The first thing that’s different about 2018 than previous years is mobile, mobile, mobile. You need to be 100% mobile ready. Make sure your website is a hundred percent ready to go. Anything that’s on your desktop site needs to be live on your mobile site. You need to have fast page speed. You need to be thinking about how users want to interact with your website on mobile because that is gonna be one of the most important things for 2018.
The second thing is an excellent user experience. Now with Rankbrain and the general Google algorithm, Google is looking much more at user experience and how people come to your site. Do they stay there? Do you have a good click-through rate? Do they like the intent? Make sure you’re continually refining your site and making it better to increase your pageviews and your time on site and your conversion rates. Google is looking at this data now, and it’s essential that you make a high-quality experience for desktop and mobile users on your site.
The third thing is to pump out a ton of content. A ton of high-quality long-form content that users want to interact with. If you can do this, you’re gonna be in excellent shape. Make sure you add content on a consistent basis. Don’t just put a whole bunch of junk out there, make sure it’s really good stuff that people want to read. Also, make sure that you’re targeting keywords specifically in every single post.
Number four is you want to be thinking about voice search. People are doing more and more voice searches every single day, so you want to structure your content in a way that Google is going to recognize that, and it’s going to serve it as a response to a voice search. Look at the Google related searches and just do some general keyword research and find all the different questions that somebody’s looking for an answer around that term and then create one massive resource around that where it’s basically like a question-answer format. By doing that what happens is Google realizes that they see all of those related answers to questions and then they start serving that as a response to voice searches. Voice search is really important, make sure you focus on it this year.
Item number five is acquired natural links through great content marketing and PR. Don’t go out there and try to force external linking. If you’re doing great content marketing and you’re building the brand you’re doing creative campaigns through social media the links are gonna come in naturally, and that’s the way you want to go about it.
The next item is to make sure that your websites on HTTPS. You need to make sure your sites secure.
The next item is keep working on your click-through rates on a weekly basis if you can make sure you’re checking that inside the good new Google search console. You can see your click-through rates you can see the exact URLs and how many impressions they are getting and how many clicks you need to keep working on.
The next item is to use schema.org as much as is possible for your site. There are all the different types of schema that you can add because it’s going to allow Google to better understand your website.
The next item is keeping great site structure. This is so important if you’ve got that top-level keyword, all these supporting keywords, and all these other supporting keywords. Make sure you’re setting up a clear hierarchy of how they’re linking to each other, and they’re pushing all the authority to each one of them, and they’re also cross-linking to each other so that Google can crawl these things correctly.
The next item is is that when it comes to SEO, make sure the content is 100% unique don’t try to outsmart Google.
And the next item just a quick point on this–keep working on your meta descriptions. I can’t tell you how many times people don’t even fill them in. That is the main thing that people look at on the search page. Your title in your meta description, keep working on it. I know it sounds simple and trivial, but don’t forget about them.
I wish you a ton of success this year with SEO and 2018, and with these simple items in mind, it might be an excellent year for you and your site.