21 Ways to Improve Your SEO Campaign This Year

New year, fresh SEO campaign updates You need to be vigilant about SEO because Google is always looking for ways to reward and assess optimized sites. Google is constantly updating its algorithms, providing new challenges and new approaches to help websites climb the ranks.

A second performance by the global pandemic in 2020 meant that more businesses went online and sought strategies to improve and maintain their digital presence. As brick-and-mortar businesses moved their products online, a few million eCommerce websites were created or rebuilt. Many of these businesses reached out to an SEO Consultant for the first time.

Google also released some significant updates that site and business owners should be aware of.

These are 21 SEO tips and techniques you can add to your list. Your SEO list for the year.

1. Digital PR has replaced guest blogging

Guest posting is one of the most important aspects of SEO. We don’t call it guest blogging anymore. It is digital PR. The term guest posting today conjures images of spammy tactics used in 2014 when Google’s Matt Cutts declared that guest posting was dead.

Today’s link builders don’t just blast content to every site (which was the norm in 2014), but instead, they use tried-and-true tactics that have been used in traditional PR for many years.

• Research Target sites
• Check out what they post and what readers want
• With a personal pitch and real value, approach these sites
• Send them a piece of high-quality writing
• EARN the high-quality connection
• Enjoy the benefits and then continue to do so as often as possible

Is that not a lot of work? You betcha! The old method doesn’t work anymore, and there is a lot to be gained from all the hard work. Moz in 2012 estimated that 30% of your SEO power was due to your links. Moz today estimates that your links may be worth more than 50%.

You’re only running your SEO race if you don’t build links. If you don’t have the time or desire to build links yourself, you should contact a link-building services company immediately.

2. Combining Podcasting and Link Building

You could fill up 80 blogs detailing how to do it properly, but I’ll limit my efforts to just the essentials.

Podcasting can be a great way to increase your SEO, brand awareness, and thought leadership. Passive roles are often a huge waste of time.

• Active – Ensure you offer real value. Promoting your podcast through digital PR is a great way to reach your stakeholders and find other podcast hosts.
• Passive – Recording and publishing without a promotional plan. Waiting for guest podcast opportunities or saying No, because you don’t see the value.

If done correctly, you can combine proven link-building strategies with podcast syndication to unlock big wins.

3. Increase the number of local citations

Even if you write the most impressive blogs and optimize your pages flawlessly, you will still struggle to rank if there aren’t local citations. These citations are very important for SEO.

This could mean being listed on review sites such as Yelp and Hotels.com. It all starts with your Google listing. In 2021, your Google My Business profile was renamed to simply your Google Enterprise Profile (because… They also revealed a few new features such as:

• Messaging (Customers have the ability to instantly message you)
• Safety and Health Attributes (i.e. Protocols for mask and vaccine passports
• Pandemic-Related Attributes For Restaurants (Take-out or curb-side)
• Online Services Listings (Does your company offer online appointments or quotes?
• Call Logging (Record all calls made from Google Maps and SERPs).
• Performance reports for Enhanced GMB (Deeper dives into traffic)
• Black-Owned Business Attributes

Check your profile You’re making it difficult for people to contact you, find you, or support you if your information is incorrect or incomplete. Even worse, If your profile hasn’t been claimed you are allowing shady rivals to claim it. Although it’s a dirty pool, it happens.

Also read: 10 Types of Digital Marketing Campaigns

4. Look into Topic Clusters

It is important to note that the stages of keyword search have grown in recent years. Topic clusters are one of the most recent keyword trends.

Although clusters don’t replace keywords, they can give Google a better idea about how authoritative and comprehensive your site is. Google will look at synonyms, subtopics, and FAQs that are related to your keywords. Google can help you rank higher and get more traffic by showing that your site is topical authority and not just optimized keywords.

This trend will only grow in the future, which is why most of the key keyword tools now have some form of cluster functionality.

5. Embrace Semantic SEO

As we have mentioned, the science behind keyword research has become more complicated. Semantic SEO is essentially showing Google that your target audience is well-informed.

You first need to find the keywords and relevant questions your audience is looking for in thorough keyword research. Next, you use semantic SEO to find any follow-up questions that your audience might have. Then, you answer them.

This SEO Krav Maga is a powerful tool that will help you prove to Google that you understand your target audience. It also helps you appear in the zero position featured snippets and the section for people who searched for on the SERPs.

