Is An SEO Strategy Necessary In 2020?Do you get enough visitors to your website? Normally for any company, the answer is a negative one, as all businesses are looking for more website visitors.
The problem is, how to increase them.
Paid advertising is the quick way, but the drop off rate (or click backs) is huge. Also factor in that your competitors will be clicking on your adverts means that you need to get organic traffic.
This is what SEO is all about, being found in the organic listings for your chosen ‘keywords’.
But is SEO dead – have things changed?
The competition in 2020 to get website visitors is higher than ever. More websites have been built in the last decade than ever before as social media booms and online business continues to expand.
Firstly, you need to know where you are. This is done by looking at your digital footprint on the web using an SEO tool like SEM rush or Moz. This will let you know important questions such as:
• Do you have any broken links/pages that are showing as an error?
• What keywords are bringing the most number of visitors to your website?
• Is your website mobile friendly?
To go on any journey, you need to know where you are starting from. This is step 1 for your SEO strategy in 2020.
Next, you need to think about how you are going to grow your audience.
Do you use social media? Social media is a growing area for search engines. When it first began, search engines did not give it much value. Now however, it is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. Search engines consider it odd if there is no social media ‘noise’ from a website and give it a digital frown.
How do most people use the internet to find what they are looking for? Have you ever wondered why news websites rank so well for searches? It is because they are constantly being updated with new content. Search engines love big websites. Sites like Wikipedia come high on searches because they are always growing.
Do you have new content being added to your website regularly? What about each month? Each week? If not, this is going to hold you back. Small website or static websites are never going to get high numbers of website visitors because they are overtaken by the larger ones.
Blogs are still a great way to add new content and are a safe way of showing search engines your website should be noticed.
Have a look at your competitors websites. Have they been adding new content? How often are they updating their websites?
Your SEO strategy for 2020 needs to be about speed. A big area for search engine optimisation is what is referred to as Technical SEO.
This is the framework of your website, the coding, the behind the scenes techie things that are what makes the website a website. Page load speed is a big part of this. This is partly as a human visitor goes onto a page, but also as a search engine spider views it.
Search optimisation used to be all about ‘backlinks’; that is the number of other websites that link to yours.
This has changed, but links are still very important. If a news website is pointing to you, then this is very good. This is why a lot of companies use PR agencies, as they want to get into the media.
Search engines are evolving and links are viewed in terms of their relevance and value. In the good old days, webmasters would do link exchanges. You link to me and I will link to you. They used ‘link farms’ to get hundreds of thousands of backlinks.
But times have changed, search engines saw this as unnatural and spammy. Why would a engineering company in Manchester have links coming to them from India?
There are ‘specialists’ around which also need to be considered, but should you use a Google Partner Agency for your business? Can they guarantee results?
The three components to optimisation are Onsite SEO, Offsite SEO and Technical SEO.
These should all feature in your SEO strategy for 2020. Onsite SEO can be done by the webmaster. Writing new content and doing internal linking is important, but optimisation does not stop there.
Offsite SEO is slightly more complicated. Getting links to your website is important, from a range of sources. Technical SEO is, well, a bit more technical still. Are your plugins up to date? Is your website speedy to load? Where is your website hosted? Is your website software up to date?
These are all parts of technical SEO that need to be factored in to your SEO strategy. There are a number of SEO gurus like Rand Fiskin from Moz that can give advice on different areas of SEO.
Using an SEO agency is wise to ensure that you are ticking all the right boxes. They can monitor the optimisation tools we touched on earlier to ensure that your website is free from errors, and growing in website traffic.
It is good to have backup SEO advice on tap.
Your SEO strategy in 2020 needs to start early if you are going to make this year, this decade more successful.
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