SEO Priorities To Put In Place for 2017

We’re already one month into the new year, so now is the time, if you haven’t already, to take a moment and reevaluate your SEO campaign. This is important because before you get too far into your 2017-year, you want to make sure that you’re locked-and-loaded and ready to go with a strong SEO campaign. After all, the world of SEO is ever changing and very competitive. Not to mention all of the rules and regulations set by search engines such as Google. Therefore, it’s crucial that your website is fully operational and can be easily optimized.

The best way to go about doing this is to look for the “quick win”. Basically, by this we mean to clean up your website. Focus primarily on the hygiene of your site, and see what improvements need to be made. For instance, you can run a review through the Google Search Console. While this is often neglected, it can actually be one of the best ways to inform you on how your site is operating. You can use the GSC to look for any errors or warnings. The main areas to focus on are as follows:

· Structured data: make sure that within your markup there are no errors. If there are, fix them yourself, if able, or get with a web developer to help fix the issue.

· HTML improvements: you’ll want to make sure that if you have multiple or lengthy meta-descriptions and page titles, you are revising them. In fact, this is one of the easiest methods of increasing your click-through-rates for your existing rankings.

· Mobile usability: mobile traffic now makes up about 80% of all web traffic. Therefore, you not only want to make sure that your website is user-friendly. You’re going to want to now start going towards the direction of a mobile-first index for your website. In the next coming year, Google will make mobile-first indexing a priority.

· Blocked resources: you’ll want to make sure that you run a check to ensure that your resources the search engine needs to render your pages are not being blocked. Again, if they are get with your web developer, or run an audit to figure out the source of the problem.

· Crawl errors: you want to identify and resolve any 404 or soft 404 errors to make sure you’re keeping a consistent and positive user experience. There is nothing worse for consumer than a broken link.

Another way you can find a quick win is by doing a content gap analysis. In order to perform a proper content gap analysis, you need to make sure you’re staying relevant with your specific consumer search behavior. After all, quality content is becoming one of the biggest ranking factors in search engines. So, you want to make sure that you’re picking up slack where you may be lacking in this area. Once you run your analysis, you can build a content development strategy that will help you fill in the gaps in the months to follow.

Finally, you’ll want to make sure, as we said before, that you’re focusing on a strong mobile website. Mobile experience is becoming vital for positive and high rankings in Google’s search engine. If your website is lacking in any way with mobile capability, you can be penalized or worse. Also, not only does your website need to be focused on mobile capabilities, it also needs to be fast. This is because the average consumer will only wait about 3 seconds for a page to load before they decide to click out. So, make sure that when developing your strategy for the early part of 2017 you’re focusing on clearing up current issues, making sure you have quality content, focusing on a mobile-first website, and increasing the speed of your website in order to give your customers the absolute best experience they can have. If you can do this, your strategy for increasing your Indianapolis SEO rankings will be a winner.