6. Optimize Every Page That You Want to Rank

As you can see, keyword research is changing. Therefore, your on-page optimization strategy will need to change with it. All of the information you just discussed above requires that you be strategic and thoughtful in your use.

Warning – If your pages rank highly, you might have noticed that Google has changed the meta descriptions that appear in the SERPs. This made headlines and was a big deal in the SEO world in 2021. SEOs simply love it when Google is in control.

Google says that these rewrites can occur when:

• Poor meta descriptions don’t sum up the page.
• Google is trying to match more precisely the search query and the page.
• Google wants to match search queries with content. However, the meta description doesn’t reflect the match.

7. Optimize your internal links

This is a must-have. To encourage users and Google bots to visit your pages, you need to have a lot of internal links on landing pages and blogs. Without internal links, the journey ends there.

Also, ensure you use strategic keywords to link back to internal pages.

8. Optimize your crawlability and indexability

This is one topic that we could talk about all day. Your pages should be as indexable and crawlable as possible.

Google provides a detailed breakdown of structure data and a schema testing tool that will help you find any potential barriers to your site.

These issues can be fixed to increase traffic and SEO.

9. Take out all broken links and dead images

We know how difficult it can be to keep track of every image and link on your website. You must do your best. Broken links and unrelated images can hurt your SEO. These make you appear as if the Internet is a barren desert that has been forgotten.

SEMrush is a tool that can help you find broken links. Images can be a bit more difficult. Screaming Frog can crawl your site but it may not capture all your images.

10. Optimize your Images

Shutterstock accounts are not for millionaires. You spent 15 minutes searching through free image sites in search of the perfect image to use for your blog. You found it! Don’t let it go! Two things can be done to this image:

• Keywords can be used to optimize the image attributes
• It can be compressed for web use so that it doesn’t slow down your load times

Load speeds are more important than ever, as we’ll see in the next section.

11. Perform Frequent Page Speed and Core Web Vitals Testing

You need to become obsessed with user experience in light of Google’s recent page experience update.

Good load speeds are essential for a good user experience. Good was a subjective term that was hotly debated. Now, it’s not so subjective. Google has provided us with some new metrics and numbers to aim for:

• Largest Contentful Painting (LCP) – How long does it take to load the entire page after a visitor arrives at your site? Try to load the page in 2.5 seconds or less.
• First input delay (FID) – How long does it take your page to respond to a click? Try to get a score of at least 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative layout Shift (CLS) – CLS measures the time it takes for the page’s loading to stop shifting. This score is calculated using a proprietary scoring system. The target score is 0.

Now, step #1 is to run a Core Web Vitals Test. Step 2 is not to beat yourself up if you fail. It’s almost impossible for everyone to fail it the first time. YouTube even failed to meet the web’s core requirements.

Only 50% passed the test among the 100 top-performing websites on the web. These numbers were lower than a year ago with only 22% passing the test on top desktop sites and 28% passing the mobile site tests.

Remember, if you fail the first test, chances are your competitors did as well. Making the necessary adjustments to your site before they fail is key. If you are keen to optimize your site’s speed and Google ranking, there is an excellent opportunity to increase your site’s speed.

Also read: Top 10 PPC Tools for Advertising Campaigns

12. It’s time for mobile-first planning

Google has extended its timeline for mobile-first indexing to September 2020 through March 2021. Your rankings could be affected by a mobile site that is not optimized.

This is what you need to know:

• Mobile sites should be as optimized for keywords as desktop sites.
• Google doesn’t consider any content on your mobile website to be relevant.

Mobile-first planning is essential if you are building or renovating your website in 2022.

13. Be Safe

Google included security in their page experience update as a ranking signal. You should make sure that your website is clean of malware, and that you are using HTTPS rather than HTTP.

SEO, however, is unlikely to be a problem for you if these two issues are present.

14. Audit Your Interstitials

Google also identified intrusive interstitials to be a ranking signal for page experiences.

This does not apply:

• Interstitials may be used to support legal purposes. This includes cookie usage and age verification.
• Login dialogs that cannot be publicly indexable include pages behind a paywall.

Simply stated, if the page is on an indexable webpage and not for legal purposes (think about promotions or mailing list invites), ensure it follows Google guidelines.

15. Take the time to conduct a content audit

You might be in need of an SEO Blog Audit to get rid of anything not providing you with real value.

It’s not driving traffic, ranking well, or generating leads. It’s not taking up any space in the backend.As mentioned, speed is more important than ever. Unused assets (images and videos, as well as podcasts) can slow down your system.

