As the world, people, and of course businesses motored through a year of uncertainties – these crackers of articles gave your strategies an unfair advantage.

You asked, “What is Page Experience, anyway? Do we really need to have an overflowing to-do list?” – and we answered everything around this enigma. This piece touched upon every aspect, angle, and action point that SEOs needed to know.

The ad tech and search industry continued to remain precarious that Google will use the cookie deprecation as a new way to establish market dominance to feed its own interests. Google expert, Susan Dolan drew from her rich experience and detailed realities of the search scape. She also shared insights and predicted future key themes that rose out of the 3p cookie death.

As the industry bid farewell to BERT, Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update in June 2021 opened new search experience dimensions. The cranked-up competition for search visibility between businesses and advertisers – left SEO practitioners and agencies with yet another burning question, “How will we win MUM’s good graces?” Joe Dawson’s comprehensive guide left no stone unturned.

“Kill your darlings”, yes, we said it! Though it sounded outlandish, this piece held wise and valuable advice from best-selling author Joe Pulizzi on why this could be one of the best business decisions you could’ve made in 2021.

Everyone is obsessed with Google, but did you know Reddit is the seventh most popular website in the US while Quora has a DR of 91? This guide shone a light on how your search strategy could take advantage of these platforms with diversification, tap into great brand-building opportunities, and enhance your E-A-T standing.

The third-party cookie still stands at a crucial intersection between digital marketing, SEO, paid media, web design, and several business tangents. The industry needed to think hard and think differently for a contingency plan. SEO pioneer, serial entrepreneur, and best-selling author, Kris Jones helped weave a tight SEO and search marketing strategy way ahead of 2022. Why? Because a stitch in time saves nine.

The internet continued zigging in a privacy-focused direction as a response to consumers’ increasing demand for a transparent, responsible, and ethical outlook towards their data. First-party data became indispensable and consumer trust, invaluable. While the playing field inched closer to the great reset, we revealed some hidden first-party gems every business could use to redesign their search marketing strategies.

The story of SEO and UX began almost 20 years ago with both making a foray into the market in the 1990s. Since then, SEO practitioners saw seasons change and the Page Experience, paired with data analysis finally etched UX as a key ranking factor. Atul Jindal condensed years of his experience working with fortune 50 companies into this SEO guide to help you win at SEO and search experience.

The pandemic didn’t let us forget that while every business is unique, budgets too took a hit, making allocation stringent. But why did so many businesses still stick to the “big guns” when allocating spending? Adzooma CEO Rob Wass and Cambridge University’s Akanshaa Khare joined forces to challenge this notion. They produced some truly unique insights that would make stakeholders rethink their media spending habits.

Everyone remembers the chaos surrounding the Core Web Vitals in early 2021. SEO folks were keen to get ahead on optimizing their site and Twitter threads were full of speculation. Armed with information, we shared a 28-point checklist on action items to spot, optimize, and embrace the inevitable rollout of these new ranking factors.

Thank you for being valuable supporters throughout our journey. Team Search Engine Watch wishes everyone a happy year-end and an adventurous 2022!

*Ranked on page views, time on page, and bounce rate.

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https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/12/30/wrapping-up-2021-with-our-top-10/

Nowadays, every business needs to have a functional website. Websites have become the face of companies and online consumers visit those pages to shop, get informed or educate themselves. That being said, businesses must meet consumer demands, expectations and needs when it comes to website browsing and experience. However, in order to do that, they must first ensure their company websites are visible, accessible and easily findable online. One of the best ways to improve website visibility in the online world is search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a cost-effective marketing campaign that helps websites rank high on search engines, such as Google. Still, online market is overcrowded and highly competitive. So much in fact, that SEO is now mandatory for businesses instead of just optional. Without SEO, you have no chances of becoming visible online and you’ll only be overshadowed by your competitors. Also, SEO demands constant work to produce viable results, mainly because search engines oftentimes change the rules, as well as make modifications to their algorithms. Therefore, here’s a complete SEO checklist for website owners.

Important SEO aspects

To better understand SEO, you have to understand its aspects. SEO consists of three main categories: technical SEO, on-site SEO and off-site SEO. These activities help you improve your website’s visibility, authority, credibility and awareness online, among other things. Each category serves a specific purpose of helping both your audience and search engines understand your website and the content you produce.

Technical SEO focuses on the functionality of your website. On-site SEO focuses on optimizing your content and pages for search engines. Off-site SEO focuses on activates outside your website that help boost your reputation and trustworthiness. The more effort you place in optimizing your website, the higher rankings it will achieve.

