Four SEO New Years Resolutions

It’s that time of year again for people around the world to make a fresh start and promise to do something better this year. This year, while you work on your personal goals, why not work on some for your online presence as well?

The world of digital marketing and SEO can be difficult to keep up with when you have other marketing tasks to perform. Now would be a good time to make some obtainable SEO resolutions to help get your website up to speed and rank better this year.

Here are some easily obtainable suggestions:

Initiate a Reputation Management Program

Undoubtedly, you heard the adage, “the proof is in the pudding”. This saying is a universal truth, especially for potential customers and search engines. They want to know you know what you are talking about and have successfully served others. This is where reputation management comes in.

Here are the steps to get you started:

1. Claim your Google Business profile (this will help you with your local SEO as well). The first thing many people see when searching for your business is your Google Reviews. This will allow you access to these reviews.
   
2. Institute a system to solicit reviews from customers. This can be a QR code they scan, a link in a follow up email, or any other creative way that fits organically into your communications or actions with your clients that directs them to where they can leave your raving review. Focus on review platforms your personas are most likely to use.
   
3. Incentivize leaving you a review. Create a drawing or discount for people who leave you a review.
   
4. Monitor your reviews across all platforms. Make it a daily or weekly task to go through your reviews and thank people for good reviews and address any negative ones with a message. Even if you do not get a follow-up response, it is important to show you tried for both people reading the review and for search engines.

Initially, this should be easy to manage on your own, but if you already have a barrage of reviews coming in, or as you grow it might be a good idea to look into implementing a reputation management system to help streamline the process. Companies like Birdeye and BrightLocal bring all your reviews and messages under one roof where you can solicit and respond to all your reviews wherever they are.

Reach and Engage Your Audience With Digital Marketing and Social Media

Make Sure Your Business Listings Are Up to Date

Business listings are an important factor in local SEO. Whether you are aware of them or not, your business is sighted and listed on pages throughout the internet. Some of these even exist without any solicitation for your information, or notification that it is there. Some of these listings could be out of date, incomplete, or just wrong.

Scour the internet for places your business’s information appears and make sure the content is correct, current and optimized. Find places you should be listed but aren’t and get added. One good way to go about this is to search for where your competition is listed and make sure your information is there as well.

Places like your Google Business Profile, Yelp, the Yellow Pages, and industry publications are a great place to start.

There are solutions available that can help automate these processes by finding all the places your information is currently listed, identifying potential places to be listed, and ensuring all the information is unform and up to date.

You will find a lot of these listings also have review functions, so a great next step would be to initiate a reputation management plan once you are confident in your listing placements and information.

Preform a SEO Audit of Your Website and Make Improvements

Ok, this sounds obvious, but many companies put this off because it can feel like an overwhelming task. With SEO trends constantly changing it can be difficult to know where to start and how far to go.

Here are some bite-sized, universal tasks to help get you started.

1. Set up, and or review your Google Analytics, and Search Council to identify any important website issues you may have that need to be addressed first. There are also many free and paid online tools that can help identify SEO issues your website may have.
   
2. Review each of your webpage’s meta descriptions. Make sure they have a description that is the correct length, appropriately describes the content and contains the intended keyword(s).
   
3. Optimize your images for size, and make sure they include alt tags describing what they are.
   
4. Make sure your H-tags (heading tags) are set appropriately indicating hierarchy and organization of the information on the page.
   
5. Look for and fix any broken links you may have. Over time, links can change, and content can be deleted leading to broken links. Make sure you re-link these or delete them.
   
6. Make sure your navigation is logical and easy to follow. Include categories and tags for better organization. This will help both visitors and web crawlers make sense of your website. Poor navigation can easily lead people to quickly bounce from your site.
   
7. Add internal links. Find information that relates to information on another of your webpages and create a link. You will find examples of this throughout this post as words within the copy that are highlighted as a link. These links will take you to other pages on our site that can expand on the highlighted term or concept.

Once you have these SEO basics addressed, you can go on to adding Schema Markups, soliciting quality back links, or participate in any of the many other SEO practices.

Create a Quality Content Strategy

We all know the best way to improve your SEO is through your content. With the internet already bursting at the seams with generic, outdated and AI produced content it is important that your content be authentic, purposeful and helpful.

Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Look at your competition’s content and assess your own. Are there any gaps in information you can address?
   
2. Refine your content topics and categories. Make sure they are relevant and group them together with categories, tags, and internal linking.
   
3. Talk with your customer facing coworkers. See what questions, objections or concerns they keep needing to address. If your customers are asking for this information, they, and people like them, are probably searching for it as well.
   
4. Create a content calendar and follow it but be flexible. Organize it in a way that optimizes its impact. Take into consideration where in the sales funnel the audience may be, or other external forces that will help lead them to your information, such as seasonal, or quarterly concerns, or emerging technologies.
   
5. Make sure your content isn’t just bland junk, the internet is already full of that. Research your topic, and write with EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in mind. Try to come it from a unique angle or combine concepts. Most of all, BE HELPFUL.
   
6. Create a variety of content pieces and address every stage of your sales funnel. Use Blogs, Whitepapers, Case Studies, Videos, Infographics, Podcasts, and any other format that will best convey your information to your target audience. Repurpose content in one format for another, create an infographic from a blog, or a video from a Whitepaper, different people digest information in different forms.

The world of digital marketing and SEO is vast, complex, and constantly changing. Don’t let being overwhelmed stand in your way. Remember, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Identify one obtainable task as your New Year’s Resolution and go after it. You will find the more you focus on just one task, the more progress you will make and the more confident you will be and the more you will learn.

Have a great New Year from the Force 5 team.

And if you feel you need any help with these or any of your marketing tasks, give us a call at 574.234.2060, or fill out our contact form here, we would love to help.