…here’s 3 things you should start doing to improve your SEO regardless of the time of year.
Analyse Your Competition
Pick two or three of your competition, grab a note pad/app or spreadsheet and start to work out what they do online to promote their business.
Check Their Search Positions
Don’t take positions a an actual fixed ranking as Google and Bing both customise the search results based on your habits, likes and dislikes but do a few key phrase searches and make a note of where your competition appears.
Put together a simple spreadsheet and every week or fortnight recheck the positions and compare them to your own. This will help you figure out if what you’re doing is working.
Follow Them on Social Media
You don’t have to use your company or brand Twitter account to follow your competition. Sign up using a made up name and start following a them.
Notice what types of posts they are making and look at the ones that attract retweets and shares. Work out what makes them shareable and start posting similar tweets and posts yourself.
Remember, social media is not a numbers game, its an engagement game.
Check Their Back Links
Use Open Site Explorer to find your competitions back links and take a good look at them. These are the places that they are promoting themselves and the blogs and websites that are talking about them.
You may find a whole host of new places to promote yourself and hopefully generate more interest and inbound links.
Create Attractive Titles
I’m a big believer that web page title tags are one of the most important things to get right on your page.
They are not just for SEO, they are seen by visitors in the search results and need to be enticing enough to generate clicks.
Titles are also transferred around social media when people share your pages so they need to be attractive enough to be spotted and re-shared.
Spend time creating really good titles that are to the point and offer some sort of clickabilty. Use one or two power/sell words in your title like:
| New | Fresh | Original |
| Safe | Proven | Easy |
You probably spend a lot of time working on your content so make sure you spend some time on your titles and make them work for you across the Internet.
Look at Rich Snippets & Microdata
Rich Snippets are the little bits of extra information you sometimes see within the search results. They may be some review stars for a movie or the dates and times of an event and they usually help generate extra clicks to your page.
One of the ways to tell the search engines about information on your website that could appear as rich snippets is to use Microdata. I’m not going into the technical side as it would take too long but do a search and learn ways to inform the search engines about the data on your website.
Adding Microdata means adding code so get together with your web designer and work out an easy way to do it. Some CMS systems have plugins that will add the code automatically.
Conclusion
There’s three things to help you with your SEO any time of the year. You don’t have to do it all but always do something.
SEO is as much about an holistic approach to marketing yourself as it is adding code and researching keywords so the more you talk about yourself online and promote yourself the better.