With Halloween just under a couple of weeks away, it seems that everyone has spooky thoughts on their mind - and that’s fine, just as long as the spooky tricks stay in your head, and don’t end up on your website. Keep all the surprises and horror for Halloween, and not for your SEO strategy.
Unfortunately, the frightening truth is that SEO can be a tricky subject and many people have fallen prey to the dark side of SEO that has ultimately lead to a decrease in their rankings. Luckily though, implementing the following SEO strategies should keep you away from facing the terrifying consequences.
HTTPS
There’s a lot of misconception around changing a website to a secure version, known as a HTTPS. In case you haven’t already noticed, Google already shows warnings on websites that are less secure (HTTP) meaning visitors coming to your website will instantly be spooked and leave your site in a flash.
Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit more to making your site secure than meets the eye. It is a technical process that will require you to take a fair few steps and invest a lot of your time into planning to make your site secure.
Even though it may seem like an utter nightmare to get your site changed to a secure version, Google will continue to alert users of insecure sites. You average searcher will most probably have no idea what HTTP and HTTPS means, so if Google says it isn’t safe, then chances are they’ll leave your site pretty quickly.
Voice search
With nearly 60% of searches being performed on a mobile device, it is becoming easier to use voice search instead of typing on tiny screens. Google has already identified this too, and said that 20% of searches on their mobile app are through voice search and they are noticing an increase. When you consider the personal assistants like Google Home, Amazon Echo, Siri and Cortana, the number of voice searches is even greater, as they rely solely on voice recognition.
Voice search optimisation requires a whole new outlook, especially when it comes to content creation. With the prediction that 50% of all searches being voice searches by 2020, now is the time to start writing and optimising the content on your site for voice recognition, so you can provide users with the best answers to their questions.
Read David’s take on the future of voice search here.
To put it simply, schema is a markup that you can add to your website and tag content which Google and other search engines can then use to determine the most relevant and user friendly content to appear in the SERPs.
Schema tags can be added to all different types of content including:
-Events
-Organisations
-People
-Places
-Reviews
This code allows Google to identify exactly what it is your page is about so it can stand out in the search engines.
But! Be careful, whatever you tag could appear in the search engines, so if you’ve got any bad reviews, you might want to think long and hard whether to add schema tags to your reviews.
Check your click through rate in webmaster tools for the terms you are raking for, if you see that people aren’t clicking through, it could be that the schema is working against you. Likewise, in analytics, if you notice less traffic for a term that you were previously ranking well for, it could be that the schema tag is having a negative effect. Therefore, it is important that you don’t go tagging your whole website in one go without tracking the results, as this could have a nasty impact on your sites rankings.
If the thought of coding makes you want to run a million miles, don’t worry there are several tools to make the whole thing a lot easier. Tools such as Schema App and Hall Analysis can help you create schema mark-up code even if you’re not an expert.
Bing
It may be a shock to some, but Bing is still alive and well, despite not exactly being seen as the horror film hero. It is, however, a bit of an underdog when it comes to SEO and the role it should play in your strategy. Although Google clearly dominates search, Bing accounts for 33% of all search which is still a pretty big percentage - it would be silly to ignore it.
Spending a bit of time focussing on ranking your sites on Bing would not be a wasted effort - and here’s why:
- Bing will give you more information about how they rank sites and what you need to do to rank higher, so you can apply the best strategy to give your site more visibility.
- They is so much less competition and therefore it is so much easier to rank.
- You can receive local visibility through Bing Places for Business.
- You will see your ranking results a lot quicker.
- It is less expensive to place paid ads.
Site audit
Not conducting a site audit for a new client is like running in complete darkness - you never know what you’ll bump in to. Completing a site audit is the only way you’ll spot your enemies sooner, rather than later so you’ll know exactly what you’re up against.
There are so many tools on the internet that allow you to analyse your websites performance, including how you are ranking on the search engines, being indexed, its mobile capabilities and the page speed. Completing this should come before the planning of your strategy, so you can use it as a check list to organise your actions.
Have a chat with one of the Adido team today to find out how you can complete a site audit for your website and get some advice with on page SEO, technical SEO, backlink profiles, content analysis and more.
