Revamp your SEO strategies with these seven helpful tips.

Whether you have been optimising your site for a few months or a few years, it doesn’t take long to get stuck in a routine. While developing regular optimisation habits are good, you can easily make the mistake of falling into a rut and becoming complacent about your Search Engine rankings. Before you know it, your SEO strategies are out of date and rankings are starting to slip as a result. Here are seven ways to breathe back life into a stale SEO campaign.

Freshening up your keywords

As search evolves, so should the keywords that your target market uses to look for companies such as yours on the web. Your keyword strategy may have been current and on-point a few years ago but they can quickly become outdated. Make sure your keywords are refreshed every six months and don’t forget to take into account seasonal trends. You may also want to expand your keyword portfolio. Keyword research tools include:

• Premium tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery
• Free tools such as Google Keyword Research Tool
• Surveying clients, customers and suppliers
• Analysing social media chat
• Asking clients for a list of keywords relevant to their business
• Google Analytics and other web analytics tools
• Focus groups and usability tests
• Competitor analysis
• Thesaurus to find synonyms for keywords for SEO strategies.

Revisiting link building campaigns

A link audit is necessary at least every year to see whether you are within the Search Engine’s guidelines especially in light of Google algorithm changes like Google Panda and whether there are weaknesses or gaps in your link building campaigns. Check if you have any inbound links that may be damaging to your site’s rankings as well as looking for new link building opportunities such as new directories or subject specific blogs or online media that have sprung up.

Reworking your online copy

Every business should revamp their website content regularly and undertake and end-to-end review every year. Check whether the content on your site is current and still accurate, whether there is duplicated content which needs to be rewritten and whether there are more opportunities to add content such as a company blog or a news and views page. In light of algorithm changes by Google, in some cases, you may also have to de-optimise your copy by reducing keyword frequency and evaluate the use of keywords and anchor text in your internal linking.

Brainstorming interesting article ideas

After a while, you may find it difficult to come up with interesting and relevant article ideas. But who says that this is solely your responsibility? Share the love around and generate ideas from different sources such as asking your clients and customers what they would like to read about and requesting staff members volunteer article ideas. You can also feature guest posts from leading practitioners and thought leaders in your industry.

Increasing your social influence

A website’s social influence is starting to play a more influential role in increasing your Search Engine rankings, with backlinks rumoured to play a lesser role in SEO strategies. Social signals include Google+1’s, Facebook ‘likes’ and shares and Twitter ‘followers’, ‘tweets’ and ‘retweets’. When these come from significant, trusted and authoritative sources, it is seen as validation of your website’s quality, enhancing your rankings.

Tweaking your technical infrastructure

You can take baby steps to improve the technical infrastructure of your website such as fixing broken links and optimising images to make your site faster through to making major changes such as changing your hosting company or plan to improve site speed. Analysis of your website’s technical infrastructure includes looking at the quality of coding, the hosting environment and speed of the site, the IP address, robots.txt file, sitemap structure and URL/filename naming.

Fine-tuning your on-page optimisation

With all the hype about Google’s latest algorithm updates, it is easy to forget about the basics that are needed to get high rankings. This includes on-page optimisation such as your title tags, meta description tags, headings, body copy, anchor text and ALT (alternative) text for images. Ideally each web page should target a particular keyword – this helps Search Engines understand what the page is all about and index it accordingly.

As we always say, SEO is not a set it and forget it online marketing strategy. With Search Engines constantly making algorithm changes, you need to have one finger on the Search Engine pulse and another on the mouse continually optimising your website. At SEO Works, we are constantly watching webinars, listening to podcasts and attending conferences to keep up to date with industry changes and pass this knowledge onto you with our SEO strategies.