Jesse Quist is a digital marketing expert specializing in growing businesses online through advanced search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization. With search algorithms always evolving to keep one step ahead of spammers, his advice for small- and medium-sized companies is an easy-to-understand list of key factors for the new year.
It’s been a busier year than usual for search-engine optimization (SEO) pros. Updates to Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm, along with changes to the way the search engine processes search queries, have made it tough to ensure you’re setting your site up for maximum traffic. Google moved to encrypt all searches performed with its search engine, which means companies no longer have access to the keywords customers are using to find their websites. On top of all this, Google made the biggest change to its algorithm in a decade, codenamed Hummingbird. Most updates by Google affect an average of one to three percent of search queries. Hummingbird affected 90%.
Below is the fate suffered by a site that was ill prepared for the series of updates targeted at web spam (read: content and backlinks created to game Google rankings).
Yes, that is a drop from almost 2,000 visits a month to scraps. This is the traffic profile of one of the largest SEO companies in Canada. I would hate to see what happened to their clients’ traffic.
Here are some straightforward tips for strategies that you can implement today to keep your traffic steady through the coming years.
ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION: FULFILL YOUR PROMISE
The technical aspects of on-page optimization haven’t changed much. Title tags, meta descriptions and other backend SEO staples are all still relevant. What has changed significantly is the structure of the actual content on each page. As Google gets better at distinguishing between useful content and spam, it’s now crucial that you write your content in a natural voice. That means you no longer need to instruct your writers to cram your keywords onto every page at least five times.
Instead of focusing on keyword insertions, focus on user engagement. How long are your web visitors staying on your webpage? Are they clicking through to any other pages? Are they bouncing (immediately clicking the “back” button)?
User engagement will be even more significant ranking factor in 2014. Ask yourself this question before you publish content on your website: If a user found your page by Googling certain keywords, does the content have all the answers that user was looking for? Will he or she leave satisfied?
As content marketing takes the center stage, blogs are no longer just a place cool kids to voice their opinions. All companies should be using blogs to engage with their customers and provide them with useful information about their products or services.
Pay particular attention to how your website displays on mobile devices. If you don’t have a mobile website or a responsive design, it’s time to get one for 2014. Google will actually penalize sites that display poorly on mobile.
OFF-PAGE OPTIMIZATION: SPAMMERS BEWARE
If you’re not going to market your content online in 2014, don’t even bother creating it.
The best way to start is to build relationships with the influencers in your niche. Do some research (you know, Google) and pinpoint the most influential bloggers in your niche. Who has the most followers and engagement? Start following them on social media platforms. Comment on their blogs and start forming an online relationship with them. The next time you create an amazing piece of content, ask all your newfound friends share the link with their followers and readers.
The other piece of content marketing is guest blogging, producing useful pieces of content on blogs within your niche in order to get some traffic and backlinks. But be careful: guest blogging has been abused as a back linking strategy, and most people who relied on this strategy paid for their carelessness in 2013. You can’t focus on guest blogging as a pure backlinking strategy. It should be used to direct targeted traffic back to your website. That means making sure the blogs you offer to share content with are of the highest quality, and then creating top notch content for them.
When linking back to your website, don’t use keyword-rich anchor text. Instead, use the raw URL of your website or your name. A great way to link back is to use the post name of a piece of related content on your website that gives additional information.
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION: HIDDEN TREASURE
Very few SEO agencies are even considering conversion rate optimization (CRO). This is shocking when you consider that simple changes to a landing page can lead to a 300% increase in phone calls with the same amount of traffic. It’s amazing how much traffic goes to waste because companies refuse to test the copy (among other elements) of a page. The number of web pages on the internet is growing a lot faster than the number of eyes available to see them. More competition equals a higher cost of acquisition. And if you aren’t testing, you’re leaving money on the table.
In CRO every situation is different. Don’t think the beautifully coded landing page you just paid big bucks for is perfect. Always ask your visitors for their opinions and always test your landing pages to find out what works best for your website. You may have your own speculations as to why a user agreed to buy your product or service, but until you ask, you’ll never know for sure. The real reason they’re not biting may surprise you.
Start by conducting surveys to find out what visitors dislike about your webpage using tools like Qualaroo.
A survey I conducted for an e-commerce website selling fashion jewelry uncovered that 45% of visitors who didn’t make a purchase cited “credit card security” as the reason. By placing a simple security seal on the checkout page, I reduced shopping cart abandonment by more than 30%. That led to a significant increase in monthly revenue from the same amount of web visitors.
SOCIAL MEDIA: THE MARKETPLACE OF THE FUTURE
Social signals (Google +1s, Facebook shares and Tweets) contribute to higher search engine rankings. This study found that the more shares, tweets, and Google +1s a webpage receives, the higher it ranks in the search engines. It is not clearly understood how much weight Google places on social signals but we know it’s important for both branding and engagement.
Pay attention to the ad platforms on the social media sites. They tend to be much cheaper than Google AdWords—especially when configured correctly. There is one caveat here: Always remember to funnel as many of your fans or followers as possible into your mailing list. You don’t own any of these social platforms and they tend to change their policies often. A recent Facebook update reduced organic reach by an average of 40% on the fan pages I manage. They want you to pay for sponsored posts in order to reach a larger amount of your fans. Adding followers to your own lists reduces the cost of outreach.
This will be the year that separates the outdated strategists from those willing to adapt and change. If you follow the tips above you should be in a very good place, but if you continue to follow the SEO practices of 2003 you may just end up in Google’s penalty box.
This story originally appeared in Profit.
