SEO Ireland - Professional SEO Tips For 2018 And Beyond

The search engine industry has gone through many changes this year that have meant SEO Ireland professionals around the world have had to up their game. The introduction of mobile-first indexing, for example, left many businesses who haven’t prepared their websites for the change wondering what had happened to their SERP rankings. Many other changes were made to the way Google’s algorithms work forcing businesses to change their online promotional strategies. With all that in mind, featured below are some tips for those hoping to improve their SERP going forward into 2019.
SEO Ireland – Professional SEO On-Page Tips
- Make sure you add searchers’ intent words to your keywords. For example: “Buy Your Product Online”.
- Spend time on your meta description. It needs to be keyword rich, but also very descriptive and enticing. Remember, it will show up on search results pages under your website’s listing and searchers will decide whether or not to click through to your site based on what they read there.
- Ensure that every page of your website loads quickly and displays properly on all of the most widely used devices and internet browsers. This could mean investing in a responsive design theme and adding various plugins to your website. You might also need to upgrade to a better web host.
- Avoid overusing things like flashing banners, pop-ups and interstitials, that distract visitors from viewing your website’s main content.
- To take advantage of traffic from Google image searches, add descriptive filenames and alt text to all of the images on your website.
- Don’t use large blocks of repeating text on any web page. Break up large paragraphs into easy to read bullet points and lists. Don’t be afraid to use lots of subheadings to divide up long articles.
- Ensure that you include your business’s address and contact information in your site’s footer. This information is viewed as a trust signal by Google and can help to increase SERP rankings.
- Opt for a branded domain to make your business appear more professional. In 2018, the SEO benefit of including keywords in a domain name is negligible. Instead, create rich snippets to help search engine crawling and indexing bots understand a page’s contents.

Professional SEO General Tips
- If you haven’t already, start guest blogging on as many trusted industry-related blogs as you can. However, instead of linking to your website’s homepage, you need to start linking to a page on your website that contains a great article related to the contents of each published guest post. There is some fantastic SEO company London providers to assist you in this.
- Structured data is now a component being used to enhance search results. Including lists and data tables onsite is going to become more important for achieving top SERP positions.
- Bounce back rates are still important, so you ensuring the visitor experience on every page is top notch is essential. These days, people are looking for fast solutions to their problems and if they don’t find the beginnings of a solution within two seconds of visiting a web page, they are likely to click the back button in their browser.
- Is your website secure? Google has announced that they will start giving searchers a warning if they are about to click through to an unsecured site. It, therefore, follows that HTTPS and site security will continue to have a bigger impact on SERP rankings going forward.
- Update old content. Many people wrongly believe that generating as much new content as possible each month is all they need to do. However, focusing some of your efforts on updating older content allows Google to see that your website is being kept fresh and relevant. Keeping articles up-to-date can be a very effective way to outrank your competition without having to spend so much time generating completely new content. To bring attention to updated content, make sure to add a date stamp to the title. For example: How to gain free Instagram followers (*Updated: 24 April 2018*).
Professional SEO For Voice Queries
Google voice search is arguably one of the many factors that have had the greatest influence on changing the techniques for successful SEO campaigns. With more and more people communicating with smart devices via voice, it’s not surprising that vocal search queries have increased dramatically in recent years. This means you need to optimize your website for voice search queries. Here are some tips:
- Focus on lots of long-tail conversation keywords. Think about questions people are likely to ask when looking for products or services in your niche.
- Start building your website’s content around common questions related to your products or services. Ask and answer questions starting with the following words: Who, why, what, where, when and how.
- Creating just one Q&A page on your website is a fast way to start seeing almost immediate results.
For Local Search
Ranking highly in local, aka geo-targeted, search results are becoming increasingly important for all businesses. One of the good things about local SERP is that it is a lot easier to achieve top positions due to the decreased amount of competition. Creating a detailed Google My Business listing for your company should be number one on your list of things to do to improve your local rankings. You also need to work of getting some of your previous or existing customers and clients to leave positive reviews about your business. Google is starting to gauge the trustworthiness of a business from local business reviews and rewarding good performers with top positions on Google Maps.

Outsourcing SEO
For many businesses, keeping up with all of the latest development in the search engine industry is not something they have time to do after taking care of day-to-day operations. Fortunately, there are now thousands of companies such as proseo.ie/seo-ireland offering professional SEO services to business owners looking to improve and maintain their websites’ SERP rankings for targeted keywords. Before outsourcing internet marketing work to an external provider, however, businesses need to ensure they thoroughly research the provider’s reputation. The cost of SEO services can vary greatly and it’s vital that businesses know exactly what they are paying for.