It’s that time again where you set goals and write down all that you want to improve, but people forget that setting resolutions for your work efforts is also vitally important. While companies oftentimes will come up with goals for the New Year, resolutions are about analyzing your current process and making changes. SEO is one of the departments that see the most change year after year, so that makes it the easiest when thinking of New Year’s resolutions. Below are 5 that we’ve come up with that most small businesses can benefit from if you need a boost:
Optimize and master 3 new alternative traffic sources.
While Google will always be number one, there are so many more places that people can search for your business. You want to make sure that you don’t try to get involved with too many too soon, but focusing on three new platforms can help you reach a new audience. Which traffic sources you choose to get involved with depends completely on your company and where you think you would see the most value, but I recommend Slideshare.net, Quora.com, and Medium.com. Other sources may include BizSugar.com, Scribd.com, Reddit, Flicrk, Squidoo, and more that you can check out here.
Include a “Review Us” button on your homepage.
More broadly, try and earn more reviews. Reviews are only becoming more and more important as a ranking factor and as a way for others to recommend your business, so the more reviews you can get the better. One of the easiest ways to make this happen is to put a “review us” button on your homepage to make it easier. Putting this button in Thank You emails is also a great way to make the review process easier. If that doesn’t seem to work for you or you already have these buttons setup and want to get more advanced, learn even more tactics here.
Spend more time and money on content writers.
The best thing you can do for your business is put out quality, relevant, and unique content. This is not only crucial for SEO success and attracting natural links, but it helps give you credibility, create relationships with authoritative publishers, keep readers on your page longer, and much, much more. For many businesses, content can be improved. If you find that you’re putting out the same old stale topics and are consistently between the 600 and 800 word mark, there is so much more you can do—a big part of making this happen is really taking time to invest in experienced writers.
It’s also important that you produce different content types, particularly shareable content types, such as infographics, videos for YouTube and your website, interviews, reviews, contests, and more. Traditional content is still great, but having a variety can help you keep readers engaged longer. Again, part of being able to put this strategy in motion is really investing in content writers who have experience with creating different creative types of content.
Report on multi-touch attribution.
This was a resolution that the SEO manager of The Home Depot Erin Everhart wrote about here that is an excellent way to improve your SEO over the next year. It’s something that not many people consider, but the average customer journey is much more complicated today than it was in the past because of all the different marketing channels. You can’t rely on one-touch anymore, which means that multi-touch attribution is something you need to master in order to really understand who is finding your website.
What’s so tricky about multi-touch attribution is that 60-day cookies are not going to be good enough for you to get a full report. This means that you have to really get creative and resolve to thinking about SEO as top-of-funnel as opposed to the whole funnel. Expect a low conversion rate and do not get discouraged if someone leaves your site. They may still very well convert, they just need to hear a recommendation from a friend or be reminded in a YouTube commercial. It’s up to you to keep this in mind and really diversify your efforts.
Refresh all of the images on your social media accounts.
This one is a little bit more about organization and keeping things fresh, but think about when the last time you updated the images on your social accounts was. For many, there are still old cover photos on Facebook that look unprofessional and there are still pictures on Pinterest of things that no longer exist. Most of all, it’s important that you have a Gravatar picture that is up to date (I’m guilty of this as well). You want to be sure that you have your logo photo in the right places, but your Gravatar is what helps give you personality. If you haven’t taken a professional headshot yet, now is a good a time as any.
Of course all of the tips above focus on SEO specifically as opposed to resolutions for your work ethic in general. You may plan to get your inbox to zero or be more patient with your co-worker, but those resolutions can be supplements to the resolutions above. This list is a great place to start when having a company or team meeting about goals and how you’re going to make sure that 2016 is even more successful than 2015.
What are your New Years resolutions this year for your SEO efforts? Let us know in the comment section below.