50 Quick & Actionable SEO Tips - Boost Your Audience

101 SEO Tips to Use Right Now

1. Do not use “#” in URLs. Googlebot does not support index URLs with “#” listed.
2. With the new mobile-first index, use Google Search Console’s Fetch and Render tool to test how Google’s mobile search agent views your mobile pages vs. your desktop pages.
3. Do not use AJAX-Crawling scheme on new websites. Migrate any sites that are currently using AJAX-Crawling. Remember: remove “meta fragment.”
4. If you’re donating to charities and nonprofits for a backlink, this is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.
5. While your sitemaps are limited to 50,000 URLs per Sitemap, you now have the ability to have acompressed version of 50MB, compared to the previous 10 MB.
6. Google will show emojis in search results. Emojis can play a big role in local search. Just check out how you can search for a pizza place nearby using an emoji.
7. Content is king, backlinks are queen, and video may be the spawn of the two. Google integrates video into Google Maps listings. So, if you don’t have a video strategy, start developing one soon.
8. If you’re a brick-and-mortar store, utilize Google AdWords distance and store visit reports to optimize what geographic regions and user locations are driving the most in-store purchases.
9. When conducting keyword research, incorporate queries that are more relevant to voice search. Now that Google voice search is available in 30 new languages, it is available to more than 1 billion people worldwide. Voice search will continue to become more important with Google Answers and the mobile-first index.
10. Ever since Penguin is now real-time, it’s important to monitor your backlinks in Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Links to Your Site) and disavow them once a month.
11. To help prep for the mobile-first index, increase mobile search traffic, launch Google AMP or Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Google will serve up your AMP pages or PWAs in the mobile-first index if you don’t have a mobile site, so you’ll want to make sure your primary content and links list on the AMP pages or PWAs.
12. Keep your link building white hat. If Google detects mass manipulation, it will devalue all of your links, not just the bad.
13. Many SEO marketers feel unlinked citations offer no value. However,Gary Illyes hinted in an interview that there might be a future in unlinked citations. So, any mention is a good mention.
14. Stop building a mass amount of links on directories. Stick with directories that are of higher quality (Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google+, etc.) and add relevance to your brand.
15. Stop using widget links as a link building tactic. If you’re going to use widgets, use them as a brand awareness strategy and UX experience.
16. Make sure you have a clear linking structure within your website. For example, if you’re counting on your footer links to drive your internal linking strategy, think again. Footer and header links do not hold a lot of weight. Therefore, internally linking within your body copy will allow Google to navigate your website better.
17. When migrating your site from HTTP to HTTPS, do not make any other changes to your website. Google is assuming that nothing else has changed on your website. If you change more than one thing, Google may have a hard time acknowledging all the changes.
18. Canonical tags do not save crawl budget. Search engines must also crawl the duplicates to determine they are, in fact, duplicates.
19. Keep site speed to 2-3 seconds for the user. You can use tools like WebPageTest to find your site speed.
20. Swap out your Twitter URL for Twitter Cards.
21. Same goes for Facebook; you want to add Open Graph markup to optimize how your posts are viewed on Facebook.
22. If you’re an e-commerce brand and you’re not using Instagram, now is the time to start. Based onInstagram’s early success with shopping features, they are starting to roll out to thousands of businesses that sell apparel, jewelry, or beauty products.
23. With Google Home, Amazon Echo, and more digital assistants rising, facts and local guides will become extremely beneficial for brands looking to land in the first result.
24. Google launched a trip planningfeature in their Knowledge Graph so if you’re a local business or travel company, creating travel guides might work to your advantage.
25. Invest in customer service on Facebook. You can sell and purchase through Facebook Messenger. Everlane is an excellent example of a brand doing this well.
26. Test and experiment with LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn allows you to track conversions for how many users from your sponsored content and ads are converting.
27. Create “Shop the look” ads in Google AdWords to convert more mobile searchers.
28. Try creating a 360-degree video for Facebook. Now, you can live stream 360-video on Facebook.
29. Get featured in Google’s Search Live carousel results by having AMP pages, structured data markup, and an Atom XML feed. Then,complete this form.
30. Reddit is the ninth largest website in the U.S. This is somewhere you want your brand to be, and you can start by testing with their sponsored content ads.
31. If you’re a local business and on Facebook, geotarget your Facebook Live posts to include or exclude specific locations.
32. You can have customers browse your local store within Google if you’re using Google’s Local Inventory Ad program.
33. Indexed age of your domain has always been an important factor in ranking. If you’re a newcomer, it’s going to be hard to compete against a website that’s been around for 10 years.
34. Maintain a healthy link profile because the search engines connect this to the authority and quality of your overall website and brand.
35. Get rid of thin content or rewrite it. It’s doing nothing for your site but bringing down the quality. Long-form content has proven to get higher search results.
36. Clean up duplicate content that’s hosted internally or externally. By cleaning up duplicate content, you’re removing any scraped content or duplicate on your site. If you have duplicate content on other sites, email the webmaster to have it removed or add it to your disavow file.
37. Customer citations are continuing to grow. Put together a plan to ask customers for product reviews or comments on products. Search engines use these to attribute value and result in higher conversions.
38. Track what pages users are leaving your site by analyzing the exit pages. Why are users leaving? Consider revising these exit pages to increase time on site.
39. If you see low click-through rate in Google Search Console Search Analytics report, consider rewriting meta descriptions.
40. Sometimes old content is still driving traffic. If this is the case, consider creating a new post with similar content to drive new, fresh, more relevant content.
41. Double check to make sure your money pages are indexed with ‘site: domain’. Also, check to see if you’re double-indexed. Double-indexing can lead to duplicate content.
42. One page should have one H1 tag. Don’t use multiple H1 tags on a single page.
43. FAQ pages are growing in importance; I’d suggest you spend time combing through your FAQ pages. To gain more exposure for long-tail keyword terms, rewrite these FAQ pages to incorporate more of these search terms.
44. You can no longer match your SEO efforts with PageRank now that Google has removed it. When comparing your site to other brands or competitors, use SEO tools like Moz’s Domain Authority or Ahrefs’ URL Rating. These are not a replacement for Google’s PageRank because they aren’t 100 percent accurate, but it’s a good starting point.
45. When redesigning your website, bring in an SEO marketer before you invest more time and resources in your site. Many new trendy website designs like parallax scrolling need to tailor to SEO best practices such as pagination.
46. Don’t forget to add image ALT attributes before posting. Also, try to include relevant keyword phrases.
47. You can have more than one sitemap. If you want Google to focus its crawl attention to specific sections of your site, create a separate sitemap. These are for images, videos, profiles, and blog posts.
48. Make sure all your pages have the rel=canonical tag directing search engines to the main page. Rel=canonical tags reduce confusion when another site scrapes your content, ultimately creating duplicate content.
49. If your URLs are dynamic URLs (meaning you see something like this: www.donutsaregoodforyou.com/?mode=1-list=1), you’ll want to adjust your parameters in Google Search Console to how you want Google to crawl your content. Again, this helps with reducing duplicate content.
50. When someone else is syndicating your content, make sure they place the rel=canonical tag to direct back to your original page.