Looking backwards at how things changed in the SEO world in 2014 and how many times Google updated its algorithm (13 times!), I think many SEOs saw their hair turn grey. But those who did manage to stay on their high horse after all Google’s updates know how important it is to stick to the successfully adopted SEO strategy created by WebCEO and supported by Google quality guidelines. May Success, Effectiveness and Opportunity be yours during the holidays and throughout the New Year with our SEO strategy 2015 (download the PDF version).

Next year you should put most of your efforts into landing page optimization and their transformation into powerful selling tools. In the course of time, SEOs have learned how to rank for targeted keywords. In 2015 you should learn how to get results from those rankings.

We have analyzed changes in the SEO world in 2014, examined some of the future predictions for Digital Marketing for 2015, and created a recommended SEO strategy for 2015 that you can capitalize on.  In the coming digital marketing year you should lean on 4 key pillars:

Turn your website visitors into customers. Loyal customers.

Get rid of all technical defects on your site. Your site structure and links should meet all the technical requirements needed for successful crawling and indexation by search engines. The technical quality of your website is now one of the big factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. If you don’t want to kill your rankings, you should test your website on any issues related to broken links, images, server and page access issues, missing anchors and slow response time pages.

Check your website for any spam and keyword stuffing in order to avoid any penalties from Google. Run an SEO audit to safeguard your landing pages from Panda violations such as duplicate titles and descriptions, an excessive number of H1 headings etc.

Think about your visitors’ behavior on your site. Your goal is to predict the search intent of those who land on your pages and optimize them for relevant search queries and attractive call-to-actions, such as sign-up, add-to-cart, subscribe-to-newsletter and other call-to-action buttons. Recent studies proved that only 20% of words on a page are read by users. Make sure you have optimized your selling pages for high-converting keywords highlighted in the forms bullets, bold text, anchors and eye-catching call-to-actions.

How WebCEO can help you earn customer’s love

  • The Website Audit tool will help with testing and detecting technical issues on your site. In the report you will find two sections: Found Issues and Quality Assured (a checklist of things that you did or not, which would assure site quality). Be sure to fix all the found issues in order to make it easy for searchers and search engines to access your site.
  • The SEO Analysis tool will guide you through an SEO analysis of your landing page issues. All the found issues are divided into “Critical” and “Consider Fixing” and supported by Google-proof SEO advice on how to fix them.
  • The Keyword Suggestion tool and Keyword Research Roadmap will help you with your website semantic field research and analysis. Fill your keyword basket with the most relevant terms based on long-tail search engine suggestions, keywords from Google Webmaster tools and competitor keyword lists and use this selected keyword basket in various other WebCEO tools like SEO Analysis and Rank Tracker.
  • The Internal Links Optimization tool will guide you through an analysis of your incoming and outgoing internal links structure and the linking text (anchors) of your most authoritative landing pages in order to improve your website’s theme and increase your landing page rankings and conversion rate.

Live in your potential client pocket

Go mobile or die. In 2014, optimization for desktop browsers started to take a backseat to mobile optimization. According to research from one of the more popular mobile commerce platforms, the e-Commerce mobile conversion rate varies by industry and device. That is to say, people are more likely to use mobile devices for small-size purchases. The conversion rate for combined and tablet mobile devices is higher than the conversion rate for smartphones. The reason for low mobile conversion rates, probably lies in the current bad content and interface optimization for mobile search; your site doesn’t fit mobile device screen sizes, has a slow mobile device load time, buttons and links are displayed too close to each other on a small screen, etc.

Lately, Google has added mobile-friendly labels to mobile search results and included mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking factor to the algorithm. This means you should optimize your content for a better mobile search experience or lose a huge slice of the traffic pie. Optimize your site for mobile search and be sure to test it according to the Google mobile-friendly guideline.

How WebCEO can help with mobile optimization

  • The WebCEO Mobile Optimization report will provide you with SEO reports on your site optimization for mobile devices with page speed analysis. We can help you to see whether your customers are now getting a mobile friendly user experience.

Reside at your customer’s whereabouts

Make sure your website is optimized for local search engines. Don’t underestimate search engines other than Google. In late 2014, the number 1 web browser Mozilla Firefox named Yahoo as the default search provider for US desktop and mobile internet users. That means Google rankings within the U.S. search results may lose their former value in favor of Yahoo positions, so be sure to do local SEO for Yahoo search.

Another strong factor that can positively impact your local SEO is structured data markup optimization. The better you organize your website meta data, such as personal info, review details, product specs, working hours etc., the better your results will be shown on Google and the higher will be your CTR. You should be very familiar with Schema markup.

If you have not yet created your Google+ Local Business Page and your listing on Google Places, this should be the number one thing in your off-page local optimization strategy.

How WebCEO can assist with local search optimization

  • Check your local rankings with the accurate WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool. Choose local search engines from the list to display ranking results for a specific country and town (e.g. Google.ca, Ottawa, Canada). With the increase of search queries coming from mobile devices, Web CEO added mobile ranking results for Google, Bing and Yahoo to help you know how your pages rank on mobile device browsers. You can filter the results for your specific country if your prospects tend to do the same (in Belgium, for instance, searchers automatically filter out many France-based websites).

Implement Google-proof link earning instead of second-rate link build-up

Implied links building is the best tactic for your website branding. Google considers brand mentions to be equal to links to your website and they take this into account as a ranking factor. Implied links perfectly suit for guest posting.

Co-citation is related to building backlinks on industry-established websites where your competitors are mentioned or reviewed. It is one of the powerful tactics that you can use to succeed with your targeted audience outreach. Where else you can establish your name and stand against your competition by putting an emphasis on unique features and services that are different from those of your competitors’.

Social media link building is a must if you want to build long-lasting relationships with your targeted audience and get them to talk about you on a daily basis. Social citations are considered to be a strong ranking factor, so take on social media marketing in 2015 as the part of your SEO strategy.

How WebCEO can assist with your link building stategy

  • The Competitor Backlink Spy tool will help you with co-citation. After configuring a comparison with 4 of your competitors, you will be provided with a detailed analysis of sites linking to them. Pick the most authoritative sources and try to succeed with publishing your content on their websites. With the competitor backlink list you will see additional opportunities to obtain link juice for your site and the chance to be listed in line with your rivals.
  • Social Engagement tool will notify you about social mentions (likes, shares) of your content on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and will provide you with the social citations trend of your site pages’ popularity change over time.
  • Strengthen your backlink profile with a toxic links cleanup using the Penguin-proof backlink analyzer from WebCEO.