#1 Make sure you have read and follow the Google Starter Guide. Of course providing trusted and fresh content is always going to be a top priority to Google, but you need to have the basics as a foundation to let Google and your site visitor understand and locate your content.
#2 Make sure your site is performing especially mobile and ideally AMP. Google has really been pushing speed. They have now released mobile first indexing (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/03/rolling-out-mobile-first-indexing.html) to determine rankings and have been promoting AMP as the ideal framework to provide your data for some time. Especially important differences in mobile are speed and view spaces. AMP has become a requirement for articles to appear in their carousel (https://searchengineland.com/google-amp-carousels-multiplying-267572) and seems to be taking over content spaces one at a time.
#3 Create fresh content and promote it.* Since the ancient days of 1996 when Google developed PageRank as the core of a new search engine to be known as Google, link popularity as a ranking factor has always been significant. Though it has become much more complex today, links from other trusted and relevant sites to your content is still a top ranking factor. Create content on a regular basis and promote this content to increase your domain authorities and watch your page rankings increase.
Bonus Tips – Mistakes often made. Don’t just hire an SEO team to do things for you, learn and understand what is being done and why. This is the only way to make sure you will get the desired results. The real value in an SEO partnership will be having a team that will be able to provide experience, technical know-how and is able to apply this to your goals. Be involved at least in the strategy or what is being done and why this is the only way to ensure your expectations will be met.
Bonus Tip – Essential components of an SEO Audit. There are two main components of an SEO audit, the technical and the content. The technical audit should focus on the internal site technical aspects of SEO such as site performance, navigation, sitemap, structure and how everything is relevant to your keyword planning and monitoring for ranking strategic terms. Is every page on your site error free? Is Google indexing all your pages? The content audit should ensure your content is aligned with your keyword planning and also look at how your site is performing on an external basis such as who is linking to you and how trusted are those links, do links to your site have good anchor texts, is your content being viewed, who views your content and are they sharing it? Is your social media and other channels working together for your high-level goals? Does each page on your site have a purpose? There are many more details and all this information needs to be specific, monitored and have a collaborative strategy that it is all working towards achieving.