Technical SEO

As mentioned before, technical SEO focuses on the functionality and performance of your website. Website elements, such as speed, user-friendliness, responsiveness, security and so on, all influence customer satisfaction, which is one of the primary factors for search engine rankings.

Website Speed

Speed is crucial for bot your website and your consumers. The main reason is that literally no one today can tolerate slow loading web pages. In fact, 67% of consumers will abandon your website if it takes more than two seconds to load.

In addition, 47% of mobile users will abandon the pages if they do not load in three seconds or less. That being said, website speed is a crucial ranking factor, because search engines will penalize you for having a sluggish website. And, the reason they do that is that you’re unable to provide a seamless customer experience on your website, due to it being too slow.

Responsiveness

Focusing on mobile users is more important than ever. As a matter of fact, mobile traffic has already surpassed that of desktop, which means that not having a mobile-friendly website is a career suicide these days. Fortunately, you no longer have to maintain two versions of your website. Instead, implementing a responsive design that can adapt to any device and screen size will satisfy all your customers.

Security

Modern consumers are much savvier than they used to be, which means cybersecurity is one of their top concerns. Lacking proper security measures results in ranking penalty from search engines and guarantees that your customers won’t be satisfied with you. Implementing security measures is therefore essential for modern websites. For example, an SSL/TLS certificate is a good way to secure your website and ensure good ranking factors for your website.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO are activities with a purpose of optimizing content and web pages on your website to be more SEO friendly. In other words, helping search engines understand the context and the content of your website and its pages. Search engines crawl your website and leverage information they’ve obtained to properly index and display it on search results.

Keywords

Keywords are an essential aspect of SEO. When it comes to On-site SEO, keywords help match the content on your pages and posts with user intent. In other words, you must rank for keywords your audience most commonly uses when searching for something online.

Keywords must be researched carefully, so that you ensure your efforts are well-placed. If you have difficulties managing this on your own, you can look for the best search agency that can help you out with this task. That way, you’ll ensure that your website is well-ranked and relevant to your audience.

Content

Content is king in the marketing world. Content on your website needs to be excellent and relevant, in order to engage your consumers properly. Content will help inform, educate and even entertain your audience while on your website. That’s why you must optimize it properly and ensure search engines can adequately display it on their results.

Titles, URLs, Metadata

Optimizing pages is important for SEO. Each page, post and piece of information must be optimized properly so that both search engines and your audience can understand it well. For example, include keywords in title tags for your posts so that it can match user intent.

Also, restructure your URLs to help search engines understand the content of your pages. In addition, include detailed information in Metadata descriptions to help your audience understand what your pages are about. Optimizing pages and their elements is essential for SEO and ranking well on search engines.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO are your activities outside your website. Promoting content on other sources serves a purpose of building credibility, domain authority and reputation for your website. Search engines reward websites with good off-site SEO with high rankings. The main reason is that search engines favor websites with good relevance and credibility.

Link building

Link building is an SEO activity of creating high-quality inbound links for your website. In short, the content you publish contains a backlink that leads back to your website. You accomplish this by guest posting your content on other relevant and reputable sources, such as other blogs and websites. In fact, backlinks share the first place with content as being the most important ranking factor on Google. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your rank on search engines.

Social media

Even though SEO isn’t directly involved with social media, search engines do prefer websites whose content is popular on social media networks. Likes, shares, tweets and others make your content popular and influence user engagement, which means search engines are more likely to recommend content on their results that is viral on social media. Sharing your content on your own social media pages is a good way to start. You can also leverage influencers to further promote your content and create a much-needed buzz for your posts.

SEO requires a lot of effort, time and dedication before it starts showing viable results. A lot of web owners simply give up before that happens. However, SEO can vastly increase not just your website’s visibility and awareness, but also boost your organic website traffic. In other words, investing in SEO can greatly payoff if you’re willing to make an effort and wait for the results to start showing.

The post A Complete SEO Checklist for Website Owners appeared first on Go Media™ · Creativity at work!.

https://gomedia.com/zine/insights/complete-seo-checklist-website-owners/

The New Year is upon us, full of personal plans made with the best intentions.

It also represents a time for businesses and teams to take stock and plan for the coming year; the difference being that unlike personal plans, business plans cannot remain unfulfilled.

Many of you will be looking to 2018 with a renewed vigor for your SEO strategy. Strategies will vary depending on a number of factors including the complexity of the campaign, the length that your team has been working on it and the work completed thus far.

