How to Get Your Business Noticed Online

When looking for a new product or service, most people’s first port of call will be a search engine. In fact, Google processes over 40,000 search enquiries per second and over 3.5 billion per day!

Getting your business to rank highly in a search engine results page (SERP) plays a huge part in getting noticed online. Using search engine optimisation (SEO) puts you in front of a captured audience who are already searching for your product or service. Learn more about what SEO is in our blog.

Google’s algorithm, which measures the importance of website pages and where they rank in search engines, is changing all the time. RankBrain, the machine learning-based search engine algorithm, helps Google to process search results and provide more relevant search results for users. This helps Google to know what users find most important and relevant in their search queries.  Implementing best SEO practices will ensure your website continues to rank highly, increasing online visibility, leads and sales.

Implementing best SEO practices in 2019 include:

Optimise for featured snippets

Featured snippets have become an essential element of SEO. When searching for a query, the featured snippet is the box of information that answers your question without the need to click a link. They are becoming more relevant and important as mobile and voice search rise in prominence.

Although the searcher no longer needs to click on your website to get the answer they have searched for, research by HubSpot has found that content with featured snippets have doubled their click-through rate. This may be as your target audience click through to the website to find out more information about the topic they have searched after feeling satisfied with your answer in the featured snippet.

Update old pages

Too often, content is added to a website and then forgotten about. If you have good content that ranks and keeps people coming back to your website, its important that you keep it current and relevant. You should freshen it up with new updates, so that it keeps ranking and keeps your audience reading.

See how that improves your website rankings and continue to adapt if necessary.

Cluster your content

Google states that its mission is ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

In order to do this, it’s important that your website architecture is structured in an organised way as this can increase your search engine visibility. Clustering relevant content helps Google understand semantic references to keywords and will improve your ranking.

This involves the process of having singular ‘pillar’ pages which act as hubs of information. From this hub, each subtopic should have its own page and be connected via a link. Every piece of content should connect back to the hub, with the pillar page providing the primary anchor point for navigation. An example of this would be a service page, which leads off to the different services a business provides.

Focus on voice search

Over the last few years, there has been a surge in the sounds of ‘Alexa,’ ‘Siri,’ and ‘Hello Google.’ In fact, according to comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searched by 2020. You therefore need to include voice search optimisation into your SEO processes.

In order to do this, you should optimise your content to align with the types of queries you hear in voice searches and research long-tailed keywords that mirror how users are likely to speak. In a study by Backlinko, they found that the average count of a voice search result page was over 2,300 words. If you want to rank for voice search, you need to make long form content a priority.

Add video content

Video is now more important than ever. According to Animoto, 4 times as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.

There are two components to effective video SEO. First, your content needs to be marked up properly to let search engines know that the content is about. Marking up your content includes many factors which include providing the name of the video, the description and the thumbnail URL. As well as this, adding a transcript to your video is important as it tells search engines what content you are providing in your video.

Your video also needs to hit your customer in the right time of their journey, so your content should be relevant to their needs. For example, individuals in the research stage are likely to want to know more about your company and product, whereas those in the post-purchase stage would prefer tutorials on how to use the product.

EDGE CREATIVE & SEO

Keyword research, titles, headings, URL’s, and meta-descriptions are all vital within your SEO strategy. These factors continue to affect how your website ranks.

With our solid and established SEO team, we have refined our SEO processes to ensure success for our clients. In order to find out how we can help you revolutionise your marketing and get your website noticed online, get in touch by calling 0121 355 8092 or dropping me an email on laura@edge-creative.com.

Laura Williams,
Head of Strategy

References:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-featured-snippet-box

https://backlinko.com/voice-search-seo-study

https://animoto.com/blog/business/video-marketing-cheat-sheet-infographic/