People make more than 3.5 billion Google searches every day. If you’re going to rank highly enough for potential visitors to find your content, then you need to play by the rules of Google. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure you are optimizing all your content for SEO.

Use A Program That Integrates With Google Analytics To Track Metrics
The best way to start improving your SEO for 2021 is to better understand Google Analytics. Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for understanding your website, so you can data-based decisions. Metrics will help you to understand how you are ranking, and who your audience is, so you can create better content for them.

Identify Low-Performing Pages And Refresh Them With New Content People Want To Read
Content marketers who develop content that ranks highly have one big thing in common: they deliver engaging content topics to their audience. Successful content marketers follow trends to brainstorm content ideas, so you are likely to have to revisit low-performing content to improve it and keep it relevant. You can also hire AAM Consultants to improve your website’s content. 

Ensure Your Content Is Created Around A Primary Keyword And Secondary Keywords
Researching keywords for your content will help to develop the framework of the piece. It will also help you understand what your audience wants to read. Understanding the keywords that work best with your target audience and content will help you to build a content strategy that optimizes SEO.
 
Writing for Google needs a balance between keywords and everyday language
our content should be written in a way that flows naturally. Your keywords should come up naturally in your content, so you don’t have to stuff your content. An easy way to do this is to identify related keywords to your primary keyword.

Diversify Your Backlink Portfolio
Even if you follow all of the guidance for on-page SEO, this won’t guarantee you’ll get onto the front page of Google. A large part of SEO deals with backlinks and whether or not you get backlinks from high-authority sites.
 
Backlink diversity has two sources:

• Type of backlink - is your backlink a dofollow or nofollow? Dofollow links have more weight.
• Where the backlink originates - if you promote your content and target publishers to run a story, the site that links back to you is the source of the backlink.

 
Use Effective Header Tags To Target Google Featured Snippets
When you develop your content, be mindful about you structure the content on the page. Every page ought to have content organized logically, with the most information at the top of the page. Readers spend most of their time looking at the content at the top of the page.
 
To get the most out of your keywords that you’re targeting, add jump links to the top of your page. This makes a more enjoyable user experience and lets your use headers tags in more creative ways to try to get Google Featured Snippets.

Remember To Optimize Images
Image optimization is often overlooked for boosting SEO. When you do it properly, it can drive a lot of traffic to your website. There are lots of benefits to using visual content:

• Helps break up a wall of text
• Aligns with Google’s future goal of visual searching
• Gives better content for your webpage’s content
• Allows reader to better understand written content

Visual content can leverage better SEO. Image optimization will help your content to rank higher on Google Image Search and improve your site’s visibility.

Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly
A huge proportion of Google searches come from mobile devices. This means it’s important to ensure that your website is optimized for them. Google rewards websites that are optimized for mobile.

Use Clean URLs and Meta Descriptions
Your URL and meta description are important factors for helping Google to understand your content. There is no hard and fast rule about the length of either of these things, but you should make them both as clean and concise as you can, and include your target keywords.

• Use a consistent structure that keeps future posts in mind. Whether you’re organizing content to one area of your site or creating similar content, keep your URL and meta description structure similar for related content.
• Avoid superfluous language. Avoid fluffy language. Both should be short and to the point.
• Make them keyword rich. Include the keywords you’re targeting in your URL and meta description.

Decrease Load Times On Top-Performing Pages
Slow loading times are one of the main causes of a high bounce rate. Speed equals revenue, which means that slow load times increase the likelihood that your site visitors will leave your web page. Your SEO ranking depends on your website speed.
 
An auditing tool can help you to gain an understanding of your website’s speed. Use these tools to learn what might be slowing your site down, and how you can address that. It can also scan for common SEO mistakes so that you can improve your website content for an SEO boost.

Continually Learn From Your Analytics
Track your website’s performance to better understand what works and what doesn’t for your audience. This means you can create more content with what they like in mind. There are several metrics that you can focus on and see how to improve. These are some of the metrics you should consider tracking most closely:
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• Average time spent on a page. Look at how long a visitor spends on a page to get insight into their reading habits. If the time your users spend on a page is lower than others, this could show what content your audience likes best.
• Bounce rate. This shows how many site visitors leave the page without visiting any other pages on your site. A high bounce rate shows that something with the need improving. A long load speed or a lack of call to action could cause this.
• Traffic sources. This shows you where you should focus your efforts to get the best results. If you get the most traffic from Instagram, you know you should prioritize this content.

The beginning of a new year will always fill people with ideas of change and motivation to achieve their goals, but several weeks in and it is easy to slip back into the old ‘comfortable’ way of doing things, before you know it, the goals are a distant thought and it’s ‘business as usual’, which is not great for you or your goals.

But you may be asking yourself ‘I don’t have many goals set, I just want to publish my book or lose weight or get that promotion’, whatever the goal is (and as you’re reading a blog which is heavily based around books and publishing, I’m assuming its about working on your book), you should take some time to refocus and plan out how you’ll achieve hitting or even setting your target for 2021.

The good news is that setting targets and goals is easy to do, you just need to be specific and realistic about it. If you look at the world of business, goals are set as S.M.A.R.T goals, meaning that they are:

​Specific – This sounds obvious but so many people are vague when it comes to setting a goal, saying you want to write a book in 2021 is a little wishy-washy, setting a goal of writing a book on fishing on the Florida coast, with a word count of 75,000, begins to be more specific and leads on to the next part of a SMART objective.

​Measured – Ask yourself, how will I know once I have achieved this goal? You need to have something to measure the achievement with, your goal could be to write your book with a minimum word count of 75,000 words, have it edited, proofread, formatted and a book cover designed. Giving yourself tangible targets that can be measured (after all, you either do them or you don’t) helps you to understand what the specific outcome of your goal will look like. If you don’t know what your outcome/target looks like, you will miss it. 

Achievable – This is so important, many people make wild assumptions about how much time and effort they can dedicate to their goal, they work like crazy for the first couple of months and then burn out (the goal is missed, and they go back to their old ways). If you have a goal of 75,000 words break it down into manageable chunks, if you can write just 100 words a day, stick to this.

Realistic – Similar to the achievable aspect of a SMART goal, you should look at making your goals realistic (but challenging) for yourself. For example, if you went to the gym for the first time and decided by the end of week one you want to be benching 500bls, you would leave the gym injured and disillusioned. You would give yourself a more realistic goal at first and lead up to those bigger weights, keeping motivated and free of injuries. The same goes for your goal, make it realistic but still challenging.

Timed – You must set yourself a timeframe, without one your goal becomes undeliverable, it could be to achieve the first draft of your book to a minimum of 75,000 words in 12 months, you need that end date so that you can hold yourself accountable for the goal itself.

SMART goals are used by many successful people within every area of both business and the creative industry, they make your targets clear, hold you accountable for them and help you to set a specific path in achieving each one.
 
It’s also good to share your goal with someone you trust and review your progress on a regular basis, this is really important if you have a goal which is set over the next 12 months. Taking time to review where you are every month ensures that you can adjust your performance towards the goal as you go (you don’t want to get to the end of the timeframe only to miss it because you should have adjusted something six months prior).
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Whatever the specifics of your own goal may be, using a SMART approach to it will certainly increase the chances of your success and will build a greater process for your future projects too.