Organic Search
Digital Marketing is a fast moving business. As a Digital Marketing Agency, it’s our responsibility to remain at the forefront of every trend, so that our clients have every advantage in the online marketplace.
2018 is going to be an exciting year for SEO. It’s set to bring about some big changes, so make sure that you and your business are ready for them!
Get ready for mobile
Mobile search already makes up 57% of all search traffic. This comes from devices such as tablets and smartphones. Google is constantly adapting their ranking factors to provide the most relevant, helpful content to their users, therefore they are going to be taking mobile into account. Google are creating two indexes – a mobile and a desktop. Most importantly, the mobile index is the primary one.
Mobile responsive design, page load speed and mobile-friendly media will all be factored into your search engine ranking. In order to maintain a high ranking, it’s important not to underestimate the impact that mobile indexing will have on your business. Tailor your website and SEO efforts to mobile search.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Accelerated Mobile Pages are Google’s answer to making their searches mobile friendly. The AMP icon appears on pages that have used the AMP software, which allows pages to load 4 times faster with far less data. These pages are stored on the Google AMP Cache, and therefore appear instantly in a variety of load optimisations.
AMP pages often appear on a carousel, encouraging mobile users to click. Although AMP is not a ranking factor, mobile users are far more likely to click on a carousel result, not bounce from a fast loading page, and spend time on a site that is easy to use. All of these will affect your SERPs.
Prepare for voice search
Siri has been around for a long time, but it’s only in the past year that Voice Search has really taken off. With the launch of Alexa, Google Home and a constantly progressing market, marketers need to pay attention to Voice Search.
To optimise your site for voice search, you need to be considering long-tail keywords. As well as short, time-saving searches, consider the questions users might be asking their virtual assistants. Instead of ‘hairdresser northampton’, they might say ‘where’s the best hairdresser in Northampton’, and your landing pages need to reflect this.
Invest in content
Google’s constantly developing algorithms have one primary goal: to provide the most relevant content to users. High results can be achieved with your on and off-page SEO techniques, but the best thing to do to future-proof your strategies is to ensure that your content is consistently relevant.
High quality blogs will always have a high click-through-rate and be in consistent demand by searchers. This will only ever improve your trust flow and bring you traffic.
Answer questions – appear in the answer box
Searchers today are often looking for a quick answer. Google’s Answer Box provides these, lifting snippets of text, bullets, and tables to give the information as efficiently as possible. This information isn’t necessarily taken from the first search result – if you provide accurate, reliable information and ensure that your language is consistent with the search terms, you can still appear above all of the listed results.
The best SEO strategy is to maintain an ongoing improvement plan, remaining informed of every update and consistently adapting to it. What worked for you last year may not work in the new year, so make sure you contact us for a free SEO Health Check to see where you can improve your site.
