In 2013, to go to the top of Google it was just a matter of doing some good keyword research, ensuring your site had a good and understandable structure and making sure you had a ton of high influence backlinks approaching your way.
And although these are all still very significant SEO tips today, we also now have to face with these brand new factors too…
1. Optimize for RankBrain
RankBrain is Google’s machine-learning AI system, which has appeared for one of the top three ranking indicators in its vast array of contributing factors by Google. Google uses RankBrain to handle ambiguous or unique questions that were never asked before. Brand new queries search up to 15% in a day – and as Google is using for 3 Billion searches daily – this means that 450 million of search in a day is completely unique.
Machine learning is clearly necessary to cope with this huge demand, and it can be difficult for search marketers to really optimize for it. However, according to our recent post about how to optimize content for RankBrain, you can do so in many ways, most importantly … Create content that answers unique questions that are especially relevant to your audience.
This will take time, research and a little test and error, but with enough context and support information in your clearly formatted, long-form content, you can start seeing more visibility for relevant questions.
2. Optimize for ‘near search’ queries
According to Google, ‘Micro-moments’ are the “important touch points within today’s consumer travel, and when they are added together, they ultimately determine how this journey ends.”
It basically indicates mobile as being the main driver for local search, and in fact you really should optimize for it.
As Chris Lake mentioned in his post about optimizing micro-moments, mobile searchers are A) very active and B) not brand loyal, so there is a big opportunity, especially as many businesses are backward due to bad mobile user experiences are there.
3. Optimize your local presence
Moving on from the last point, it’s no worth optimizing for ‘near me’ search inquiries if you’re not actually ‘there’. So you would require sorting out your local SEO.
You can do that by optimizing your Google My Business page. Apart from many other things, you will need to make sure that you have the following features:
- A long and unique description about your business
- Select the right categories.
- Important information on opening times
- Lots of imagery
- Regular updates
- A local business address and phone number
And one of the other major local SEO factors is making sure that you have a lot of visible customer reviews, which are very important for “local businesses” whether they sell online or not.
4. Optimize for natural language and voice search
Mary’s Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends report states that since 2008, Google Voice Search queries have increased by 35x.
Why these sudden explosions in voice search? Voice input is 4x faster than typing, so you will have access to quick results. There are clear access issues. People have difficulty typing on some devices. People also like to avoid confusing menus. Ultimately, no matter how mobile-optimized a site is, or how big our phones are, searching on mobile is still very bad.
Google has worked hard to improve its search engine so that it can better understand superlatives, ordered items, time and complex combinations.
The key to optimizing for voice search is to provide content for more direct questions. Those whom we speak in search engines speak more natural language than the commonly used language, where keywords are key.
5. Answer a question
After optimizing for natural language, your content is able to answer questions directly.
Google scans third party websites to give a clear on-SERP answer to searchers’ knowledge-based queries (when Justin Bieber’s birthday is? etc.). Though Wikipedia used to be a prominent place in these answers boxes, it is becoming lesser because Google recognizes that more quality expert contents are coming from other publishers.
Find out what questions your site can answer and create content that actually does this. It will be beneficial if you’re as concise as possible, you construct the question in the headline and you answer the question as soon as possible in the article.
6. Pay for it
Few things are still very much a truism currently as they were in 2013… you can ignore all these tips by giving your way to the top with PPC ads.
Although you will still need quality ad copy, relevant landing page, and high-end customer rated products (especially if you enter into the product listing ad space), however yes, you can still throw money on the problem.
7. Go to Top Stories, Apply AMP
Getting your site in Google News is always a sure way to run short-term traffic on your content.
This is not very good for the evergreen appeal, but if you can get hot with the press with good quality news stories, then it can also be great to add you as a source for other sites.
Top Stories is the mobile equal of the desktop in the news section, and right now this section is filled with accelerated mobile pages (AMPs). AMP is Google’s open-source program, which gives webmasters the ability to generate super-quick, strip-down, load instantly versions of web-pages for mobile users.
AMP is not a ranking signal yet, but if you are appearing in top stories compared to AMP pages, then the user will help improve the experience. Also note that AMP results will appear throughout the entire mobile SERP by the end of the year.
8. Optimize mobile
You should get it nailed till now. Although three years ago many of you did not do this, and then it was not a ranking signal. Although it is now!
9. Speed up your website
As we mentioned earlier, AMP is definitely helping to speed up the mobile web. Although it is controversial in nature, and generally it is not the best solution to improve the speed of websites because it just looks like a quick fix.
You still need to prioritize your actual site’s speed, not just grafting on Google-owned patches. Site speed is a ranking factor, but there are several ways you can improve performance.
Firstly, check the speed of your site using any speed check tool, and then you can access a report breaking-down where you can improve.
You can make a huge difference in reducing page load by following these image optimization SEO tips for site speed.
10. Optimize your Twitter presence
Although it may be the last tip of this list, it is not the last thing that you can adapt to bring to the top of Google. However, a major shift in SERP has been initiating tweets in the past few years.
Last year, thanks to a deal between Twitter and Google, tweets are now indexed on SERPs. So if you search for a brand, publisher or personality, you will now see their live timeline of their latest news.
So make sure you tweet frequently, have a reasonably substantial following and for God sake do not say anything you’ll regret since it will most likely remain cached for a few hours.
For more information reach out to us at contact@callousweb.com
