What are the main points that should be on every company’s 2020 checklist this year? 

SSL 

A SSL certification, also known as Secure Sockets Layer certification, ensures a secure and safe connection between a company’s website and its user’s browser. 

As Norton states, “is a type of digital certification that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection. The authentication process is much like seeing a letter in an envelope before sending it through the mail.” 

An SSL certification ensures the consumer that the website is WHO they say they are and indicated that connections are secure without having to worry about personal information being misused or hacked. Any website that is selling products or services, like E-commerce, should ALWAYS have an updated and secure SSL certification set in place to avoid any online scamming or other scenarios that could happen. 

Why would other companies who are not in the e-commerce industry need an SSL certification? 

This is because a company’s website holds a large amount of personal information without a company even knowing it. This also helps to secure the following information: 

• Login information

• Personal information

• Proprietary information

• Legal documents and/or contracts 

• Medical records 

Listen to the experts, do not let this expire. This puts your company and clients in a very difficult spot, and Google is going to flag your website as being shady. Yup, Google requires a website to have an active and updated SSL certification. Once this has expired, searchers will get a warning telling them the website is not secure. Yikes, who would not click the back button? 

Contact information 

How will searchers or interested customers find you? It is important to update the following notions with a new address or phone number: 

• Google My Business

• Any social media platforms

• The contact us form

• Any website content that has this information

Refresh content 

Has it been a moment since anyone internally has reviewed the website or content itself? Does the company still offer the same services or products? What the heck were we thinking when writing this? 

Yeah, this is common. The first step is to conduct a content audit. This is a great moment to review company goals and see if the website content reflects these goals. Be sure to add some fresh content to your website. Add new photos, and videos are all the rage right now, add new employees, some testimonials or anything else to help spruce up the website! 

When a company is checking this all out, what about URLs? URLs are critical for SEO efforts. Make sure all URLs are correctly working and there are no 404 pages. It is frustrating for searchers to navigate through the website, find the exact page and it is no longer working. 

With 51 percent of content consumption being driven from organic search results, a company cannot afford to not have some updated content and even keywords! 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Yup, here is OMG yelling from the mountain top again speaking about that dang SEO stuff. “Yeah, we know it is important.” Do you really understand how critical it is? 

At Omaha Media Group, our company follows Google Development Guidelines and SEO is laid out in these guidelines. Follow the ways of Google, my friends. 

Technical SEO 

Technical SEO covers just about everything under the sun when it comes to organic SEO. Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for crawling and indexing and can include improving this by meta tags, keywords, JavaScript indexing and more. 

What do our experts suggest updating in 2020 for SEO? 

• On page content

  • Length of content 

• On page optimization 

  • H1, H2 and H3 titles

  • Keywords

  • Keywords in URLs 

  • Meta tags

  • Meta titles

• Off page 

  • Building a backlinking strategy

  • Growing a Domain Authority (DA). 

Yup, this is just about everything that our experts suggest to always keep an eye on. This is why when a company wants to handle their own SEO, we suggest otherwise. 

Local SEO

46 percent of Google searches are for a local business, and guess what is the first thing that shows on the right hand side? Google My Business account. Why would any company want to create this account? SEO.

It is estimated that anywhere between 45,000 to 75,000 new pieces of content have to be crawled by Google each second every day. The typical searcher will not scroll past ranking five on search engines, but if a company’s Google My Business profile is right there and provides the information, click away friends! Always have the following information filled out:

• Address

• Website

• Photos of the company

• Company description

• Videos

From here, the Map Pack on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) will be one of the most critical factors for local SEO in 2020. The Map Pack is also known as the Local Pack and shows the results of the top local businesses. The three  local SEO factors taken into consideration are: 

• Relevance

• Proximity

• Prominence 

Relevance takes into consideration the search query and how relevant it is to the user. Proximity identifies location when a user enters a search query and prominence relies on details about the company. 

With a 900 percent increase in keywords with near me or tonight/ today, any company should always be targeting local and national keywords, but in 2020, local SEO might be a more important factor to consider. 

Mobile friendly 

Google released a mobile indexing first update that means the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for Google to crawl and index the website. This means the mobile version of the primary version of your website will be the first thing that shows. As a company, you have to tell Google what to crawl and index, while Google is a VERY smart machine, it still needs help at times. 

As mobile online usages continue to become increasingly widespread from Gen X to Gen Z, users want to quickly obtain information on a website that fits their mobile devices. If a company is not sure if their website is mobile friendly or not, Google offers a free test! Let Google themselves tell you whether it is time to update or not! 

Don’t worry, OMG can help you with ALL of this! Give us a call today!