If you don’t pay attention to current digital marketing trends, you may face a failing business in the upcoming year.
This is because SEO is always changing, so you need to create an SEO plan that allows your business to adapt and change with it.
We’ve put together this step-by-step guide to help you start 2019 off right by implementing a plan that will keep your business growing all year and beyond.
Keep reading to find out exactly what you need to do for your business.
1. Do an SEO Audit
You can’t know where you need to go unless you know where you are. For that reason, the first thing you need to do is a full SEO audit of your website. This will let you know what your company’s strengths and weaknesses are.
2. Optimize for Local SEO
If your business is all online or international, you can skip this step. However, if you’re running a local business, this could be the most important thing you do for your company.
Claiming your listing with Google My Business and other directories is just one step in optimizing your site for local SEO. You’ll also want to build landing pages to focus on each neighbourhood you serve.
3. Update Your Security and Speed
Visitors don’t stick around websites that take too long to load, and Google wants to protect their customers. For that reason, you need to make sure your website uses an SSL certificate and loads quickly.
4. Build Powerful Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the primary ways search engines use to determine if your site has authority. When other websites are linking to yours, Google sees your site as more relevant and will rank it higher.
The more time you spend building powerful backlinks by guest-posting to other websites, the better your website will rank.
5. Create Useful Content
Search engines continue to get smarter and look for relevant content for each search query. Whereas keyword stuffing used to work, that’s a thing of the past.
Now, if you want to rank, you need to create useful content that your potential customers will find helpful. Think about what your customers want and need. What are their concerns? Address those.
6. Analyze Your Data
We can’t stress enough how much analyzing your data will help your business. This is essentially an ongoing audit of your business but should take less time since you’re just checking on key stats.
Here are some data points you should be tracking:
- Organic search visits
- Time spent on page
- Number of returning visitors
- Pages viewed per session
- Mobile bounce rate
- Social media reach
Keeping track of these things will allow you to make a better SEO plan as you move into this next year.
Need Help With Your SEO Plan?
You’re a busy business owner. Even though you know having an SEO plan is vital to the success of your business, you don’t have the time to implement it or learn everything for every step of the process.
If you want help getting your business more leads and customers by improving your SEO rating in 2019, contact us today. We’d love to help you with anything you need.