5 Overlooked SEO Opportunities to Take Advantage of Right Now

I'm frequently auditing websites and their SEO strategies. Lately, I've noticed several of the same missed opportunities across a number of my clients.

In this post, I'll share five commonly-overlooked SEO tactics and suggest ways that you can take advantage of them.

1. Audit Your Site Speed and Usability with Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source project for site performance that's now built into Google Chrome's Developer Tools.

Google has stressed the importance of site speed and user experience to your site's SEO performance, and they're giving you the tools to make improvements. Lighthouse audits the following and provides detailed recommendations:

 Progressive web app compatibility

 Site performance (speed)

 Site accessibility

 Technical best practices

Here's how to run an audit with Lighthouse:

Open Chrome and navigate to your website.

Open the Chrome menu > hover over More Tools > and select Developer Tools.

With Develop Tools open, select Audits from the top navigation and click "Perform an audit…".

Review the results to see where your site isn't measuring up to Google's standards.

2. Own Your Brand with Schema Markup

Schema markup can help your brand's search results go from this:

To looking like this:

Introducing schema markup to your website has gotten easier to do, so there's no excuse for not having it.

Using schema markup to improve your brand's knowledge graph has several benefits:

 Occupy more SERP real estate, reducing the opportunities for competitors to leach off of searches for your brand.

 Reduce costs associated with bidding on your brand name in paid search ads by showing more organic options.

Help searchers quickly get to your company's web properties.

The easiest way to add schema markup for your company's information is by using JSON-LD. Here's sample schema markup that you can use (by replacing the bold text with your info):

Alternatively, you can use the Data Highlighter feature of Google Search Console if you're not comfortable modifying your website's code.

Explore more opportunities to add schema markup to your website with these resources:

 Merkle's Schema Markup Generator

 Schema.org's Organization Markup

Validate your website's schema markup using the structured data report in Google Search Console and the Structured Data Testing Tool by Google.

3. Reclaim Lost SEO Value Using 301 Redirects

Over time, you may remove content from your site or your URLs may change. If you forget to write 301 redirects, you'll lose out on any SEO value earned from backlinks to those pages.

To get that SEO value back, you'll want to periodically check for page errors and write 301 redirects to resolve these issues.

Here's how you can guarantee that you're not losing SEO value due to broken backlinks:

Open the Google Search Console profile for your website

Navigate to the Crawl Errors report

Check the list of top 1,000 pages with errors

Write 301 redirects to resolve these issues. For each one that you implement, be sure to select the now-fixed URL and "Mark as Fixed"

4. Get More Out of Your SEO Data with Google Data Studio

If you haven't checked out Google Data Studio yet, then you're missing out on amazing insights from your organic search data.

Google Search Console, where the majority of your keyword and ranking data can be accessed, is limited in not only how much data you can see, but also in how you can manipulate the data.

You can't create custom reports or save filters for quick analysis. This makes it difficult, and time-consuming, to uncover optimization opportunities.

Enter Data Studio. Not only is integrating Search Console a simple task, you can create custom reports and filters that update automatically each day.

Here are several examples of filters I've created in Data Studio that maximize my use of Search Console data:

 Separate short-tail and long-tail keywords by word count

 Filter your keywords by brand and non-brand terms

 Filter by ranking position to find quick wins

Find out how to create all of these filters and get the most out of Search Console using Google Data Studio.

5. See if AMP is Right for Your Website

One way that Google is taking it upon themselves to speed up the web and make it more mobile-friendly is by encouraging webmasters to adopt Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

In most cases, implementing AMP requires the technical resources of a developer and, in my experience, issues with the code and analytics tracking occasionally pop up which necessitate attention. So, for many companies, there's a cost-benefit question to be answered before going all-in on AMP.

AMP has been rolled out to more than 1.7 billion web pages (source), but that's largely due to some of the biggest publishers, eCommerce sites and content management platforms moving quickly on this technology. For the average website owner, there's still a wait-and-see mentality.

Google continues to invest in AMP, most recently with new features coming to Google Search Console to help webmasters identify and fix AMP errors. In my opinion, this trend makes it more of a question of "when", not "if", you should adopt AMP.

Staying on top of the ever-evolving SEO industry is not easy to do. Is your company on top of these five overlooked SEO opportunities?

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Author: Griffin Roer

Griffin Roer is the founder of Uproer, a Minneapolis-St Paul based digital marketing agency that provides SEO services among other offerings. He believes in using data to develop strategic recommendations that increase traffic, improve user experience and generate revenue. View all posts by Griffin Roer

Source: 5 Overlooked SEO Opportunities to Take Advantage of Right Now