8 Essential SEO Strategies Your Company Needs in 2017

If you’re still placing SEO to the side with your website or marketing content, it’s time to take it more seriously in the coming year. You have a lot more to think about than you realize, and it means thinking more seriously about keywords to local SEO processes.

In-between, you need to hone in on newer or still growing technologies like mobile optimization, or voice search. However, many other SEO strategies still tap into things you’ve likely worked with for a while, including recurring content (blogs, etc.), and video.

Here’s the 8 essential SEO strategies your company needs in 2017.

Thinking More About Keywords

No doubt you’ve had experience working with keywords in the past, though thought one-word terms were all you needed. This is an archaic SEO practice in today’s business world.

Today, it’s all about the long-tail keyword. Yet, it’s more than just that, meaning picking long-tail keywords unique to your brand. At the same time, you want to use ones you know your targeted demographic would try to search.

As Hubspot notes, you need to use the Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords relating to your industry. This should help you figure out keyword relevance and location-based keywords.

Mobile Optimization

You absolutely need to think about mobile in your SEO. The way forward on this is to test out your website and content on mobile platforms to assure it’s easily readable. Otherwise, you may scare away mobile users.

As Moz points out, take time to examine your site design, site structure, page speed, and proper optimization on things like titles and meta descriptions.

Invest in Video Marketing

Video never goes away in SEO viability, so video marketing is a good way to capture interest. Statistics show video marketing ads sustain interest two minutes longer than with textual ads.

If you go this route, it’s still important to use proper SEO optimization like relevant keywords, as well as proper keywords to your summary and tag fields.

Creating Quality Content

No matter what you do, creating quality content is at the heart of effective SEO. At the core is Google being more scrutinizing now on any content that looks automated or spam-like.

You need to take quality time to create exclusive and valuable content for your audience, written personally by you or your team. All of it needs backing up with reliable sources to prove your expertise.

Building Organic Links

Here’s another SEO essential you may not think enough about. Ignoring it can mean punishment by Google since they demand you focus on organic links to avoid influencing your rankings.

It works when other websites or blogs link directly to your site based squarely because they considered your content high quality.

In other words, you earn organic links, though it all starts with making sure your content is top-tier.

Voice Search

As a newer SEO technique, voice search should become a major part of your list. More people have begun to use voice-activated platforms that allow quick searches online. Siri is already in play, including more recent Echo from Amazon.

Some say 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search, and it’s only growing fast. To optimize, long-tail keywords are definitely important. Although now it requires schema markups for better phrase contexts. Plus, keyword searches on conversational queries helps you understand exactly what people say when querying out loud.

Social Media SEO

Nothing has much changed in the field of social media SEO. Despite Google not directly relying on social signals, placing your content on social channels provides the necessary backlink Google demands.

Be sure to optimize your content similarly to the above. In addition, keep in mind Google scans search results on social media. If your content is at the top of your tweets, you’re more apt to rank at the top of Google’s search page.

Local SEO

You’ve perhaps neglected local SEO in the past, hence missing out on a great opportunity. Making this work requires careful use of keywords containing your local city or town. Keyword placement should stay natural, though place local keywords into the title of your content so locals can find you easier online.

You can always check our blog to read more about SEO and marketing tips to improve your search engine rankings.