transform their building strategies into earning ones. Anti-fans of link building are also wary of the practice due to fear of penalties. Hearing news about big brands getting on Google’s bad side is enough to dissuade them from implementing this practice.
On the contrary, link building remains an ingredient to SEO success.
Countless surveys and studies prove that backlinks still make a difference in boosting your site’s ranking. As for penalties, you need not be one of the unlucky names if you do linking right.
Here’s how to do it:
To stay on the safe side with Penguin, incorporate regular backlink profile cleanup in your routine. It might seem like a burdensome task, but doing so keeps you one step ahead of the competition.
Do not waste your time with spammy and black-hat tactics; instead, grow your profile naturally by creating link-worthy, unique, and useful content.
- Pay Attention to Structured Data
For some SEO experts, Structured Data Markup is underrated and that shouldn’t be the case.
Structured data—also known as the additional information that sits next to websites and meta-descriptions—is an on-page markup that allows search engines to gain a better understanding of the business’s web page, which is also helpful in improving your brand’s search results listings.
If your website does not use structured data as part of the strategy, your business is missing out on a valuable opportunity in gaining higher SERP rankings.
Here’s how to do it:
Google’s new search experiences like SERP features use structured data as the foundation. This means proper markup is necessary for helping you rank, as well as getting featured on top of the listings, which offers better visibility and traffic.
Start your strategy by studying available schemas at Schema.org and make your own “map”: list your website’s pages and browse through the relevant schemas.
Guides are also available online, which provides an easier understanding of the process of creating and implementing Structured Data Markup.
Also, don’t take markers (e.g. contact details, operating hours, and ratings) for granted. These may have a significant impact on your success with voice and local searches, so be sure to implement these and regularly update them.
- Old Content, New Approach
Content is KING—forever. It is here to stay and remain a crucial factor in your SEO success.
Google, however, is constantly learning to improve its understanding of search intent. Currently, it relies on context, topical relevance, and other factors to meet user expectations.
It’s not just about keywords anymore; content optimization requires a more complex approach that focuses on quality, not quantity.
Here’s how to do it:
Keywords still matter, but stuffing content unnaturally will earn you a thumbs-down from Google. Instead, use keywords in a natural manner.
Use keywords in the first 100 words while making it appear natural. Apart from the first keyword, sprinkle LSI, or latent semantic indexing, which are keywords semantically related to the primary keywords, and target keywords in a natural manner.
And place them in such a way that the flow of your content remains undisturbed. Also, keyword density should be less than or equal to 1.5% for better optimization.
Then produce relevant content. Unique and helpful content that answers the user’s queries will remain relevant in the long run.
2018 is just months away, which means potential changes are, too. It’s only natural to worry about the future, but as long you stay in the loop with new SEO techniques, your website’s chances of ranking might still be in your favor. All you have to do is stay knowledgeable about the coming trends, and partner with a trusted SEO company.
Aspire Digital Marketing, led by Meyer Laniado, is a digital marketing agency that keeps you in the know. As your partners in business, we focus on enhancing your growth with advanced on-page SEO techniques and ironed-out business strategies.
Live up to your business potential. Get in touch with us today and get an obligation-free consultation from us.