In this article we take a look at some key elements to focus on for all the SEO marketing professionals out there. We aim to highlight key SEO strategies that will help aid your business with some key growth in website traffic, customers and sales.

Understand Your Audience & User Intent

Each Industry is different therefore the consumer behaviours are likely to vary somewhat. Depending on the product or service, the consumer is reliant on your information to help them with their query or objective. Your target market will largely dictate what source of information they are more receptable to.

• Images
• Text
• Video
• Audio

By tapping into this in your SEO efforts can ultimately decide what a winning campaign is, and failure to acknowledge the array of key information will inevitably hold you back. By understanding what your consumers are expecting to find when they query a word or phrase allows you to give them the best possible answer.

The interests, likes, and preferences of your market audience can change quicker than you may think. Even if your website has the most gleaming content perfectly written and optimised for SEO, simply put if this is handled incorrectly and aimed at the wrong audience, then you won’t grow your business. If your able to enhance the user experience through your website, Google will reward you with high search rankings and the user stands a much higher chance of investing in you and your business.

Rankings have recently been fluctuating over the past year to help match the intent of the user’s search query. Whilst creating content it will be vital for SEO professionals to harness their efforts on the user intent of the keywords they are targeting.

Today Google rewards website who focus on their keywords matching those to specialist key terms that create a matching result in the form of a funnel.

When conducting keyword research, we highly recommend you check the SERPs to see whether websites like yours are ranking for a targeted phrase. If the top SERPs are bulging and full of directories or review sites and your site isn’t one of those, then you should move on to another phrase. Instead of matching keyword phrases to grasp your target audience, think of your content as being the guru for information that ultimately answers the queries your visitors are asking.

Moving further forward, opportunity lies in the path of those who suspected it. What better way to engage with your audience by anticipating follow up questions that you can answer and help your audience advance from their initial question or query.

Moving Beyond Google Search

Today Google is the whale of search engines, it’s on everybody’s lips and a common phrase whenever a question is asked….Google it! However, what is in today doesn’t guarantee the future will hold the same values. Large corporations like Amazon and Apple are likely to breach into Google’s search dominance.

SEO will not just be about how to optimize for Google, but likely to consider these other search engines to. SEO is about featuring wherever and however people are searching and not just getting the first link. So, it is important to learn ways to drive traffic and future engagement for formats other than websites.

Should your potential customers search for apps, then this simply means you need to rank in app stores. Should they be searching for podcasts or videos, then you also need to rank where people search for these. Brands which are strong are developing a multiple array of techniques to ensure a strong SEO, which is becoming imperative to remain on top.

Brands which benefit from exposure and ultimately sell their products online ensuring optimisation for home assistant or audio only devices shouldn’t be ignored. Wherever your user is coming from, ensuring the best content on the fastest platforms which are catered to meet the user’s requests are a sure way to enhance your brand.

Your goal shouldn’t just be to drive traffic, ensuring you’ve optimized the search experience, being web-based or mobile app-based ensures your creating the most efficient and engaging aspect of your user’s needs.

Structured Data Mark-up

Since AI (artificial intelligence) is becoming increasingly important for Google, structured data is becoming more important also. Should Google move from a mobile-first result to an AI-first results world, then structured data is paramount. No matter how developed your AI is, if it is too slow in crawling the required information, it will never develop and reach its full potential.

By understanding structured data, schema, active and passive search behaviours, and how they can interact with behaviours that signal intent so that the behaviour of a search becomes a much larger result in the find-ability factor.

Using tags, meta data and more recently, structured mark-up, we’ve had the ability to supply search engines the signals to understand the information’s topic and any supportive content structure. These mark-ups are the key link between reality and the screen-less future.

Creating Exceptional Content

Google is increasing their focus on evaluating the content quality, depth and helpfulness of a website’s content.

Websites which provide tremendous depth in their quality of content, results in coverage online which will soar in the rankings. Sites which are weaker in their content depth are likely to suffer for it.

Google's changing algorithms means a lot of fine tuning in the way that their search results work. If websites are still creating content in the pure hope of just keeping a content like this isn’t good enough to acquire any links, so there’s a small chance that this will rank on Google. When publishing posts it is important to consider if they will work or not. It’s more efficient to do one post that is properly distributed every few months than doing several per month which will likely only receive a few hits.

Content created that actually solves problems is the way forward for businesses SEO attempts in the future. By developing content that either, engages, motivates or connects with people will build your rankings and your brand. By doing your research and being the solution to the problem that people may have, and providing credible helpful content is not just the way forward, but it is what is rewarded. As opposed to writing purely for SEO will likely rank you much higher as a brand and a reputable business that is designed to help others.

Increase Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness

Businesses aiming to establish themselves as key players in their market are achieved through growing their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

SEOs are starting to understand that quality comes with context. You can’t rank easily writing authoritative content unless you are already an authority on the given subject.

Google are looking for a certain level of expertise to help power their results. By developing key areas that Google are looking to rank their searches on ensures your business has the best opportunity to stand out as the expert on a given topic. How can you develop further skills to enhance your blog and create more interest and exposure? How can you base your brand as the authoritative speaker of a subject in your industry? These levels of expertise and quality are the very foundation of the criteria the Google is looking for.

Invest in Technical SEO

The advancements in technology affecting a websites speed and overall performance increases with complexity every year. Your technical SEO therefore needs to be a major area of investment for the future.

Websites will start to develop more straight forward and quicker functionality as soon as SEOs discover that Google rewards sites for their speed and functionality.

JavaScript: It may be time for your business if not already so, to become familiar with JavaScript, mainly to understand how the major search engines interact the best with JavaScript-driven websites.

On-page Optimisation

Links are still very important, but the biggest return on investment for most companies is ongoing on-page optimization.

What does On-Page Optimization mean?

On-page optimization is simply put, an SEO (search engine optimisation) tactic that configures structural elements of a website by increasing its search engine visibility and grasp. This includes but not limited to, a series of different processes that collectively optimise the structure of a website to help it get found by the major search engines in specific and searchers/ users online.

Voice Search

We saw the birth of the internet explode into our lives, followed by the growth of the mobile phone to name a few phenomenon’s. Now we are starting to see the signs of an emerging technology that is likely to take precedent in the future. More businesses are looking into voice optimization and are developing strategies for the coming years. Voice search is definitely coming, however the technology isn’t quite there, yet.

While voice recognition maybe an easier way to request answers in some situations, it isn’t the ideal format to fulfil the intent with more complex answers such as comparing products or services.

Optimise for Google SERP Features

As well as optimizing for your own website, you must also optimize for the Google search experience.

Exposure is as much about visibility in the SERPs as it is about clicks. This means optimizing for featured components and other Google search features will continue to be an important trend.

Should have any questions relating to this article or wish to find out more information on how SEO strategies can help your website, then we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us via our website or better still give us a call.