With the end of the year approaching quickly, it’s natural for many businesses to start assessing their marketing effects from the previous year and start planning for the coming one.
- What worked?
- What didn’t?
- How is technology changing?
- What should you put in place to have a great next year?
If you’re in the middle of planning for 2018, there are a few things we see coming on strong in the next few months. If you’re looking for ways to increase your web presence, take advantage of all that social media marketing has to offer, and gain more prospects and clients in the online world, consider adding these to your SEO plans.
Boost Your Visual Content
It doesn’t take more than a few seconds online to understand where we’re heading. Visual content will continue to grow fast over the next year. And the more creative you can be with that content, the better results you’ll have.
In a recent study, visual marketing was the most important form of content for 37 percent of marketers who responded. These marketers will be adjusting their marketing programs to include more videos, visuals, blogs, live video, and podcasts to the mix.
That should come as no surprise. Spend five minutes surfing online, and you’ll find top results in Google often point to social media sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. And if you’ve spent any time on the newsfeed on Facebook, you know content is king. What’s shared the most are videos, visuals, and other interesting graphics that give bite-sized content in a readable format.
How can you take advantage of this trend?
Think “sharable”.
Create more visual content – especially “embeddable images.”
An embeddable image is an image that others want to share. Other sites choose to use them in their own content. People on social media choose to share. And in most cases, they’ll link back to you as the original source.
Embeddable images can be complex infographics. But that’s not always the case. Even simple messages when done well can be highly effective.
Encourage Comments On Your Site
So how effective is your blog? Are you pushing your content around enough to get it noticed? Do people love what you have to say and reward you by leaving great comments?
On site commenting has had a lot of up and down movement in recent years. Getting comments to your site was originally a great thing to have. Then they were found to be difficult to manage, thanks to trolling and autobots. So many businesses turned access to commenting off.
Yet in recent months, Google representatives have once again stated that blog comments help with ranking. A lot.
Comments are better on-site for engagement signals for SEO than to move and encourage comments on your social media accounts. Google likes activity, and when that occurs on your website, it knows you have an active community. And when Google sees action, they reward you by giving you an added edge to the overall ranking process.
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Let’s Not Forget It’s A Mobile World
Right now, 60 percent of all searching is performed on a mobile device. Google knows this. That’s why they’ve switched to what is now called a “mobile first index.” That means Google will consider the mobile version of your site the “real” version, no matter where the search takes place.
That means old websites will falter in this new modern environment. Because our connected devices are getting more mobile all the time, those companies that choose to change with the times will continue to be rewarded with top placement.
And it doesn’t take much. Even if you are primarily working on a desktop, pull out your smartphone and tablet and do a little searching. How does your web presence look on different devices? How about your competition?
And it’s the little things we’ve built into older web content that can have impact too. Take, for instance, the “more” or “keep reading” functions you’ll find on a lot of content. We used to keep home pages short and to the point, using “more” buttons to keep people clicking. That doesn’t work with mobile technology. That “hidden” content is ignored by Google. That means all of that data won’t be used or shown using mobile devices.
That’s something that’s easy to recognize with just a little clicking as you move from one device to another. And it’s worth your time to see how it operates, to learn how to better use your content as SEO grows and changes in the coming months.
It’s Time To Keep Up With The SEO Trends…
We realize keeping up with SEO trends is a difficult process. After all, it’s our job, and we live and breathe it all day, every day. And even then it can feel like it changes so quickly it’s almost impossible to keep up with it.
So how can you?
The easiest way is to find a professional who can help you wade through the process. Want to talk?
