Current State of Play With Google SERPS.
Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are changing. We’re seeing more and more ‘add-ons’ beyond the standard organic listings or paid ads.
SERP features like knowledge cards, knowledge panels, and Featured Snippets (such as answer boxes) are taking over. Add to this the fact that Google ads look much more like organic results, and we’re now at the point that even achieving the number 1 organic slot doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to appear anywhere near the top of the page on Google.
Even when you are, you’re often surrounded by ads and other Google SERP features, all vying for the searcher’s attention.
My Tips For Digital Marketing In 2017
So What Can SEOs Do? Work Harder?
Well yes, and no. Of course working hard helps, but working SMART is just as important, if not more so. Going after Google organic rankings is fine, but focusing solely on this is not. Instead, as the title states, diversity is key.
Diversify Your: Google SERPs.
Start by surveying The SERP landscape for the keywords and topics you’re targeting. The easiest way to explain this is with an example.
Let’s say you’re targeting the keyword ‘beard care’, for an information-based article on your ecommerce site. You’d probably be hoping to pull in some relevant traffic to the top section of your marketing funnel (more on this later).
Check the SERPS for this keyword. Click here to view the image (sorry, no inline images with Huffpo!).
As we can see, there’s a lot of noise in this results page. We’ve got 4 ads from Google above the fold for a start. We’ve also got product ads on the right, with thumbnails (images draw the eye).
Okay, so we know that many people skip past the ads and go to the organic results, right? Well, immediately below the ads and above the ’normal’ organic SERPs, we have a featured snippet result. This contains a headline, bullet list, image and link to the article. Let’s call this position 0 in the SERPs.
So the site ranking number 1 in Google’s organic search results, Birchbox, is only just managing to peek up from the bottom of the page. (This is indeed an ecommerce site with a top-of-funnel information article, like our example).
Does that mean you shouldn’t target this keyword? Possibly. Or it could mean you need to investigate ways to grab that featured snippet result for yourself!
Dr. Pete, over at moz, produced a great article on featured snippet SEO and there’s another good article on Search Engine Land too.
Moz’s Keyword Explorer actually tells you which of the keywords you’re targeting have featured snippets... very handy both for spotting keywords with ‘noisy SERPs’ and seeing opportunities for gaining featured snippets yourself.
To distill Dr. Pete’s article into an over simplified recommendation (but you should still check out both of those articles):
- You need to try to get your article ranking on the first page of Google, and also ensure your article targets the question (if you’re going after a featured answer snippet), or targets the topic tightly.
- You don’t need to rank no.1 either, as seen in our example.
Beards.org actually ranks number 5, yet they achieved the no. 0 position with their featured snippet. Looking at the titles of the featured snippet box and the title of both articles, may give us a clue why.
Beard.org’s article has the title:
- BEARD GROOMING TIPS
This is very closely related to my ‘beard care’ query and is equally as direct & concise.
Birchbox is similar:
- Beard Grooming Tips: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Beard
However this title is a little longer, and less focused.
Additionally, Beard.org uses a bullet list, with the bullets appearing in the featured snippet.
There are different types of featured snippet out there. It’s important to know which type are showing for your target keywords, then try to optimise your article to target the correct featured snippet type. Of course this shouldn’t be forced. If your article isn’t suitable for optimizing for a certain featured snippet whilst still being engaging for your readers, don’t force it.
In this example though, if I were Birchbox.com, as I’ve already got the number 1 slot I’d jump into action. I’d optimise my h1 article title, then add a short bullet list summary immediately under the title, leading into the article. With a little work, they may be able to steal the position 0 featured snippet from Beard.org.
Optimise For Other SERP Features.
As well as targeting featured snippets, remember to optimize for other SERP features (remember universal search?). Do you publish news articles? (not company news, but genuine industry news or op-ed pieces?). If so then consider applying to Google News.
Is your site image rich? Be sure you’re optimizing for images. Go back to SEO basics 101 & optimize image filenames, alt and title text. Optimise file size too, aiming for good quality but fast loading.
Local business? It goes without saying you should have a great Google My Business listing, upload images, add opening times and get yourself some (quality) citations. Encourage (but don’t incentivize) reviews too.
Use structured data where possible, from recipes to events to local businesses, there’s a wide variety of structured data out there now. See what options are a match for your site and get yourself some structure :)
Diversify Your: Organic Channels Beyond Google
Whilst diversifying your organic SEO to include rich snippets, structured data and image/news results is a great start, be sure to focus on platforms other than Google Search.
YouTube is often cited as being the 2nd largest search engine in the world. Publishing videos to YouTube can help your brand, help drive traffic and generate leads. YouTube can also help with the previous recommendation, diversifying your Google SERPs, as YouTube videos can appear as video results within organic SERP pages.
