It’s a new year. It’s winter. Maybe business is a little slower and you have a little extra time on your hands.
Now is a good time to go over your site and commit some of this extra time to getting these SEO tasks completed. After all, waiting is not doing you any favors.
Here we go:
HTTPS
It’s been a whole year since Google started penalizing websites for not being secure. Whether it’s through “shaming” or actually penalizing your sites position in search results.
It’s easier than ever to get an SSL certificate. Don’t put it off anymore. Some hosts will even install an SSL for you.
If you know what you’re doing head on over to Namecheap and purchase your SSL. They have a great tool to help you choose the correct type and if you host with Namecheap installing it is pretty doable.
If you host with someone else, Comodo or Namecheap have installation, verification, and all the other steps you have to perform in order to get your site using your SSL Certificate.
Once your SSL is installed on your cPanel or hosting account, you will need to replace the URL’s on your website with HTTP, with URL’s that start with HTTPS. There are several tools to help your or a Simple SSL plugin that automatically changes URL’s to HTTPS and redirects visitors to the HTTPS version of your pages.
If you don’t want to learn to install server and site security let us know. We can give you some options.
Mobile Experience
AMP
AMP Project is geared toward making the web mobile friendly. With Code that plays well with mobile devices and loads quickly.
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”) Project is an open source initiative that came out of discussions between publishers and technology companies about the need to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone — publishers, consumer platforms, advertisers, creators, and users.
Add AMP support to your WordPress website with the AMP plugin from Automatic. It’s easy and will help your site to be ready as the internet as a whole becomes more and more mobile.
When activating the AMP Plugin or any other plugin on your live site make sure you create a backup. Don’t cause a catastrophe you can’t come back from while trying to improve your site.
Responsive
In 2018 and beyond you need a mobile responsive site as a minimum. Your site needs to be able to resize and function correctly on a smartphone.
Head over to this responsive website tester from responsinator.com and test your site. If it either breaks or looks exactly the same no matter what size screen you are using then you have a serious problem.
If your site is not responsive and you don’t know how to make it responsive, contact us or give us a call. We can give you some options to make your site mobile friendly.
Build Some Links
Reach out to those sources you have not had time to contact yet and look for link building opportunities.
Who in your industry can you guest blog for?
Who would be willing to feature your business on their blog? Is there a product you use frequently who would be willing to feature your case study on their social media and link to you from their product pages?
Local Citations
If you have been putting off cleaning up your Local Citations or getting listed now is a perfect time to get those taken care of.
Are there any local citations you need to sign up for and are there citations with incorrect information? Go through and audit your local citations and make sure your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) are correct.
Having the wrong information out there can negatively affect your local SEO and “confuses” search engines.
Moz has a great infographic of what they have found to be the citation hierarchy and is a great place to find some you may either be missing or not thought of before.
In conclusion:
A lot of these are low hanging fruit and some are much more technical. It’s the new year. So set some goals for your website’s SEO and set out to accomplish them. As always, let us know if you need a hand. We’d love to help!
