New years bring lots of changes. For those marketing a website or business, paying attention to the changes for search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial. Tips to help a business owner get the most out of optimizing their website in the new year can enable them to grow their business and draw in more customers.
Optimize the Website for Voice Searches
Voice searches are becoming the norm. Google has the Google Home device, Amazon has the Alexa, and Apple has Siri. Windows has Cortana and Samsung now has Bixby. All of these are digital assistants people can use to search for what they want using their voice.
With it being easier than ever for a person to just ask for what they want, more people are going to simply talk to their preferred digital assistant when they need to look up anything. Being optimized for this gives a website a better chance of being in the results pulled up by the digital assistants.
Prepare for More Natural Searches
Along with voice searches, when a person does a search online they’re more likely to use more natural phrases than they did in the past. Instead of plugging in keywords to the search box, they’ll tend to use more long-tail keywords or full sentences. Search engines are now looking for more natural search phrases instead of short keywords like they did previously.
Learn About Linkless Backlinks
Backlinks have been crucial for a number of years now, but connections to other websites and other businesses without a link are becoming more and more important. Along with focusing on boosting the optimization of their website online, business owners should make connections in the real world that can help them as well. If their business is mentioned on another website, even if there is not a direct link to their website, it still helps to boost their perceived authority by search engines and helps boost their ranking.
Boost Visitor Experience
The website needs to be well made for potential customers to stay on it more than a second or two. However, just making sure it looks good on first glance isn’t enough. A website owner will want to do as much as possible to boost the visitor experience and ensure the visitors stay on the website as long as possible. The longer a person is on a website, the more likely they are to become a customer.
Boosting the visitor experience means making sure the links on the website work, making the website easy to navigate, and making the website work more around what the potential customer might be looking for. There are a number of ways to boost the appearance of the website and staying on top of this can make a big difference in the search engine rankings.
Boost Mobile Experience for Visitors
The business owner should make sure they focus on the mobile visitors to their website as well. More and more searches are being done on smartphones and tablets every day, and many people will simply look for another website if the one they want to use doesn’t have a mobile interface. Business owners need to take as much care to ensure the mobile experience is as fantastic as if the visitor was seeing the website on a computer.
Boost the Speed of the Website
The speed of the website can make a huge difference in how the website is ranked. Search engines tend to rank websites on how they can help people find what they’re looking for. If the website is slow, people are going to leave the website quickly and move onto something else. Today, most people are looking for instant responses to their questions. The faster a website is, the more impress the consumer will be and the more likely the website will rank higher.
Create a More Visual Website
Search engines typically depend on a string of keywords to complete a search, but this isn’t the only way for a search to be done nowadays. Along with voice searches, people can use search engines that focus on visual aspects of the website instead of keywords. Websites can include more photos, with relevant metadata, to ensure their website is likely to rank highly for these types of search engines.
For instance, a person might see a photo of something they like and will want to search for things that are similar. They can click to search based on the photo and will be taken to a page that shows a number of similar photos for them to look through. When a website is optimized for visual searches, it’s more likely the person will see the photo from the website and there’s a chance they’ll click through to the website as a result.
Enhance Search Results to Attract More Visitors
Business owners might want to consider enhancing their search engine results to make it more likely potential customers will visit their website instead of another one. Enhanced search results stand out quite a bit and are more likely to be noticed by potential customers. A link with a rich snippet, for example, is almost 30% more likely to be clicked than the standard search result.
Take the time to prepare your website for 2018 now and start working on what you can do to boost the optimization of your website. This can help you ensure your business draws in as many potential customers as possible and to help you be as profitable as possible. Check out more SEO Tips for 2018 now to learn more about what you can do to boost the optimization of your website today.