There are lots of ways to make videos relevant for your business:
- Collect customer questions and turn the most common ones into a video Q&A
- Interview influencers, suppliers and/or customers
- Create explainer videos (or ‘splainers’) to explain your services
- Read out your news articles as a talking-head video
- Hold Google Hangouts with others in your industry, effectively digital round-tables (Ammon Johns and Bill Slawski have a great example of this, with 'Bill and Ammon's Bogus Hangout’).
Also be sure you’re active on any review sites that may mention your brand. Respond to comments and definitely respond to complaints professionally and swiftly. Be helpful on review sites, not confrontational.
If you’re in ecommerce, have a think what other channels you could sell via. Amazon and eBay are obvious examples. If you sell handmade items, consider other 3rd party market places, like Etsy and ‘Not On The High Street’.
Lastly don’t forget vertical search engines, or sites like Trip Advisor, Yelp. See what other search engines or (quality, high traffic) directories are out there in your industry and how you might benefit from them.
Diversify Your: Paid Search
If you run paid search campaigns, diversity is key here, too.
Google Adwords has seen huge changes recently, with more subtle blending with organic results, extended text ads, sponsored pins on Google Maps and more.
If you run Adwords campaigns, make sure you’re taking advantage of all the features that could work for you. Review stars, for example, can help increase click thru rate from Adwords listings. See what’s out there and check on a regular basis what new features you may be able to use to enhance your listings. Don’t do this blindly though, test, measure, and adjust. Always.
Diversify your paid search beyond Adwords too. Social media ads can be a great way to reach your audience. Just don’t expect to go straight to the sale with social traffic (in fact, in must cases you shouldn’t be doing that anyway!).
Try to capture traffic for every stage of your funnel (you have a marketing funnel, right?). You should have a funnel, and for every stage of that funnel, content that nurtures visitors, moving them down the funnel towards the goal.
‘Top of funnel’ content (like our ‘Beard Care’ article example) can often be promoted very effectively by paid social media ads. Once on your site, you want to continue to educate and help the visitor. So long as you understand your demographic and their needs, you should be able to create ‘next step’ content to reinforce the fact that your website is the best place for them to be to find the solutions to their needs.
If people don’t move through your funnel on one visit, it’s not the end of the world (in fact, it’s highly unlikely they will). It used to be the case that pretty much the only options you had in this situation was to hope for a funnel conversion there & then, hope they bookmark your page, or try to get them to opt-in to your mailing list (often with a content upgrade, like a whitepaper download, or guide).
However these days it’s different. These days we have…
Diversify Your: Remarketing
Remarketing/Retargeting is awesome. End of. With a well-planned and executed remarketing campaign you can stalk - ooops, sorry, follow around folks who visited your site, showing them related offers.
Facebook and Google both have great remarketing options, with some awesome features that let you set different ads to show to people based on how they interact with your website.
Don’t just run one campaign that targets all visitors who come to your website and treats them the same though! Diversify your efforts.
Think about your funnel. When visitors land on your ‘Beard Care’ guide, what are you hoping to get them to do next? Or, more to the point, what do they need next?
Perhaps it’d be appropriate for them to check out your guide comparing different beard creams? If that’s your goal and you think it’d interest them, but they didn’t move to that article on the first visit, then head over to Facebook and make a custom audience for folks who:
- Visited the ‘beard care’ guide’s URL
- Didn’t visit the ‘Compare Beard Creams’ article’s URL
Use display ads focusing on comparing beard creams and focus the message on why they should compare, bringing them back to your site for more.
It CAN be appropriate to use ‘sale’ related ads on Facebook, however this must be done very carefully. Say, for example, someone had gone through your ‘beard funnel’ (!) and visited various pages, sending ‘buyer signals’ to you and making you think they’re close to purchase. Perhaps they’ve:
- Read your beard care guide,
- Checked the comparison article
- Then clicked on a product page
At this point, I wouldn’t be too nervous about showing ads on Facebook that offer 10% off their next purchase of [product page they looked page], as the message is somewhat appropriate for that custom audience, at that stage in their journey.
Okay, that was a simple (and some might say a bit odd) example (though I do have a beard, so it’s not all that odd for me).
If you want to know more about using paid ads to fill various stages of your funnel, I whole heatedly recommend Samantha Noble’s deck from Turing Festival. If you get a chance to see Samantha speak, do it. She’s a great speaker and has some excellent tips for paid marketing.
Diversify Your: Social Media
I’m going to try to avoid arguments about the ROI of social media (if you want to get into an argument about social media ROI, go ask Gary Vaynerchuk). What I will do, is give some tips on how I feel social media works best. Again, this is about diversity.
Diversify the shares you publish. Don’t just talk about yourself, share stories you think your audience will be interested in. Mix-in text, quotes, images, and videos. Share things that you think will help people learn.
