Ten SEO Tips for 2017

In time past, it was fairly easy to rank on top in the Google search engine by just doing some keyword research, getting quality backlinks and optimizing your site contents for SEO.

The importance of these three activities has not waned for any SEO campaign, however the game has evolved and it now features new players that should be given high priority if you are really serious about getting anything out of your SEO campaign.

Here are 10 Tips to Work on for Any SEO Campaign

RankBrain

RankBrain is an AI system made by Google, it uses machine learning algorithms to understand data.

Out of 3billion queries submitted to Google daily, between 400-450 million is made up of new and unique queries which are also in the form of questions. For example, searching for “how many people were affected by hurricane Harvey” returns the image below

Google uses RankBrain to handle this type of queries, which is said to be approximately 15% of all daily searches. The most important thing to remember while optimizing for RankBrain is… Create content that answers unique queries that are particularly relevant to your audience personas.

Optimizing for RankBrain can simply be put as “creating content that directly provides an answer to queries like the one in the example and tailored to fit the personas of your target audience”.

The Rise of Social Content

These days more priority is being placed on content from social media in the SERPs. Search engines will index more social content in their search results in the future blurring the lines between ‘web’ and ‘social media’ in terms of SEO strategies.

When brand names are searched on Google, social media profiles are amongst the returned listings on the first page.

Optimizing your social media content to promote your website or brand will increase your visibility in search engines.

Optimization for search queries that contain the term “near me”

When it comes to local search the main concern for any SEO campaign would be “how best to optimize for mobile”, mobile has been recognized as being the key driver for local search.

Quoting Google, ‘micro-moments’ are the “critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends.”

It is also believed in some circles that when optimizing for ‘micro-moments’, mobile searchers tend to be active and don’t usually stay loyal to a brand, most businesses do not pay attention to the huge opening mobile search has to offer, hence they lose out on customers that make use of mobile. You have to optimize your pages to be relevant and easy to use for mobile users.

Optimize your local presence

In my opinion, local SEO is the key to making sales for any product you might be offering. What’s the point of SEO if you are not visible to people in your immediate environment.

The simplest way to do local SEO is by optimizing your Google My Business page. To do that you need to spell out in detail these information

• Description of your business, it must be unique

• Enlist your business in the right category

• You must provide all available contact info, most important being a local phone number and business address

• Images are important too

• Opening and closing hours

• You have to update this information regularly

It is also paramount to get enough reviews and testimonials from previous customers and clients.

Content Aggregation will get Bigger & Better

Over 80% of Google search results are made up of wiki, images, videos, news, social media, maps and local listings. It is good practice if you optimize your pages to feature one or two of those coupled with content relevant to your target audience.

Content aggregation is a practical way of finding, collating, amassing, consolidating, presenting, sharing, and displaying content around pre-specified set of criteria to appeal target audience. You can always gather high value content from top sources in your niche and display it in one place for your visitors to see, it will help in building authority.

Provide Answers

Being a source for high value content and answers that solves general and specific problems is a goldmine, you are sure to get a lot of traffic by doing that.

Whenever a ‘knowledge- based query’ is entered into Google, the search engine scrapes third party websites looking for information looking for websites with authoritative content to list in their search results. Websites like Wikipedia used to be at the top of this category but nowadays more publisher are coming up as better sources of information.

Look for a question that needs to be answered, create content that answers with as much detail as possible, don’t over-do it just so you won’t add irrelevant information, use the question as your page title and the answer in the body.

Work on boosting user engagement

User engagement depends on factors like, average time on site, bounce rate, pogo sticking, among others.

There are certain page elements that contribute to your chances of conversion and visitors committing to your call to action.

Though, user engagement is said to have a not-so-direct influence on search rankings, it is however important for a website owner looking to get maximum returns through his SEO campaigns to pay attention to user engagement.

Certain tools like HeatMapping and SumoMe are used to analyze data on how your visitors and users interact with your content. You can always check them out.

Google News and AMP

Google News is a sure source of short term traffic.

You can always drive traffic to your content by being in the news constantly and in a positive light, if you provide high value content that’s relevant to a lot of people, other sites may link to you as a source whenever they are in the news.

The ‘Top Stories’ section in Google is getting filled up with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP was developed by Google to allow webmasters create super-quick, stripped-down, instantly loading versions of web-pages for mobile users. AMP is not a criterion for ranking at the moment, but if you plan on getting in the news often, then AMP pages are the way to go in improving user experience. There are a number of tutorials on the internet on how to implement AMP.

Mobile optimization

This point actually goes without saying, everyone now knows that technology is going mobile. It didn’t use to be important to optimize your website for mobile around three to four years ago as it is at the moment, and it’s only going to keep to the top of
the list of important SEO practices.

Throw money at it

The reason why most people still do SEO is because they have low advertising budget or they haven’t got an advertising budget at all. If you have money to spend on advertising, you can skip all these tips and just pay your way to the top using PPC or Bing ads (whichever works for you).

Although you will still need to have great copywriting skills (or you could just hire someone to do that for you), a product that beats the competition’s and a well designed landing page, but yes, all these can still be done by throwing money at the problem.

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