Humphreys Media   •   July 15

Last year was full of surprises for digital marketers and search engine marketing specialists. Google introduced many of its updates including RankBrain, Semantic Search, AMP as well as improvements on mobile search. Major algorithm updates Google Panda and Penguin, were also given a refresh; making them a lot smarter and now plays critical roles for your SEO success.

Here at Viplex Media, we have listed down the top 7 actionable steps you can take to ensure that you dominate Google Search. This is our very own SEO Checklist.

1. Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

What’s the point of having a website if people are not able to find it? Search engines will never give you a high ranking if your website is not search engine friendly. So make sure that you prioritize optimizing your website for search engines. Make it easy to locate content on your website, that is the most important thing.

Here’s how you can make sure your content is found easily by Google bots:

Logical site structure

Best practice dictates that web pages should be structured in a tree-like structure. Search engines should be able to reach all the essential pages of your website through the homepage itself. Also, make sure that the URLs reflect the structure of your website.

Internal linking should also be practiced as this strengthens the connection/relation of your pages. Also consider implementing breadcrumbs to make it easier for bots to see the flow of your website.

Create a XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps help search engine bots to crawl your website and index the pages accordingly. It serves literally as a map for search engines to help them find their way throughout your site.

Your site’s XML sitemap should include the canonical version of the URLs. Always update the modification time of a site while updating the sitemap. Allow your visitors to find the latest updated content on your site through RSS atoms.

If your sitemap already reached its limit, add one more sitemap or create multiple sitemaps. This is highly advised for e-commerce sites.

Use the right Meta Tags

Always pay attention to your title tags and meta description. Make sure you include your target keywords in your page titles but also be careful not to over optimize it. Use Google Keyword Planner or aHrefs keyword tool to find good keywords that have significant search volume but also have fair amount of competition.

2. Master Google Panda and Improve your Site’s Content

If you’re not familiar with Google Panda, it is the algorithm update that polices or strains out websites with thin or low-quality content. Content quality has always been one of the major factors that determine a website’s ranking. It is crucial for marketers to implement good practices when it comes to content writing and avoid all such bad practice that can affect the ranking.

Make sure you build useful, informative, and expert level content, which users can find engaging and interesting. Avoid duplicates at all cost. Good content should also have a visual aspect to it so make sure you attach a good image on your articles.

3. Learn About Google Penguin

If Google Panda is in charge of filtering out bad content on search, Penguin update takes care of penalizing websites that are using unnatural ways of getting backlinks. Penguin checks a website’s backlinks profile specifically determining if your website is gathering links from bad neighborhoods like spam sites, porn sites, and other banned websites.

To ensure you don’t get penalized by Google Penguin, avoid banking on low-quality backlinks. The best way to go around to gather quality backlinks is content marketing. Tools like Moz, aHrefs, and Semrush allows you to double check if a website is worth getting a link back to. A good backlink is the one with high domain authority and receives a considerable amount of web traffic.

4. Make Your Site User-Friendly

Truth is, Google has long been considering User Experience as a ranking factor for websites. But they’ve only emphasized it further when they started focusing efforts on improving mobile search.

Make sure your website is optimized not just for search bots but also for your actual website visitors. Areas to keenly monitor are mobile friendliness, page load speed (especially for low mobile net connection), and HTTPs protocols.

5. Implement AMP effectively

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a new feature launched by Google to create the better web content for mobile devices. AMPs are four times faster and consume 10 times fewer data compared to non-AMP pages. According to surveys, more than 90% of the AMP publisher experience high click-through rates.

If you get most of your traffic and conversion from mobile devices, implementing AMP is a must.

6. Earn social signals

Google loves websites with a strong social signal. Social media presence establishes a trust factor with Google confirming the authenticity of your website and brand. Make sure your website receives a generous amount of exposure on social media.

The best way to strengthen your social signals is to create viral content that would attract social links and shares. Make sure your content provides substance and relevant information users can benefit from. And if you can, inject a little humor and entertainment in it to add to its virality.

7. Learn your Local SEO

Get traffic and conversion from people who matter: your local community. Local SEO marketing allows you to optimize your website for local search and be able to target audience. This is very important especially for businesses with an actual store front like healthcare and medical services.

Recent surveys reveal that most users who search on mobile have higher chances of visiting a service later within that day as compared to those searching on a desktop and other devices. And most results on mobile are geo-targeted, you can see the value of investing in learning the best practices for local SEO.

Here are some tips to get your local SEO pumped up:

For local businesses, make sure your website includes the business name, address as well as phone number (NAP). It should be consistent all over the web. Use only one NAP for social profiles and business directories.
Create a Google My Business profile so you can be visible on Google Maps.
Encourage your customers to leave a positive review on your Google My Business Page or Facebook page

These are the 7 most important steps and critical areas to check to ensure your website is ready to dominate Google Search. At the end of the day, a good website is the one that provides users value and substance. Don’t be fooled by so-called search engine hacks that promise to help you rank in a short amount of time. Quality always provides long term results. Producing quality is the always best way to go!