Give Yourself a Boost: 6 Easy SEO Tips to Improve Your Rankings Before Year-End

Do you want to make major waves between now and the end of the year? Start with these 6 easy SEO tips to help your search engine rankings skyrocket.

Think back to your mindset in January. You had so many goals for your website and your business, and you were ready to do anything to accomplish them.

Here we sit today closing in on the end of the year. How has reality measured up to your dreams?

Whether or not you’ve hit your benchmarks, now is the time to start working toward an even better 2020. These easy SEO tips can get you on track for success before the year’s over…without eating up tons of time.

Easy SEO Tips for Better Metrics

As with so many other aspects of life, great SEO starts with learning the principles behind it. If you’re a beginner, discover more about the basics principles of SEO. If you have those basics down, use these tips to put them into practice.

1. Brush Up on Keyword Research

So many aspects of SEO come down to keywords that this is the first place you need to start. You could use every SEO trick in the book but if you’re optimizing for poor keywords along the way, you won’t see the results you want.

The trick is finding keywords in your niche that have high search volumes and low amounts of competition. It isn’t an easy balance to strike, but there are plenty of options out there.

One of the most common mistakes companies make with keyword research is doing it once and calling it done. Your target audience’s search activity changes on a constant basis. Block out time to do keyword research once every month or so.

2. Make Those Tails Longer

In the earlier days of search engines, short tail keywords were the norm. For instance, a pediatrician might have optimized for “pediatrician,” “doctor,” and “pediatrics.”

Today, those types of keywords have too much competition for you to breakthrough.
Instead, you should use long tail keywords like “pediatrician for vaccines in New York” or “what to do if your child has the flu.”

On top of the lower competition, these long-tail keywords will boost your conversion rates by bringing in more qualified traffic. Make sure you use this same strategy for links as well, using up to six or seven words for your anchor text rather than one.

3. Revisit Your Meta Tags

Now that you know what keywords you should focus on, it’s time to put them to practice. First and foremost, you need to look at the meta tags for your pages.

Meta tags are pieces of information that you write at the back end of your website. They help search engines categorize each page of your site and figure out what the content is about.

Each page on your site should have three meta tags: a title, a description, and a list of about five keywords. Check every page on your site to make sure they have them because it’s easy to forget them when you create a new page.

Apply your new keyword knowledge to your meta tags as you go along. Modify them to use some of the keywords you’ve found to be useful. Remember that users will see your title and description in their search results, so make them engaging and descriptive.

4. Claim Your Business Listings

The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to convince users to come to your site. To do that, though, you first need to convince search engines that your site is valuable so they’ll show it to users in the first place.

One of the easiest and most important ways to do this is to claim your business listing on Google, Bing, and other search engines. You’ll need to complete a verification process to confirm that your business is active with the right contact information. The simple verification makes a powerful difference, though.

After you claim your listing, it’s more likely to appear in search results. It also shows the search engine that your site is reliable because now they know that your business is genuine.

5. Blog, Blog, Blog!

Without a doubt, one of the most powerful things you can do for your SEO is to blog on your website.

Your blog adds more pages to your site, which means more opportunities to appear in search results. It also lets you delve into more detailed topics and questions that your customers are looking for.

Blogs also help with the more technical side of SEO. Each blog is another opportunity to use the keywords you’re trying to optimize for. Every time you post a new blog, it also shows search engines that your site is active and well-maintained, so they see it as more relevant.

The keys are consistency and quality. You should aim to post a blog about every week, though this varies from one industry to the next. Every post needs to offer helpful, relevant information that customers will actually search for.

6. Speed It Up

It’s not just content that affects your SEO. Your website’s technical performance has an impact too.

Search engines can see if your site has poor performance, and they don’t want to recommend you to their users. When a user does find your site, they’ll leave if it takes too long to load. That hurts your bounce rate, which in turn damages your SEO even more.

To keep your performance up, avoid overly complex design elements that don’t provide enough value. For instance, there’s no need to use photos that have a higher resolution than 72 dpi. Anything larger than this standard will slow your website without looking any better.

Year-End SEO Goals

As 2020 comes to a close, now is the time to evaluate your site’s performance over the past year. Instead of dwelling on areas where you fell short, use your data to work toward a more successful 2021.

The easy SEO tips above are a great start. Still, remember that SEO is never a done deal. The only way to be successful is to always be revising and improving your strategy.

For more hands-on help with your site’s performance, learn more about hiring an SEO expert.