Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is powerful enough to make or break your business. The power of data science and proper attribution using your Google Analytics becomes the arena for battling your competition with ever-changing SERP updates. The mobile-first indexing algorithms, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence have improved Google’s algorithm dramatically, making the process to rank your website organically, more complex and time-consuming. But the rewards of being ranked highly for your businesses’ core products and services are well worth their investment. One of the most important aspects of any good SEO company is based on keyword and competitor research, and content planning and distribution. Despite all the hard work and planning, there are a few things that are often overlooked by webmasters. The general SEO guidelines below can generate a boost over time to your sales originating from organic traffic.

Core Elements of SEO

Speed of the Website

The speed of the website is the first thing you should be concerned about. Google favors and pays attention to websites that load very quickly. Users will usually exit a website if the page takes any longer than 2 seconds to load. Therefore, websites with better speed performance often boast better organic rankings. There are many tools within digital marketing to help you to know about the Site Performance Factors that are slowing down your website and hurting your SEO. Check out these useful chrome extensions for digital marketing. The quality metrics, such as bounce rate and dwell time, are usually considerably better on faster websites compared to slow websites, as good site performance keeps your online users more engaged.

Sitemaps

If you have hired an SEO agency in Los Angeles, make sure they update both your Robots.txt and your sitemap on a regular basis. There are many plugins for websites that automate this process. Updating and submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console on a regular basis will help the search engines index and crawl your website more easily, ensuring that your rankings improve as well.

Crawlability and Indexing

Most websites face some basic crawl and indexing issues. Your web content has to be accessible in order to appear in the search results. Meta directives such as “dofollow” and “nofollow” are used to indicate to the search engines which pages on a website should be crawled and indexed, and which pages should not be. There are always some pages that should not be indexed such as back-end or admin pages, and Identifying which pages are important to the search engines will help Google bots better understand and navigate the onsite content.

Content is King

Refreshing Older Content

Digital marketers may overlook existing content, but by ignoring older content, you are ignoring plenty of readymade opportunities that could have a positive impact on SEO. However, one evergreen strategy (Strategies that will work forever) is that you should refresh older content to add new information and relevancy to climb the organic rankings. Keep updating your content with the latest facts and numbers. Use it as an opportunity to refocus on your keywords. Long-tail keywords are easier to rank and can get you some quick wins as well. This will improve your quality metrics and overall conversion rates as your updated content will provide more value to your users.

Optimizing Your Content

Updating your featured snippets and video snippets from time to time can get you ahead of the competition in your industry. Repurposing and adding value to older content will help you jump to the top search results.

Lack of Content

Lack of content is one of the usual suspects in not being able to rank well organically. Good and engaging content is the first thing that helps you drive traffic to your website. Good content comes before Good SEO.

Duplicate Content

The most authoritative or preferred version of similar content pages is called the canonical version. In order to avoid any duplicate content issues, it is important to manually set the parameters for which content is the preferred result for a given search query. You can do this simply by implementing a rel-canonical policy, a practice very much appreciated by Google.

Backlinks are Queen

Media Mentions

There are many free and paid tools that can send you alerts about the use of your brand name. Such unlinked or linked media mentions can give a boost to your link building campaigns and ultimately help improve your rankings.

Link Outreach or Earned Media

To take things to the next level after creating an engaging piece of content, we need to promote and distribute that content far and wide. We manually outreach to well-established publishers of the relevant industry. Industry experts and journalists are key influencers and thought leaders. This aspect of backlinking or link outreach is most similar to what a PR (Public Relations) team would be known for. Earning media exposure in this way is critical for your success as an authority in your field.

Backlink Profile & Diversity

Backlinks serve as the backbone of any good SEO campaign. Making sure your backlink profile appears diverse and natural is important in improving the overall search engine ranking performance of your website.

Conclusion

If you ever get stuck in optimizing your website for search, we hope that this post will help you to review the common elements of SEO that are often overlooked. By implementing these tips, your website will have no problem scaling the Google mountain, and climbing to the peak of the search engine rankings.