As we ease our way into 2019, I thought I’d look at some of the SEO issues that have caught my attention and which I think will be important during the rest of the year.
Here’s an interesting fact for you. Did you know there are 200 Google ranking factors?
It’s going to be difficult to remember every single one of them, but as a brief overview, the most important are related to: the URL, inbound links, meta tags, the intent behind each keyword, your content structure, how fast your page loads, and numerous other technical SEO specifications.
Topic Authority
It’s important to write content around topics that show Google you’re an authority on a particular subject. You should aim to have a good amount of content on your chosen specialist topics. These will always rank better than a one-off topic regardless of how well it’s been written.
Clear Call-To-Action
Do you have clear call to actions (CTA) on your most important landing pages? If you don’t you need to.
A call to action is about telling visitors to your website, what you’d like them to do.
Common CTAs include asking people to:
- Subscribe to your newsletter
- Downloading a report
- Getting a quote
CTAs are about guiding your visitors through the user/sales journey when they arrive on your website. The user journey will be more effective for you and your business if you have strong CTAs.
Keywords still matter
When it comes to choosing the right keywords, you need to think about the intent of your user. What do they want to know? What questions are they asking when they conduct a search?
They keywords that you use should take these factors into account. Think of commonly associated words and questions related to the topic you’re writing about. These will help your pages rank higher.
Because these pages have information that your visitors are looking for when searching, they should get more traffic and user engagement.
Content structure
Content structure is about how well your articles are arranged for your readers.
Good content structure should include a variety of headers and sub-headers to make it easier for people to understand.
A lot of content is about providing answers to the questions people are asking when they do a search on Google.
You should always include bullet points, numbered lists, supporting images, and clearly cited research. Together, they will help keep readers engaged with your content.
Image tags
This is something I didn’t pay too much attention to a few years ago, but I’ve realised it’s becoming very important.
Google can’t read or ‘crawl’ images in the same way it crawls text. Crawling is how Google identifies and categorises webpages. To make things easier for Google, it’s good practice to give your images an alt text or ‘alt tags’ They help describe the image used if it can’t be downloaded.
You might see an example of this if you receive an email in your inbox such as a newsletter. Sometimes you might notice the images haven’t downloaded and are missing. There’s usually a description where the image should be telling you what the image actually is.
Alt texts also help visually impaired users using screen readers. They will be read an alt attribute to better understand what the on-page image is.
Page Speed
This is very much a technical SEO issue, but as writers we still need to be aware of the technical stuff.
Page speed is about how quickly your website loads its pages when someone conducts a Google search and clicks on your site.
There are quite a few different things that contribute to how fast your page loads but the faster the website, the higher it will rank on Google.
If you have an eCommerce site, it’s even more important to have a quick loading time. As little as two seconds is recommended by Google. Uncompressed images have a habit of slowing websites down, so always make sure that any images you use are compressed.
Domain security
Domain security is vitally important for many eCommerce businesses that collect sensitive information or allow financial transactions online.
When you click on a website, you may notice at the front of the URL the letters: HTTP, this stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. This is a virtual process that transfers information from a website to the visitor’s browser.
Any private data shared on such websites (for example bank data) are at risk of being accessed by third parties or hackers). To protect visitors and to let them share sensitive data safely, it’s advisable to transfer to an HTTPs protocol.
HTTPS protects data by encrypting it before sending it either way by using an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate.
HTTPs is now an important ranking factor for Google. It’s a sign that a website has more security and is encrypting data shared by visitors.