LAVEH BLOG

Search Engine Savvy: How You And Your SEO Consultant Can Be Prepared

by Taline Badrikian

Marketing never stands still, and for a small business to succeed, it must respond quickly to new trends. This year brings with it new developments in Search Engine Optimization. To stay ahead of these changes and maximize your publicity, you and your SEO consultant must practice: 

Video Variation

Video content is both growing and shifting. Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, and other video apps have grown rapidly in recent years, altering customers' expectations for videos. These changes provide both opportunities and challenges for small businesses.

On one hand, these apps offer low-cost strategies to create a wider range of video content. Snapchat, for example, lets marketers make brief videos with minimal editing, making it easy to update customers. At the same time, companies that fail to take advantage of these strategies risk a severe drop in rankings. The most successful companies will be those that make an array of videos for every medium. They must also pay attention to other organization’s video content, linking to and re-posting videos that are relevant to their operations.

 

Voice Search Savvy

Besides the advent of variable videos, voice recognition technology is also leaving its mark on marketing. 56% of adults have used voice search, and 55% of teenagers use it on a day-to-day basis; these figures will only increase in 2017. Consumers phrase their inquiries differently when using voice search than when typing. This will quickly make once-effective keywords obsolete

Determining the best keywords for voice searches requires detailed research, but a good first step is to rephrase inquiries into the form of a question. Consumers usually formulate voice searches as questions, so think about how this would affect the wording and structure of a search. This will allow you to take advantage of voice searching early-on.

 

Mobile Matters

For the past few years, searches on mobile devices have outnumbered those from desktop computers, and this is only expected to continue in 2017. To stay ahead of this trend, Google has changed the way it ranks pages, indexing the mobile version of your company’s site above its desktop equivalent. This means that you must optimize your mobile page or all versions of your site will suffer.

To prepare in advance for this change, make sure that your mobile pages conform to the Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, standard. Designed to help pages load more quickly on mobile devices, AMP requires simplified versions of HTML and CSS code. The closer you conform to this standard, the better you will perform on searches.

 

Dense Content Diligence

Consumers are increasingly wary of both long-form writing and short, incomplete content. Instead, they demand dense writing, which uses as few words as possible to communicate the maximum amount of information. The denser your writing, the better you will perform in search rankings. To enhance density, ask yourself:

  • How long are my writings? The longer the piece, the harder you should look for fluff content to eliminate.
  • How often do I use keywords? Excessive keyword use can hurt your search rankings, while underuse indicates that you aren’t getting to the point in your writings.
  • How frequently do I publish on each topic? Consider ways to consolidate your content, giving the reader as much information as possible in one article.

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process, and every new development requires a quick response. For in-depth updates on SEO trends, contact Laveh today.

 

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Topics: SEO

Taline Badrikian

Written by Taline Badrikian

Taline is the founder of Laveh Inbound Marketing. Using modern marketing concepts without the hefty price tag, Taline has a history of leading small businesses to explosive growth.