Also, try to strike up conversations on social media. Be human. Talk to your customers, your suppliers, and your influencers. Don’t see social as a way to sell, but as a way to network. It can be surprising how many good things can come out of just talking to people openly and being helpful.
Remember, unless you’re in a seriously ‘impulse buy’ category, it’s likely that people will research your brand, agency, beard care shop, or wedding cake store before they buy from you. What will they find when they Google your name or brand? Social media offers a great way to build your brand and show the world what you’re about.
Done right, this can increase your brand’s share of voice, instil customer confidence and drive loyalty.
Diversify Your: On-Page SEO Checks
Do you use Google Analytics and Search Console (Webmaster Tools for those with grey hair, like me) for your technical SEO? If you do, that’s great! But there’s more you could (and should) do.
There are some free tools out there, like Screaming Frog (which also has a paid version), that will crawl your site and help you identify issues.
Carry out a regular crawl with your favourite crawl tool (paid options include Moz’s suite of tools and Deep Crawl).
Look for any 500 or 404 pages, check for any 302s. Check for redirect chains that may be losing you efficiency and also for any pages that are being crawled that don’t need to be (don’t waste your crawl budget!).
In addition, find your server access-log file and use log analysis to check for Googlebot visits to pages on your site. I like to throw my access log files into a MySQL database so that I can perform SQL queries to dig deep, however there are a few tools out there to help analyse log files (Screaming Frog have a paid tool for this too).
Some things to check for:
- Your most important pages are getting crawled frequently.
- There are no pages Googlebot is gobbling up that you don’t really need indexed in Google (wasting crawl budget). For more on crawl budgets, check Dawn Anderson’s deck on Crawl Budget.
- 404s or other non 200 HTTP responses.
- Spammers (run Wordpress? Look for hits to xmlrpc.php… Not always, but in many cases, if you see lots of hits to this URL over & over again in rapid succession, you may be looking at a brute force attempt).
The reason I like to look for any 404s in the access log file, is that whilst a crawl of your site will show any 404s that are linked to from other pages, the access log file should show any 404s from inbound traffic… The sort of thing that can happen when you have a page that becomes an orphan page during a redesign, so isn’t linked to from your site anymore. Or when a 3rd party site links to your site but screws the URL up somehow. (Search Console can provide similar info, but I don’t like to trust just one tool).
Additional Recommendations; Not Related To Diversifying Your Efforts
Although this piece is primarily about diversifying your efforts in 2017, I can’t end the article without three more recommendations:
- Ensure your website loads fast. Use https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/, GTmetrix, and Pingdom’s page speed tests and optimise your website’s load times.
- Make sure your site is very mobile friendly. Ideally your site will be responsive, but if you use two different versions of your site (one for desktop and one for mobile), WATCH OUT! If your mobile version has less content than on your desktop version, you may run into some issues as Google moves to using it’s mobile index as it’s primary index.
- If you’re currently using interstitial ads (urgh!) on mobile... STOP IT NOW! In January 2017, Google will be penalising this practise. (and it’s horrible, especially on mobile, so please stop).
Summary:
- Diversify Your: Google SERPs.
Don’t just go for the organic listings. Aim for featured snippets, image, video, and news search. See what featured snippets appear for related keywords and optimise for the specific featured snippet type that’s appearing.
- Diversify Your: Organic Channels Beyond Google
Look beyond Google, even for organic traffic. Consider 3rd party marketplaces (admittedly some of these may be paid) and also vertical search engines and (decent) industry directories.
- Diversify Your: Paid Search
If you use Adwords, be sure that you’re using all the features that are appropriate for your business. Take advantage of the extra length that text ads now have, check out what ad extensions could work for you.
Move beyond Google too, considering other paid channels like Facebook ads.
Lastly, don’t just target the sale with paid search, use ads to fill the top of your funnel too (social ads can be great for this).
- Diversify Your: Remarketing/Retargeting
If you’re already using remarketing/retargeting then great! Kudos to you! However, be sure that you’re making custom audiences and splitting both your remarketing ad copy/images, and destination URLs, based on the previous actions and potential next-steps of your visitors.
- Diversify Your: On-Page SEO Checks
Try not to rely too much on one tool. Combine Google Analytics and Search Console with a 3rd party crawler and access log file analysis, to get a bigger picture of what’s going on.
Run frequent checks looking for issues, avoid wasting your crawl budget by having pages indexed in Google that are not really needed. Check for CMS specific issues like brute force attacks too.
That ends this article. Some of you will notice that I’ve completely missed out any mention of link building or link earning. That’s for another time, but why not give your suggestions in the comments?
I hope you’ve found this article useful. What are your top tips for SEO in 2017?