SEO For 2015
Hope you and yours had a great silly season! We’re looking to a fantastic 2015. The question I always get asked this time of year is what is new for SEO this year? In my first video for the year I take a look at six case studies all that had awesome results from Google last year. Even though they were all very different sites and businesses, there were some common themes that keep emerging which will be at the core of any good SEO campaign this year.
A Tidy Google Index
This is such an overlooked fundamental pillar to a great SEO strategy. A simple search site:webadress will reveal everything Google knows about your site. This most common issue we find when doing this search is content duplication. The same pages crawled at different addresses. For a wordpress site this is usually categories, tags and archives being crawled. For an ecommerce site it is often Google crawling variations of a page. I’ve read many articles regarding what extent duplication will have on rankings. Our position is to simply eliminate these things as variables.
Great Content Updated Regularly
If you cant create it yourself outsource it. I’ve spoken with many ‘content marketing” purists who are dead against this and claim that the content must always come from the business owner. It needs their passion and that personal touch. That’s great if you love writing content and you have the time to do it. For most business owners that is simply impractical and not the best use of their time. I know that will set the community managers and content marketers, social media managers all a fluster but seriously; what business are you in? Did you write your own brochure or just give content direction and approval? You must do the same with your site. By publishing regularly it shows you are an authority and active in your field.
Avoid cheap junk content though. Just like you wouldn’t put out a substandard brochure don’t put rubbish content on your site either. If you are outsourcing make sure you are not just churning out rubbish. In the long run it will backfire.
A Strong Keyword Focus
Understand the keyword themes that you want to rank for. It’s not just about one or two phrases, it’s about a group of phrases around a central theme. Don’t forget, 20% of searches typed into Google are new. It’s the first time they have been searched. The graph below shows a client’s traffic tripling over the course of a year.
They are not no.1 for any of their core phrases though. Government and news sites are above them for most searches. They are certainly no.1 for slight variations of the keyphrases and appear in the top 5 for a multitude of keyword searches.
I hope you have a fantastic 2015 and thanks for supporting us.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
