With the new year in its second month, now’s a good time to take stock of your existing SEO strategy. Perhaps you didn’t see the sort of results you wanted to in 2018 — or maybe you’re just trying to shake things up?

Whatever your goal, the following tips should propel your SEO and help ensure a steady stream of leads in your funnel.

1. Conduct A Competitor Analysis

If your competitors are ranking better than you for relevant keywords, it’s time to see why that’s the case. According to Mike Wiseman, SEO expert at Jumpfactor, the first thing you should do is to make a list of the industry keywords that your competitors are leveraging. One way of going about this is to use a third-party SEO tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz.

This SEO veteran adds it’s also possible your competitors are performing better than you because of a higher volume of backlinks. You can determine this by looking at the domain authority of the sites.

Lastly, use a tool like ScreamingFrog to understand how well their website is optimized. Once you have these insights, it’s possible to replicate what works on your own site.

2. Ensure A Top-Notch User Experience

If there’s one thing SEO experts agree on, it’s this: when it comes to determining search engine rankings, user experience is ranked high on the list of priorities. This means your content should be neatly ordered according to H1, H2, and H3 layouts.

H1 — also known as the main header — gives search engine crawlers an idea of what the main page is about. The other tags break the text down and make it easy to read.

3. Optimize Your Site For Mobile

Search traffic from mobile phones overtook desktop a few years ago, and now Google has started to actively penalize those sites that aren’t optimized for mobile. While as a B2B company you’re probably going to get a lower amount of traffic from mobile phones, this doesn’t mean you completely ignore mobile-first indexing.

At the end of the day, someone searching from desktops will be given the same search results as another person accessing from mobile. You simply can’t afford to miss out.

4. Factor In Additional Search Engines

The typical SEO strategy has an inordinate focus on achieving high search engine rankings on Google. Google might be the most popular search engine, but it’s definitely not the only one.

Microsoft’s Bing achieved over 12 million monthly searches in 2017 and that’s undoubtedly gone up since. And privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo gets north of 30 million searches everyday.

Other engines that haven’t yet run out of steam are Yahoo and Yandex. Simply put, you’re ignoring a large captive audience who simply bypass Google. After all, Google has 75% market share — meaning 25% of the entire internet audience doesn’t use it at all.

Your SEO strategy for 2019 ought to target search engines across the board.

5. Repurpose Old Content

If you’ve been blogging for a while, then it may be time to go back and spruce up those posts a little. Updating old content helps make it more informational and relevant for the current year. This also tells search engines that your site is relevant and should continue to receive quality SEO scores.

Start by determining which articles are driving most of your traffic. After that, add new information wherever possible including pictures, videos, and newer subheads. Sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all you need for a brighter outlook.

Conclusion

As digital marketing changes, so should your SEO strategy. Don’t rely on old-school tactics alone, it’s always good to experiment, iterate, and see what new strategies work in order to get a leg up on the competition.