Your 2020 SEO Checklist

Here are some quick-tips to include in your SEO checklist, ensuring you’re optimizing your website and creating success for your business in 2020.

Your 2020 SEO Checklist has Arrived

Let’s dig right in. Here are some quick-tips to include in your SEO checklist, ensuring you’re optimizing your website and creating success for your business in 2020.

A new year should mean a new strategy

• What worked last year may not work this year, so do the research and stay up to date on changes and new information released by search engines. 
• SEO best practices and algorithms are constantly morphing so don’t fall behind.
• Revisiting optimization for your site on a regular basis will benefit your business tremendously. 

Be honest with yourself...how much do you actually know about SEO?

• SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, ensures your website can be discovered in a search engine’s results page when searching for specific words or phrases relating to the content on your site. 
• Spend some time familiarizing yourself with what SEO actually is, including benefits and key terms.

SEO is not a one-and-done activity for your business

• There are simple actions you can put into place that will increase your website ranking, however most SEO best practices are an on-going approach that need to be attended to often.
• There isn’t just one action that’s going to solve your SEO puzzle, as there are many pieces, but when they all come together, it’s a beautiful thing. 

Make friends with Google Search Console

• This is a must have in order to track your site’s performance in Google searches.
• The free platform allows you to view your referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages.
• This web service is search-engine focused, and provides tools and insights that can help you improve visibility and presence in the SERPs, Search Engine Results Pages.

Create a Google Analytics account right now

• This tool is super useful and important, so make it a top priority.
• User-oriented, Google Analytics provides data related to those who visit and interact with your website. 
• Understanding which metrics to analyze will help you understand specific ways to improve your website traffic.

Content is still king and the variety of crowns is large

• Publishing visuals that are simple for other sites to embed into their platforms, especially with a link back to your site, will improve your ranking.
• With visual searches on the rise, using descriptive file names is key to image SEO success.
• Developing a plan for various content that is useful to your readers, whether it’s blog articles, videos or images, is a way to create organic traffic, start conversations and build a community. 
• Headings tags, ((H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6), are important to include in your text as they are used by Google and other search engines as context for searches.

Mobile, mobile, mobile

• Google has introduced Mobile-First Index, which in layman's terms, means that Google now mostly uses the mobile version of a page for ranking and indexing. 
• If your mobile site isn’t up to par, both your sites can be negatively impacted.
• Spend the time and money to make your website mobile-friendly.

Did someone say Wordpress?

• Wordpress can be complicated, but implementing SEO best practices is easy.
• If you’re using Wordpress to create content on your site, installing Yoast SEO is a no-brainer. 
• The plug-in creates a very easy checklist to ensure your work is optimized for search engines.
• Yoast allows you to update your pages’ titles, meta descriptions and slugs.
•  They offer a super helpful and simple content analysis is offered with improvement recommendations. 

You can never be too safe

• Spend the money and get an SSL certificate, as it’s an easy way to improve your rankings. 
• SSL, Secure Sockets Layer, is used by websites to establish secure connections between the host server and the visitor’s device.
• Google themselves have confirmed that having a secure website with an SSL certificate will have an advantage over unsecured websites without an SSL certificate.
• Many browsers will alert you when visiting a site that is unsecured, causing visitors to drop off.

The list goes on and on.

In fact, Google has over 200 search engine ranking factors that it actively considers before ranking any website in the search engine results pages. 

Educate yourself and get to work! It will be well worth it.

Make sure to check back on our blog shortly, as we’re putting together tips on keyword research for 2020, a great SEO booster.