Marketing is important for every business, from small to medium to large scale organizations. Conventional marketing strategies have been serving the business sector very well until the users shifted to internet-based channels.
Additionally, online marketing offers a better return on investment, by allowing the measurement of user-based data. This is another reason why marketers are looking forward to online strategies rather than offline strategies.
SEO is integral to online marketing, as it tends to achieve higher visibility by improving ranking in any relevant search result.
But does it only limit to keywords and backlinks? Of course, not. Digital marketing extends far and beyond optimizing your website or online store for some popular search engine.
So you need to follow some of the trending practices that digital marketers use every day.
- Understanding The User Intent Behind A Search
With search engines becoming smarter with every update, the user is enjoying all the privilege. After all, it is the user who adds value to any piece of content online. Keeping user at the epicentre of your SEO, all of your marketing strategies should be designed around them.
- Ranking in search results
- The volume of traffic received
- Number of searches made for a certain keyword
- The conversion rate on-site
Since the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning, search engines have started to deliver the user with more and more relevant results. This is only because the user intent behind any search is being exploited.
Search engines have started to learn the relevancy between similar terms and sentences. This understanding helps with understanding the user-persona. Use this user-persona to your benefit.
Try to understand the intention of any user behind the search made. Learn what would your user be looking for when it searches for any term. The next step is to optimize your content according to your target audience.
- Plan Your Campaigns Beyond Just Google Search
The current user is omnipresent. Missing out on any of the platforms your target audience uses, can keep your brand in shadows. And when the objective of your marketing strategy is branding for your business, you need to look beyond Google.
Your target audience may use other search engines and social media channels as well. Why should you be missing out on these opportunities, when you can gain higher returns by investing low?
In fact, one of the most promising digital marketing strategies is to make use of influencer marketing. According to the experts at https://socialbook.io/ influencer marketing can not just improve your website’s SERP rankings, but also bring in referral traffic from other platforms as well.
If your user is searching for you on Hubspot, your website should pop up. In fact, be it youtube, facebook, app stores, amazon, or eBay, SEO is all about increased visibility and engaging with your customers.
According to Eli Schwartz of Survey Monkey, SEO is not just about Google, but tapping into each and every search engine that ever existed, be it Google or Yahoo, or simply Amazon.
- Well Structured Data Is Favored By User As well As Search Engines
Since the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, the crawlers are learning the type of data that users like to read. In fact, according to an article published in SEJ, a detailed in-depth content that provides a user with useful information is more likely to receive higher traffic and retain it, as well.
Many leading marketers suggest that well-structured content is easier to read. Think of it in this way- whenever you land on a page, the very first thing that you do is a quick scroll through the page. This helps you make out if the content is worth reading or not.
- Creating Exceptional Content
So, you need to create a structured content but at the same time, it needs to be engaging and interesting. Try to maintain an informational tone, and deliver what you know. Your audience needs to understand that you are giving them something useful.
If you miss out on either of the things, it may lead to a higher bounce rate, which would eventually decline your ranking in the SERPs.
- Improving E-A-T Score
Most importantly, it is the compatibility of your content with the Webmaster’s Guidelines. An important update that Google rolled out is E-A-T; the expertise of your content on the subject, the authority it holds amongst the users, and how trustworthy it is.
Try to incorporate these simple yet important factors into your content and you’ll surely be picked up by the search engines.
- Do Not Miss Out On The Technical SEO
SEO has always been about both the factors, including on-page and off-page elements. While the off-page elements mainly include links to your website, the on-page elements include many more signals. From internal linking to the domain name, and many more.
- Optimize For Higher Speeds
The increasing pace of life is the main reason that users don’t prefer to wait for long loading times. In other words, if your website takes more than a few seconds to load, on any platform, it may cost you a high bounce rate. And it is needless to say how search engines consider a high bounce rate when it comes to ranking in search results.
- Integrate Javascript Into Your Website
The search engines are learning to crawl JavaScript. Or better, they can actually parse the content coded in javascript. Benefit? Well, javascript happens to reduce the loading time and other functionalities of your website, without needing the server to respond. This means, that as soon as you open up your website, the landing page would load and start functioning before the server could even respond.
- Invest In Progressive Web Apps
If you wish to retain your users and convert them into customers, then you may need to learn about PWAs. these are similar to a webpage and are sets of programs constructed using a similar language as of a website. The only difference lies in the type of user interface. With PWAs, you can offer your users an advanced feature-rich experience, similar to that of a native application, but without providing a separate distribution or bundle to be installed. Businesses affirm improvement in user retention, conversion, and customer acquisition after investing in these browser compatible PWAs.
- Take A Step Further- Optimize For Voice Search
With the advancement in lifestyle technology, the ascent of voice-based search is also expanding. Not only the search engines, but gadgets and even native apps are integrating voice search into their system.
As we’ve already discussed the importance of taking your SEO strategies beyond just Google, optimizing your content for voice-based search can be the answer. Unanimous research shows how the voice search makes use of the question-answer format to assess the data and bring up the results.
Evidently, you need to optimize your content to gain access to the voice-based search results. Furthermore, voice-based optimization can improve the chances of featuring your content in snippets and feature-windows in search results. Therefore, fetching you an advantage over your competitors.
After all, ultimately it is the increase in traffic and improved visibility that marketers promise their customers. And this is the pinnacle of SEO based ranking.
As the popular quote says: “marketing is done for what is to come and not what is going on” you need practices that can promise futuristic returns. With these practices, you can surely rank better in the coming years. With wrong practices, you may rank better in SERPs initially, but it won’t last long. Whereas, the ethical approach can promise gradual and consistent growth in results that last longer.