Blog posts of '2020' 'October'

Change is the only constant in SEO and it’s no secret that if you want to stay competitive in the market, you need to come up with a good local SEO plan. Local search has made a huge impact on SEO over the past few years.

In fact, reports show that as much as 46% of all Google searches are local, more than 50% of “near me” searches have resulted to a physical store visit and almost a third of all online consumers in the U.S. search for local businesses on a daily basis.

But how exactly do you build a successful local SEO plan?

• Register for a Google My Business (GMB) account.

  It is the first step to any successful local SEO strategy and you have to do it right to maximize results.

  Make sure that your address is accurate and complete, be specific about your service area, list all the possible categories that are related to your business and don’t forget to optimize your introduction. You should also verify your GMB listing through a PIN sent by Google to your physical address.

• Optimize your GMB listing.

  Of course, you shouldn’t stop at having a GMB profile; you also need to nurture it. Remember that the more information you provide about your business, the higher your chances of getting good ranking on local searches.

  Aside from filling in your NAP details accurately and exploring all your category options, you should also work on on-page optimization because it’s the strongest ranking factor for local searches. The trick here is to use the keyword in your business name because more often than not, that will give you good results.

• Invest in good photos for your listing.

  If you try to search for a restaurant, Google My Business and Google Maps will usually display photos on search results first. Soif you’re going to get that opportunity to entice a customer to dine at your restaurant or visit your physical store, you need to invest in good photographs and optimize your EXIF metadata.

  You should add some important metadata into your images including your physical address, geographic location tags, latitude and longitude details, service details, business category and target keywords.

• Work on your citations.

  Citations continue to play an important role in local SEO where it has two primary functions: validate your business information and offer additional targeted traffic.

  It’s essential to list your business in the biggest and most relevant directories in your city or region because it doesn’t only give you more exposure in your local market but it also helps validate the credibility of your business.

Of course, you need to strengthen your credibility further by creating astrong content strategy.

Remember that relevant content can produce thrice as many leads as paid advertisements, so you need to invest in content that will offer value to your customers. Create a mix of both educational and local SEO content to get more exposure in search results.

2020 may have been eventful for marketing in general, but the demand for good SEO strategies continue to grow, especially with more businesses shifting to the digital landscape today.

SEO has evolved consistently throughout the years and as you begin to prepare for 2021, here are some important tips to start following today so you can get ahead of the game:

Voice search will become more prominent.

A lot of people have adapted innovations like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant because of the convenience of voice search. In fact, some reports predict that at least 55% of all householdswill own a smart speaker by 2022.

With that in mind, it’s very important to start optimizing your website for voice search mainly by being more mindful of your keywords.

When people search on Google, they usually tend to abbreviate search terms. But voice search is different because it’s like asking someone a complete question.

For instance, someone could type “fashion trends for 2021” on Google but say “what are the hottest fashion trends for 2021” through voice search.

User experience will take on a bigger role.

User experience is basic SEO. But in 2021, that term will take on a bigger role in search engine rankings. In fact, a Google Webmaster Central blog post last May hinted that Google search would now consider different UX signals as part of its ranking factor: “Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience.

They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger—how annoying!).”

User experience is also believed to be strong determinant for optimizing SEO for an artificial intelligence algorithm called RankBrain.

AI will also be showing more prominence in SEO in 2021 and senior Google scientist Greg Corrado explains of the possible correlation between RankBrain and user experience: “The other signals, they’re allbased on discoveries and insights that people in information retrieval have had, but there’s no learning.”

What this means is that RankBrain will continue to improve that AI is definitely the next big trend to watch out for in SEO.

Mobile-friendliness will have more weight.

Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019 to allow its spiders to index the mobile version of a website considering that this is its “primary” version and not the desktop version.

That is mainly because of the growing trend towards mobile search, which reports predict that at least 73% of all Internet users will go online using only mobile devices by 2025.

So if you’re going to improve your SEO strategy for next year, you need to consider different mobile usability features and evaluate your website’s mobile readiness through Google’s free mobile-friendly test.

Are you ready to take on 2021 with smarter SEO strategies? These are just some of the tips that you can start working on now as you wrap upanother year in digital marketing.