As Google continues to prioritize the user experience in its algorithm, this data can become critical. It’s one thing to provide a list of items that generally lead to a better user experience (like we did above), but it’s another thing completely to be able to address extremely specific elements of that experience. If the content you’re producing isn’t of a high quality and isn’t useful/unique then, no matter how optimised your site is for search engines, people will simply just click away and find a more useful site In 2012, Google began to penalise any site found with bad backlinks and alongside this, it can ban your business from Google Adsense. This means that anyone with links gained unethically through black hat SEO tactics, for example, paid link building, overuse of affiliate links and duplicate content to get to the top of Google, now find themselves faced with a penalty. Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own.

Find great working partnerships online and off

If Google decides a site no longer adheres to its quality guidelines, they may apply a site-wide penalty pushing the results down for every page. The more infractions, and the greater the seriousness of the infractions, the bigger the penalty and the further the site will drop. The Internet is a complex place that houses billions of websites, documents, apps, you name it, and search engines help link all the information together like a giant spider web – everything’s connected! If you are a local business, register with trusted local directories. By submitting your company to business directories (especially the free directories) you cannot expect to be flooded with high quality traffic and transform your website into a high-converting lead generation machine. What you should be expecting though, is getting some extra local traffic boost and an improvement in your search engine placements. Review your h1 tags across your site, using a crawler to find them all if required. Do they all describe the page accurately? Do they use the keyword target? And do they match the title tag in what they say the page is about?

SEO has a wide range of other benefits for your business

Producing content for search engines is also content marketing, list building, and relationship marketing. Much of the time, it makes sense for the search engines to deliver results from older sources that have stood the test of time. However, sometimes the response should be from newer sources of information Another major change in recent SEO is Google’s Knowledge Graph, which first emerged around 2012 – this has increased the focus on Schema.org microformatting making content more simply deliverable. The key is to use SEO and content marketing together. Yes, SEO requires a lot of content, but that doesn’t mean you should pin all your hopes on that single aspect of online marketing. We want to come at this from all angles.

Focus on producing content that is relevant and engaging

Duplicative or unnecessary website content can also hold you back from your true ranking potential. Build a list of other niche blogs in your field. Start commenting on their blogs with insightful comments, and then reach out to them and ask if you can write one guest post for them. If they accept, write NEW content for their blog (don’t just copy and paste something already existing on your blog). Remember to include a couple links within your post linking back to your site, using anchor text with your relevant keywords. By creating great relevant content with the right keywords​ and having a few decent backlinks built to those content pages, you can easily rank in Google depending on the competition for that particular search. Competition with a comparable piece of content will beat you in the rankings if they have a better link profile and vice versa. Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "Google delivers results based on the geographic location of the searcher, which is determined by the IP address of the user."

What is the relevancy of the content between the linking page and your target page?

Search drives an incredible amount of both online and offline economic activity. As you gather intel on your website’s audience, the competition and commonly used keywords, it’s up to you to make informed decisions to determine which SEO strategies make sense for your business. Staying relevant is crucial to ensuring your website visitors are happy with what they find on your site — but don’t let staying relevant keep you from taking keyword risks and trying something the competition isn’t doing. When your schedule is manic and you just haven’t got the time to create new material, re-purposing existing content is the ultimate time-saving strategy. And although it may seem like the lazy option, it’s actually a really effective aspect of content marketing. Take a few minutes to jot down some word combinations that website visitors might use to find you. Once you’ve got a healthy list of keyword options, it’s time to see if people are searching for them. A solid place to start is Google’s free Keyword Planner, which helps you research keyword ideas and estimate how well they’ll perform in search results.