With 2021 on the horizon and a step into a new dawn, we are optimistic that next year will see the return of a more ‘normal’ (that means, back to pre COVID times) daily life!

With more and more businesses focusing – or starting out – online due to the year we have had, we decided to share our thoughts for 2021 and what are just some of the key things to focus on when thinking about SEO and marketing.

Mobile Friendly
According to recent studies, over 60% of all Google searches come via a mobile device – and that number will just continue to grow. It is so important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly and accessible to all  – you can check whether your site is mobile-friendly by using this link https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly or by taking a look at your site via your mobile’s browser yourself – navigate around and see how hard/easy it is to use your site. Are there areas for improvement? Can you read all of the content and press all of the relevant buttons? If the answer is no, you will need to address these issues with your web developers.

Image Optimisation
This one is quite important as it directly aligns with Google’s goal for the future of visual searching.  Not only will image optimisation help your images to potentially feature higher on Google Image Search, but it also makes all of your content more accessible for those with visual impairments or difficulty reading.
Images are also important to break up large bodies of text and can help to add another dimension for the user. Just ensure any images you use are not too big and make your pages load slowly as a result – this is especially harmful on mobile site…!

Understand Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool to use – once you get your head around it. It can be tricky at first and it comes with a whole heap of language you need to understand, but the data provided by Analytics is so important to get a better understanding of how users interact with your site.

First of all, look where your traffic is coming from – organic, referral, direct, social sources? Which is your biggest driver?

Then look at the content and where people are spending the most amount of time – why is that? Think about how you can create similar content to encourage users to stay on the site even longer.

Revisit Stale Content
Engaging content is important! You need to create content that is relevant but that people also want to read and then engage with – either by socially sharing, commenting, saving for later etc.

Take a look at your blog – do you have some good content on there that is now a little out of date? Reinvigorate it and refresh it! Bring it up to date and share it again across your social channels, just remember to republish it as a new post so that it has the chance to be viewed by more people.

You might also find when you start diving deeper into your old blogs that you have a few pieces that are similar – take a look in Google Analytics to see which performs the best and then merge the two (or more) content pieces together to create one. Again socially share and voila, even more, refreshed content!

Look into Backlinks
Ensure that your site is healthy as it possibly can be by taking a deeper look into the backlinks you have – you might find that there are some harmful sites linking to you that may require you to action either via contacting webmasters or by disavowing certain links. To disavow links, you must be confident using Google Search Console and also be certain that disavowing is correct as it is a last resort.

Next look at what backlinks you could potentially gain if you were to do some further off-site activity – by actively researching and gaining high-quality backlinks, you will be helping your site to perform better within Google.

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