However, there is a fundamental checklist that we have here at Yellowball that is applicable to all campaigns:

1. Review the previous year

Blue sky thinking and creative ideas for the year ahead are fantastic; fear not, they will come. In the meantime, it is critical that we learn from previous actions by reviewing 2017.

If you set goals at the beginning of the year, you can use these as benchmarks to understand your successes, and also pinpoint where the campaign experienced hurdles.

Break the campaign down into major component parts and be self critical about the outputs from your team within these components. The results (rankings, traffic, conversions) are the obvious end goals; remember that these results come as a consequence of actions and this review should be focused on learning points that will influence the SEO strategy for 2018.

Agencies should speak to their clients to get input from their perspective. These feedback sessions are essential in understanding where processes and communication can be improved to create a more efficient campaign.

Finally, from experience it is valuable to keep these reviews as objective as possible. On one hand a review can get overly optimistic celebrating successes of the previous year, brushing over the hurdles. On the other hand, make note of hurdles, learning points and subsequent actions for 2018 but avoid an overly pessimistic outlook.

SEO is a mid to long term investment – if your processes and actions are in line with strategy, then trust in these; the results will come. 

2. Revisit your research

Do not underestimate the value in revisiting your research and initial strategy. Not only are markets and behavior in a constant state of flux, but with another year under their belts, your team will have additional insight that may influence future strategy.

Go further than just keyword research; reassess your buyer personas and inbound funnel. Loop in individuals that are not at the coal face of the project. They are often able to give a fresh perspective on items that can be invaluable to the ongoing success of the campaign.

You may well find that everything checks out, but it is worth the exercise just to refresh your memory on the strategy. You may even uncover some gems!

3. Set targets

Targets and KPIs. In a world where results can seem like a mirage in a baking desert, it is all too easy to bypass targets in favor of a more output oriented strategy when in fact the two go hand in hand. Don’t be afraid to set targets – the numbers should be available to you.

If it is traffic-related, this can be targeted through average search volumes vs current and target positions. If it is conversions you can utilize traffic in conjunction with present conversion rates.

These targets will give you clarity and focus on the actual day to day planning of your SEO strategy in 2018. For example, if you wanted to increase your conversions by x% in 2018, this target could result in:

• An assessment of minimum rankings required to achieve the traffic (and therefore conversions) using your current conversion rate.
• Highlighting that conversion rates need to be improved and that the web design and UX/UI team need to be more involved in the campaign.
• A realization that your content may not be aligned with the sharper end of your sales funnel, indicating that the content strategy needs revisiting.
• An analysis that dictates your user acquisition strategy needs to expand, according to rankings, potential traffic and desired conversion rate.

Once you have your targets identified, don’t just file them away on your desktop. Share them.

For in-house teams, share targets with any team member that will be involved in the project and the powers that be. For agencies, build your client relationships by delivering these targets face to face with detailed explanation and any requirements from their side. Everyone should be aligned to their responsibilities in achieving these goals.

4. Brainstorm

We’ve all been there. The relative grace period at the beginning of the year is short-lived, as the never ending pile of daily tasks rears its head again. Teams can find it difficult to set aside the time to get together and have extended brainstorming sessions (over and above the regular ones that should be occurring), so make the most of your time now.

Fresh off the back of your analysis (and hopefully a relaxing Christmas break), teams have had time to take a step back and look at the campaign from a slightly different point of view. Again, a larger brainstorming session may kick up new ideas compared to the last one conducted.

5. Planning

As a result of your actions in steps 1-4, you should have a clearer idea of the campaign’s framework for the coming year. Itemizing and scheduling every single granular detail of a campaign for an entire year is highly unlikely, so schedule key milestones and any major items.

It is important that you allow the flexibility to remain agile in your processes without facilitating a campaign requiring more structure.

What you should be able to plan is your resourcing. With your goals and overarching strategy identified, you should have a plan of action for your implementation – implementation that will most likely require man hours and/or budget.

Resourcing additional hands, whether that be via recruitment or freelancer networks, should be planned well in advance. For those that have internal structures requiring sign-off on budgets, present them and gain sign-off before that budget is reassigned!

Hopefully these 5 steps will provide an overarching structure for your preparation of a refreshed (or brand new) SEO campaign for 2018. The nuances and minutiae are dependent on your own style, business set-up, resources and strategy.

https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/01/08/preparing-your-seo-strategy-for-the-year-ahead-5-key-checks/