For many people, the beginning of February means the glow of New Year’s resolutions has worn off and new routines are starting to set in. Nevertheless, there is still a chance for companies to make the commitment to improve their SEO performance in 2017. While ranking first for all target keywords is likely not in the stars, there are several goals that can be accomplished during the year to place your site on the path to greater visibility in the long term.
Revisit and Revise Keywords
One of the easiest things you can do to refresh your SEO strategy during the first months of the year is to revisit and revise your list of target keywords. Ensuring that stale or no longer relevant words are removed and new ones are added will give fresh impetus to your SEO activities.
Stay Focused on Relevance
It’s tempting to cram keywords into all available places—from blog posts and title pages to press releases and website copy. While these types of content are invaluable places to use keywords, it’s important to maintain a balance. Ensure that keywords are always relevant to the central topic or focus of a page and avoid overloading content with too many keywords—it not only looks bad to visitors, but it can be penalized by Google.
Make a Calendar to Track Evergreen SEO Content
It can sometimes be difficult to stay dedicated to producing SEO-useful content throughout the duration of the year. In order to remind yourself of the need to consider SEO, create a calendar of potential evergreen topics related to your target keywords that can be published throughout the year. In fact, some blog posts or web copy relevant to your industry may be able to be written in advance and tweaked at the time of publication. This bank of ideas and content can be useful when workloads grow and the time and resources that would be used to generate useful web content are needed elsewhere.
Making a commitment to improving your SEO standing is an important step for any business. Setting clear goals and strategy ahead of time and sticking to them is the best way to see improvement in your search ranking and digital presence.