Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical if you want to increase traffic to your Website. However, many sites suffer in search engine rankings due to misunderstanding the basics of SEO or following outdated practices.
The best way to determine if your strategy SEO needs a review is to carry out a thorough audit. When you take a closer look at how you do things, you'll quickly be able to understand how to improve your process.
Let's talk about how to do it!
The current search engine optimization (SEO) landscape
Search engine optimization (SEO) is constantly evolving. The way people find content is changing and search engines are always trying to adapt and deliver better results. For example, let's look at the rise in mobile internet usage. For some time now, mobile traffic has overtaken its desktop counterpart. One of the consequences of this change has been the increase in voice searches.
Interestingly, the way we write voice searches is not the same as when we use text. For example, voice searches tend to use more natural language. From an SEO perspective, this means you might want to favor keywords long-tailed to get a closer match.
The increase in mobile searches has led Google to completely review its results. The search engine plans to deploy what it calls its "mobile-first" index. This means that Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) will favor mobile versions of websites over their desktop counterparts and penalize sites that don't provide a good experience for smaller devices.
Another interesting change is the rise of deep learning, which promises to bring radical changes to the way we approach SEO. There are already a handful of tools that can take on some of the work of optimizing your content's metadata. This could end up reducing the time it takes to optimize your SEO. However, the effectiveness of these tolls depends on their ability to provide a reasonable degree of reliability, which remains to be verified.
However, even as the landscape changes, the basics of SEO remain the same. You should always focus on creating the best content possible and providing a user-friendly experience. You should also use a mobile-first approach when building new websites. As a WordPress user, you have an advantage since you have access to mobile-friendly themes such as Divi. There are also many tools to help you, such as Yoast SEO.
Having all of these tools at your disposal doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking to improve your SEO strategy on a regular basis. A great way to do this is to conduct SEO audits, which we will see later.
