The web is the most critical place for you to market your business, but simply building a website and sending out some Tweets online isn’t enough to properly market your brand and establish your presence. Search engine marketing is one piece of your overall marketing approach, and in this post we look at six successful strategies you can employ in your search engine marketing scheme.
Recognize the Importance of Voice Search
The improving functionality of voice assistants on smart devices is also driving the usage of these features upward among more consumers. Siri, Now, and Cortana are making the lives of smartphone users easier, but challenging marketers to adjust keywords (in particular) in their marketing schemes. Search terms, and therefore keywords, vary between speaking and typing. You’ll need to lean more toward long-tail keywords when optimizing for voice search.
Adapt to Local SEO
Google has placed increasing importance on local SEO, and as a result significant changes have come in the presentation of search results based upon local search terms. Google now uses different search elements to provide immediate information regarding local businesses, so it’s important to list your business on Google to improve visibility.
Read More: Your Guide to Mastering SEO
Use Social Media Posts to Boost Search Engine Results
Blog posts and other website assets help boost your standing on search results pages, but social media posts are increasingly important in pushing your brand up the rankings. Most marketers are already utilizing this tactic to improve visibility in search engine results. For example, when a customer searches your brand name, you want to make sure your social media profiles are visible on the first page. Using long-form content in your Facebook posts, and posts on other sites, is a good place to start.
Speaking of Long-Form Content
If you aren’t familiar with long-form content, that term refers to the blog posts and other unique content that you generate for your website. While users have typically posted short messages, memes, or links to long-form content on social media, platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook are now encouraging users to post those items directly to their social profiles instead. With millions of daily users, you can’t afford to ignore the value of putting your long-form content directly on social media. As mentioned, in addition to growing your visibility on social media it will also help your standing in search results.
Link-Building is Rebounding
Remember in 2010 when link-building suddenly became a curse word in SEO and marketing? Well, proper link-building has rebounded since then and continues to prove effective in many search engine marketing campaigns. Despite updates and releases from Google, link-building remains an important factor in your search engine rankings, assuming it is done correctly.
The key to successfully employing link-building in your page and content creation is to value quality over quantity. You can link to all the external sources you want, but that won’t move the needle on your search standings. What you need are contextual, relevant links to both the content in question and the consumer viewing that content. Optimizing your anchor text in those links is helpful as well. Try to avoid using the same keywords as anchor text, otherwise you might run afoul of spam detectors.
Read More: 3 Tips for Building Better Ads
Go Secure
Anyone who’s used mobile banking or other online sites has interacted with a secure website. You can tell the difference if you look at the start of a domain name. HTTPS indicates a secure website, while HTTP does not provide security for activities conducted on that page. Google is so intent on protecting users on the web that they are providing a ranking boost to websites that are secure (HTTPS) in search results. Consider it’s not something that requires much work as a marketer, it’s an easy fix.