If you’re looking to keep your SEO sharp, the odds are that you already know that keeping up-to-date is important. But when strategizing SEO, businesses have an array of choices. How do you know where you should focus your attention? How can you maximize the financial impact of your investment, both of time and of money? Some SEO strategies have proven to be more powerful than others. Here are a few particularly excellent gambits:

Optimize For Mobile Customers

According to Forbes, more people than ever use their mobile devices to browse the internet. In fact, mobile devices are used more than desktops. The big search engines like Google have noticed this, and now they more heavily weight your mobile site. This means that any SEO strategy that doesn’t prioritize your mobile site and mobile content is leaving you behind.

Go Local

Another effect of the increase of mobile browsing/searching is that local optimization matters more than ever. If your customers are searching for “Orange County nail salons” on their phones, for example, and you’re optimized only for “nail salons,” your site might not show up on their search. A local SEO company is particularly useful in this regard: as it can help you think of and optimize for keywords that you might not know you need to use. Even if you do a fair amount of non-local business, make sure you are optimized for both local and national keywords.

Ask And Answer Questions To Optimize For Rich Answers

What’s a rich answer? It’s a small piece of text that a search engine will display in response to a query, rather than making the user click through to a website. For instance, if you search “what year did the Beatles break up?” you might be given a rich answer display of “1970” with a snippet of text from Wikipedia. Search engines don’t make up these answers, but rather lift them from quality sites. Asking relevant questions, and correctly and concisely answering them, can give your SEO a boost.

Use Awesome Links AND Awesome Content

Most people with a passing knowledge of SEO know that including quality links is important, but you might not know exactly how important good links are: they’re one of the top three ways Google decides how to rank sites.

But excellent links aren’t enough by themselves. If your content is old or lackluster, links aren’t going to nudge your search rank higher. Rather, if you’ve already got excellent, relevant content, great links can be the catalyst that puts your site over the top.

Great SEO requires you to stay up-to-date, concentrate on strategies with a high return on investment, and create a volume of high-quality content. Some businesses can manage this in-house, while others realize that their time would be better spent concentrating on the core competencies that make them money. Whether you put in the time to do it yourself or hire an experienced SEO company, concentrating on the most effective SEO strategies can boost your company’s visibility and your bottom line.

Sources:

12 Most Effective SEO Strategies – www.forbes.com
What Are “Rich Answers” And How Do They Affect SEO? – www.forbes.com