By Valerie Noel, Bayshore Solutions Digital Marketing Team
Answer the 10 questions below to determine how your SEO strategy stacks up in 2015:
1. Are you re-using content across pages of your website?
All pages on your site should be 100% unique and have original content. As we’ve identified previously, SEO is a long-term strategy and shortcuts should not be taken, including reusing content in order to increase the number of pages on your site. The search engines will catch up!
2. Is your website easily found in the local search results?
Visibility and consistency is key when it comes to localized search results. Not only do you want to make sure you are found, but also that your business information is the same across the search engines.
3. Have you checked your site’s analytics recently?
Regularly checking analytics provides insights into how visitors are interacting with your website. Based on historical analytic data you can identify areas for improvement and improve your user experience.
4. What are the actions you’d like visitors to your site to complete?
Getting visitors to your site is the first hurdle – next you want them to convert! Additionally you want to measure the conversions so that you can measure performance.
5. How does your website appear in Webmaster Tools?
Google and Bing Webmaster Tools provide a glimpse into how the search engines view your site. You don’t want to ignore this as many technical SEO items can be uncovered here.
6. How quickly does your site load?
Site speed is not only a factor for search engine algorithms, it also affects a user’s experience with your site. If your site takes too long to load a visitor can easily click back to the search engine results page and visit another website.
7. Is your site mobile-friendly?
It is not uncommon to see mobile and tablet traffic make up more than half of the visits to a website. Also with the recent Google update focusing on the mobile-friendliness of a website it is even more crucial than ever to make sure visitors from mobile devices can easily navigate your site.
8. Are you URLs user-friendly?
The way your site appears in search affects whether or not a user clicks on your site or the site above or below you. In addition to a clear title and description, a URL that clearly indicates what page the user will be taken to can positively impact how many people select you over your competitor.
9. Does your site have an XML sitemap?
Search engines spiders are constantly crawling hundreds of millions of websites. You want to make this job as easy as possible for them and the most effective way is by creating an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is different from an HTML sitemap, and clearly indicates which pages to crawl and index on your site.
10. Do you have Title tags throughout your site?
Accurately titled pages are beneficial not only for SEO but for visitors as well. The title you give each page on your site determines what appears for the user in the search results and at the top of the web browser. Every page on your site should have a unique and descriptive title related to the content of the page.
The above are just some of the many services Bayshore Solutions provides inside of a complete digital marketing engagement for a variety of our customers. If you would like help with any of the areas of search engine optimization Contact us today!