For years we’ve been hearing that “SEO is dead”, but the fact that companies are still investing significant sums of money in this form of marketing in 2018 suggests otherwise. In short, it’s alive and kicking and while Google might be promoting PPC a little more than a few years ago, the opportunity from an organic perspective certainly still exists.
This is the reason this guide has been put together. Naturally, not everyone is going to be in a position to invest thousands in their SEO strategy, but most are at least able to make a few minor tweaks that can transform their fortunes. Through the course of this page we will now analyse some of these tweaks.
Fix #1 – Get your featured snippets in order
This is one of the more recent suggestions from Google, but it’s something that a lot of brands just aren’t doing according to Assertive Media. The fact that featured snippets are classed as “position #0” by some quarters should highlight just how important they are. They appear above any organic results – and can double your real estate in the SERP in a lot of cases.
Fortunately, implementing them doesn’t require immense technical knowledge. Instead, it’s all about formatting correctly – usually creating tables, list or even just paragraphs depending on the type of featured snippet which is being used.
Fix #2 – Make sure your site loads fast
This next point is quite vague and in truth, you’re never going to be able to fix a terribly slow site in a flash. You can at least make Google see it as faster through its PageSpeed Insights tool though.
For example, adding a few lines of code to your .htaccess file can enable GZIP compression, while a few other lines can cache items so that it’s quicker to load for returning visitors.
Simple suggestions like this can boost your page score in Google’s eyes and ultimately make them see you more favourably.
Fix #3 – Invest in a HTTPS certificate
There are now umpteen studies doing the rounds about how most of the search results are dominated by secure websites (those using the HTTPs protocol).
It’s now possible to obtain free certificates, so cost really isn’t an obstacle anymore. Sure, it might take a bit of setting up to ensure that all of your links and resources are pointing to the HTTPs equivalent, but as so many case studies have proven the results will be really worth it.
Fix #4 – Attend to your robots.txt file
An alarming number of sites are blocking key resources in their robots.txt file. In some cases, this might be JavaScript files which mean that Google doesn’t render their page properly, while others might even be more severe and result in an entire category being inaccessible. This is one of the simplest files to edit on your server, so give it a quick once-over and ensure that your website is not falling into any of these traps.
