BrightonSEO was a chance to keep up to date with a range of digital marketing topics and building on the best practices that we already follow. It also offers a fantastic chance to learn about the future of search, on and off-screen. The highlight for me was integrating the different pieces of information, from the various talks, and realising how important it is to have tailored SEO campaigns for each and every client.
It’s a question anyone who uses an SEO agency or who conducts in-house SEO should be asking themselves. If you focus on one element of SEO or one aspect of digital marketing then you’re missing the bigger picture. There’s so much to consider throughout a campaign and so many different ways to consider each element!
80% of content is wasted each year – that equates to content worth around $166 billion
If we take content outreach for example. You could just outreach to a variety of bloggers and hope for the best (singular approach). Or you could differentiate various aspects of your content outreach to maximise potential results. If you’re unsure about an idea, why not conduct idea validation with bloggers and sites? If you’ve got a great piece of content that is designed for sharing, why not conduct outreach to social media pages? If you have a data driven article about your local area, why not outreach to local news outlets? By limiting your channels of outreach or the way SEO is conducted, you’re limiting the success you’re going to have.
If we waste content by only utilising one outreach channel then our content becomes another statistic. Around $145 billion dollars of global digital content was created in 2015, around $166 billion (80%) of this was wasted. This alone should tell us that at present only 1 in 5 pieces of content are actually having the desired impact.
The key to SEO and outreach is versatility. By covering a range of channels and platforms we learn what works well and what doesn’t. We can then tailor our approach, customer by customer, to focus on the high performing channels to help grow their business.
In the SEO industry it wouldn’t be surprising to hear a statement like the one below:
We have an SEO campaign and I rank position 1 for all of my keywords
This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s also not the full story. It doesn’t account for whether there is any traffic on these keywords. We then need to account for landing page optimisation to try and increase the number of converting customers to provide the business with the best return on investment (ROI). The type of thing we should want our customers to be saying is:
We have an SEO campaign that works as part of our digital marketing strategy. Our positioning within the Google search results are good and they are based on keywords that have good levels of traffic each month. We are seeing an increase in goal completions / enquiries / sales which represents a good ROI.
That’s the bottom line, RETURN ON INVESTMENT. All businesses that invest in a service like SEO want the best ROI they can possibly get. For the majority of customers this means that you probably don’t just want an SEO campaign. In markets (or keyword groups) that are highly saturated or where there’s a monopoly / oligopoly, it can take months, even years to get on the first page of the Google results. We should be using SEO to build a business into these positions.
We could also use a PPC strategy alongside the SEO which allows us to get a top position on page 1 for specific keyword terms almost instantly. These two elements of digital marketing cover the Google search section of your campaigns (although you can do the same on Bing too).
If you’re looking to inform previous customers of an offer or entice future customers with a new offer then you can use tools such as MailChimp to create email marketing campaigns. You can track the people who clicked through to your website or who liked your page on social media. This would help you to create re-marketing campaigns to get in front of the audiences that are interested in your brand or products. You can use organic or paid social media avenues to build up a following for your business too!
Ultimately you need to find the avenues that work best for your business, which means there will be an element of trial and error at the start. But once you have a formula that works for your business, you can tweak it and optimise it to get the best results for you, regularly. This is why here at ASSISTED. we encourage and promote the idea of integrated digital marketing solutions.
The future of search engine optimisation will see a variety of changes, predominantly within voice search. The introduction of the Alexa, Google Home and the Amazon Echo could lead to an element of search being taken away from our screens. Intelligence search will still require search engine optimisation as the data given to search queries will be pulled from the internet. However as we think in keyword terms (as the industry needs us to), Generation Z are thinking in questions. Their searches aren’t tailored to technology, they’re making technology tailor to them.
As more and more long tail searches are used, more and more data will be needed to provide the user with the best options in accordance to their search queries. That means that we’re going to have to provide Google with more and more data so that we match a wider range of search criteria. We are already seeing updates inside of GMB and Schema which are now asking us for prices, reviews, collections and other relevant information about our businesses.
We can already see differences in search results too (voice search conducted on Samsung Galaxy S7):
As you can see as the search terms change ever so slightly so do the results. This is a basic example of how long tail voice search will change the results if you don’t provide Google with as much information about your business as possible. We can see that Cafe Two Ten is providing all the necessary details that Google is looking for and as such, is maintaining a high position within the search results. It’s essential your structured data tells Google everything they need to know otherwise you’re visibility on Google will drop off. If you’re thinking that this won’t be you, About.com actually saw a 97% drop in traffic within 2 years due to the lack of maintenance and relevance displayed on the site.
It is going to be important to factor voice search engine optimisation into your integrated digital marketing campaign. It is predicted that by 2020 around 50% of all searches will be voice search. We are experiencing 140% growth within the market sector year on year and people are 4.8 times more engaged with intelligence services than they are with a website. These are the strongest indicators yet that year on year, search is moving away from a visual era and into an audio one.