Does this mean that you should throw away anything that isn’t performing? No. Ask yourself why something isn’t working. This blog is a bit out of date (e.g. Is it too outdated (i.e. The Top 10 Upcoming Concerts in 2019)? Or can it be given a second chance with updated images, titles, headings, stats, keywords, or some new keywords? Is this blog just not good enough and should it be rewritten?

Recycle any content that you can repurpose or reinvent, and then throw away the rest.

16. Write Better Blogs Because Content Quality is the King

How can one create better blogs? Is good writing subjective? Nonsense. There are some things you can do in order to create better content, even though different writing styles and topics will appeal to certain readers.

This includes:

• No spelling or grammar errors
• Engaging headlines
• Use keywords naturally, without affecting the flow

These are fairly straightforward. Things get more complicated when we look at your blog’s EA-T score.

E-A-T stands as:

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Google stated that E-A–T is not a ranking factor per-se, but it’s an important part of Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

This is especially important if your company falls under the YMYL ( You Money or Your Life ) category. This could be someone from the financial or health sectors or anyone who could have an impact on their readers’ finances, health, and happiness.

Another topic is simply too large for one blog. If you are looking to increase your site’s E.T.A, here are some suggestions:

• Do we publish enough often to be recognized?
• Do we link to respected and established sources?
• Do you have links to other sites?
• Do we want to stay within our niche or do we try to be too broad?

Are we able to establish a strong presence off-site, such as review sites, industry publications, or Wikipedia listings?
You can write Pulitzer-level stuff. Google won’t trust your content if there are no links to you and you don’t appear to be linked anywhere else.

17. Learn Why Long-Form Content is Better

A lot of reliable data shows that longer-form content ranks higher and gets more links than shorter content. Does that mean that a 600-word blog won’t perform as well as a 2000-word blog full of absurd bullshit? Not at all. Your E-A-T must still be high quality.

But, having spent over 10,000 hours writing content, I can conclude that long-form content performs better because of a variety of reasons.

• It is hard to write 2000+ words. Now, the author is doing more research and planning.
• The long-form format allows you to dive deeper into a topic and answer more questions from your readers. Do you remember what we talked about semantic SEO and clusters earlier?
• Organically working in your keywords is easier and you can add longer tail keywords.
• Sharing/linking to something such as a whitepaper, report, or study is more common on other sites.
• Long-form writing requires you to be more engaging, informative, or funny in order to keep your readers’ attention.

Do not try to write 2000 words just for the sake. Try to create better content and provide more value.

Also read: How to Improve Your Personal SEO Ranking

18. Purge Unused WordPress Plugins

Consider revisiting the utility of your WordPress plugins as part of your website/content audit. It’s not worth the effort if you don’t use it often. Too many plugins can slow down your computer!

These are just a few of the 8 reasons you should audit your website by 2022 in order to get the best from it.

19. Do not be lazy with your Shopify Store

Shopify allows you to create a plan for your SEO success. It does not work on autopilot. Every page, both product, and category must be optimized correctly.

However, you should not just borrow product descriptions from the manufacturer when creating product pages. If you are a hardware store that sells snow blowers, don’t just use product descriptions from the brochure or manufacturer’s website. This copy is almost certain to have been indexed elsewhere online. Google will consider it duplicate content if it appears in your online shop.

Write your own unique product pages/ product descriptions.

20. Google Updates: Don’t Overreact.

Be aware of Google’s announcements about updates or confirmations that they have just released, and take the appropriate actions. But don’t go nuts. Every year, there are hundreds of small and large updates. It will be impossible to respond to all of them.

Over the past few years, Google hasn’t changed the pillars that define what it wants to see.

• High-quality content
• Optimization and keyword optimization
• Good user experience on desktop and mobile
• High-quality links to quality sites

You’re already committed to these things if you already do what Google wants now and what they will most likely want in the future. Keep going.

Another saying we have around the office is: “If your doing the right thing, you should be excited about an update.” If you do spammy things, an update should concern you.

21. It is time to act now

SEO is fiercely competitive. Many businesses have had to relocate their products online because of the pandemic. A high-end clothing shop that has built its reputation on quality and location is now looking at local SEO services in order to rank locally.

You may be late to SEO if you are just starting to get serious about it. It’s important to not try hacks or cheats in an attempt to cover a lot of ground quickly. This will cause more harm than good.