Every year, SEO tactics change and morph. This past year, we have seen a huge range of Google updates, which have changed the game play again. No matter what sort of business you have, being able to stay up to date with the changes can be really difficult. However, it is about prioritizing the right tasks, particularly within search engine and social media marketing. Get it right and you could earn a lot of money. Let’s take a look at the best tactics that will allow you to improve your bottom line by getting more conversions and relevant traffic in 2013.
Optimizing Pages by Using SEO Best Practice
Everybody should read the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide provided by Google in 2012. There are lots of topics in there that can help you be on the top of your game. You will learn how to create accurate and unique page titles, how to make description tags and improve the structure of your site and URL. You will learn how to make easy navigation possible, optimize your content, offer quality services and content, write an appropriate anchor text, optimize your images, use the right heading tags, deal with crawlers, use robots.txt and use “nofollow”. It also teaches you how to SEO your mobile sites and how to submit them to the search engines, as well as showing how to guide your mobile users. Lastly, it teaches you about promotions and analysis and what free webmaster tools are available to you. Implementing all of these tactics will improve your rankings slowly but surely.
Social Media
Nobody who wants to make it online can ignore the power of social media. You must use all the big ones, being Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. These platforms greatly influence the decisions people make when they purchase something. Also, it allows them to share their experiences with others. This means the brand will get mentioned more regularly. Did you know that 76% of consumers take the time to recommend companies and products to their friends? Or that 62% of online shoppers read reviews on Facebook before making a decision, with some 75% of these getting to the site through the links on social media? Also, if consumers interact with you through social media, they have a 150% bigger chance of actually buying your product.
These statistics demonstrate just how important social media actually is. You have to take advantage of this as much as you can. Make sure your customers feel empowered to leave reviews for you as well, which will attract new customers in turn.
Using the Mobile World
You should also consider building mobile apps and mobile pages. Some people don’t even have laptops or computers anymore. If you are not accessible via mobile devices, you will lose out on a lot of customers. You have to make sure your mobile sites and apps include calls to action, all your contact details, directions to your store, in store and online promotions, pictures of your stores, any YouTube videos about your company, the option to share on social media, click to call features and links to any promotions.
Build Local Pages
You need to have as much enhanced data as possible. The more of it you have for your local business, the more you will be shown to your customers. Some of the enhanced data you can consider includes business descriptions, types of categories, web page links, operating hours, descriptions and images of your products and offers, and images and logos representing your business. Do make sure everything you put on there is fully consistent.
Fix Data Inconsistencies
Try to include a single PoC (point of contact) to manage all your business listings. You will increase how you appear on your local maps if you have categories that are relevant to the services offered by your business. Your name, address and phone (NAP) have to be consistent. So, if you change your details, you have to make sure that all of those details are updated.
Manage & Update Local Data
You have to make sure that your data is consistent. This builds the trust that search engines have in you and makes the user experience better. If you claim and manage all of your listings directly on the search engines, it makes it possible to optimize and distribute your data straight away, using images, videos, categories, descriptions, served areas, links to social media and so on.
Consistent Data Validation
If there is any incorrect local business data, you have to make sure it is overwritten straight away. This will make your rankings higher because your data is consistent. The algorithms used by search engines decide how high you rank and these use consistent data as a deciding factor. You have to make sure that you are present on all of the information services, rather than just a few of them.
There are a number of ways for you to ensure your local business data is always up to date. First of all, you need include all of the things that matter to customers (name of your business, information on manager, contact details, areas serve, storefront images, logo, categories, operating hours, special offers, social network links, review links, map links and so on). Secondly, make sure that you use the internet Yellow Pages and local search directors (such as InfoUSA, LocalEze, Yellowpages, Axciom, Yelp, Superpages, Facebook, FourSquare, GPS Devices, Local and so on).
Semantic Markup for SERP Visibility
If you can, you should also add semantic markup. This will increase the listings of your page and increase your click through rates. Most ecommerce sites tend to use GoodRelations, who are really good at this sort of work. In 2011, three of the biggest search engines started working with Schema.org, which creates a structured markup. You need to take the time to learn about that as well.
What to Remember for 2013
SEO tactics have changed tremendously over the last year. Hence, you have to make sure your website is updated to reflect this, as well as your marketing strategies. Try to focus on having a structured markup on your pages and on local search optimization first. This is because it will make you far more visible straight away.