Five months into 2015, and search and content marketers have likely been deep into the grind of links, keywords, content, and conversions.
As you keep working hard (and smart), you would do well to adopt the following five strategies to keep your momentum going into the next year.
1. Send social signals
A lot of digital marketers complain about the low proportion of incoming traffic from social platforms in relation to the efforts spent on those platform, but a silver lining has finally been added to the social big picture.
Just as backlinks act as votes for your site, raising your domain authority and rankings, so too does the popularity of content you share on social media.
After years of hemming and hawing about social media's relative importance to search rankings, Google finally acknowledged its place as a valuable visibility factor, albeit in a subtle way.
Late in 2014, Google loosened its grip and took the first steps toward allowing non-Google social media platforms to be featured on its search engine results pages (SERPs). Social media platforms other than Google+ made their entry into Google's Knowledge Graph.
With the removal of Google authorship, as well, from search result snippets, you can expect social signals from popular platforms to gain in importance in the years ahead.
2. Befriend mobile
In the past few years, many have predicted the coming of age of the mobile Web. With the share of smartphones at 77% of the US mobile market, those predictions are finally coming true. Further, mobile Internet activity now stands at over 30% of all Internet traffic and half that of desktops.
Recognizing these landmark changes in browsing patterns, Google took the bold step of tagging sites on its SERPs as "mobile-friendly" as a tip off to searchers. Obviously, the click rates and engagement for sites tagged specifically as mobile friendly would be higher than others'.
So, for starters, hurry up and switch to responsive design, if you haven't already. Heed the site markers that Google uses to confer this tag on websites and implement these changes on your site ASAP, including the following:
- Having buttons that are large enough to be clicked easily on a small mobile device
- Ample whitespace to prevent the "fat finger syndrome"
- Copy that is large enough to read without zooming in
- Links that are placed fairly apart to avoid wrong navigation
Take Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and make sure your site passes with flying colors.
3. Migrate to HTTPS
With the recent spate of large-scale data breaches, including the infamous Heartbleed bug, security has been a centerpiece of most digital conversations. Gone are the days just e-commerce retailers, financial websites, and the like having to spend time and energy building airtight websites with SSL encryption.
In a move toward a safer browsing experience for all users, in August 2014 Google announced it would be using HTTPS as a definite ranking signal.
HTTPS (HTTP Secure) is a technology for transferring data between your site and the Web server with an additional layer of encryption called SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to make data transfer extra secure.
Keeping the ever-worsening Web security situation in mind, combined with Google's announcement regarding HTTPS as a ranking signal, it is definitely worth your while to invest in an SSL certificate for your site. It's even more important if your site needs login authentication or handles sensitive user data.