Staying abreast of the latest development in SEO lead generation can be daunting given the pace of development of the latest techs associated with search engines. We’ve taken the liberty of gathering the most important changes in the industry so you can make your websites as competitive as possible this year in terms of attracting organic traffic, SEO lead generation, etc.
Summary:
1. Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager to their fullest potential. Utilize upgrades to Google Search Console so you can harvest more data.
2. Make sure that your content is friendly to Google’s mission to bring relevant content whenever people use voice-assisted technologies like Google Assistant.
3. Exert effort in making your mobile site as accessible and comprehensive as your desktop site.
4. Use Google’s granular tracking options if available.
5. Take advantage of rich results and snippets whenever possible by making your markup compatible.
1. Power Up With Analytics
In today’s business environment, it is only possible to be truly competitive if all your digital marketing decisions are guided by metrics and analytics. Data is your friend.
If you are not looking at the data, if your analytics are a secondary concern, your SEO lead generation tactics are going to suffer – big time. Specialists recommend that businesses always leverage the free platforms for data and analytics such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager.
Business owners should develop an expert, almost “second nature” grasp of these platforms – and then some. Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager, specifically, can help business owners immensely in managing their PPC and CPC campaigns.
This is a top-level goal for businesses, not a secondary concern, as we mentioned earlier. People need to see the numbers behind each campaign, and on a day to day basis, as they continue improving their services and how they contact potential leads.
This reminder applies most especially to businesses whose websites and landing pages are not converting, and are suffering from serious flaws such as high cart abandonment rates and high bounce rates. Ditto for businesses who are utilizing social channels and are delivering a lot of content, but have yet to see positive results with their efforts.
Another spot of bright news: the Google Webmaster Blog has recently reported that that the Google Search Console has been updated with better download capabilities. A summary of the updates can be found below:
– You will now be able to download complete data sets from reports generated from the Search Console
– Users will now be able to see the data behind the charts
– Expanded data sets can be downloaded as CSV files
– You can now get expansive data on the following categories: Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, and Search, with the Date criterion.
– Users are encouraged to use the Search Console API to modify the properties of sitemaps and maximize the use of search result data sets
2. Google’s foray into granular tracking
Running a campaign won’t make any sense without data tracking. So it’s actually a welcome development that Google is testing/slowly rolling out advanced granular tracking options in the Google Ads program.
These granular tracking options were first spotted this month and have sent the digital marketing world buzzing with the possibilities. While not all accounts have been given the new options for tracking, it’s great that Google is testing out how useful it is for digital marketers through an internal rollout program. Current granular tracking categories are for:
– Purchase (a person buys your product or service)
– Lead (a person interested in your product or service shares contact information)
– Page View (A person views a particular page on your website)
– Sign-up (A person registers for an event or newsletter)
– Other
Conversion actions that can trigger the system under the sales category include the following:
– A successful purchase from the customer
– A customer beginning the checkout process
– A customer subscribing to anything on your website
Conversion actions on the lead side include:
– Submitting to a lead form
– Booking an appointment with the website
– Signing up for anything
– Getting directions to a physical address or destination
– Other outbound clicks
Our take: While it’s interesting that you can track all of these things from the Google Ads platform/dashboard, any built-in system by the website owner can do, too.
But we’re guessing that it is going to be more convenient and therefore more productive for everyone concerned that such statistics can now be viewable while you are monitoring other signals of a current campaign. Definitely sweet! We also think that it’s very important for business owners to be able to understand the customer’s journey from point A to any point created specifically by the campaign.
3. Maximizing Google Assistant and other voice-assisted technologies
Voice-assisted technologies have definitely progressed a lot since the very first attempts some two decades ago. With Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa leading the revolution, it really is time for businesses to think hard how they can fill the emerging needs with the further advancement of this technology. Here are some ideas that we’ve gleaned from Google’s own recommendations about how any Android user can make the most of his day with the help of Google Assistant:
– Upload informative, targeted videos on your YouTube channel so Google can surface these helpful videos as a response to queries from voice-assisted devices. Optimizing your video title and description with the right keywords and phrases increases your videos’ chances of being surfaced and pinned right on top of search results.
– Create content that exploits queries like “Google, can you find me a ______?” Rephrasing headlines to indicate your company’s focus or location can help Google find your business faster and relay it to users as relevant content. For example, instead of using a generic title on your blog posts, you can intersperse the headlines with phrases that indicate your business’ location.
Example: “Experienced SEO Company in Orlando, Florida.” Of course, the content of your post still matters a lot to Google, so the exploit should not stop with the headline. The content needs to contain relevant keywords within the content matrix, and these have to be contextually correct to fill the perceived needs of someone perfuming the query.
The rules of relevance (i.e. the signals) do not change just because the way queries are being phrased is changing. We can say that this is merely an enhancement of how searches are being done, and Rankbrain is still pretty much paying attention to the quality of your content.
– Create useful content that answers the questions that start with what, why, how, when, and where. These are the foundations of informational queries for a long time, and there are so many ways to serve the market by simply sharing your knowledge and expertise with readers.
Examples:
“How Can You Optimize Images?”
“What is SEO?”
“What is Material Design?”
“Why Can’t I Rank on Google?”
Take note that your content structure and strategy in general still need to be guided by the specific metrics that you are observing with your blog or website. These are just examples (good examples, if we might add), but you probably get the picture already.
– We cannot emphasize this enough: geo-tagging content is so important. If ever there is an opportunity for you to host events or at least attend conferences and seminars in the area, make sure that you create content that exploits the geo-tagging feature so your website is associated with both the location and the keywords you are gunning for. Example: “Sunshine SEO Company Headlines Google Summit in Phoenix, AZ.”
4. Pay more attention to review snippets
Review snippets are rich results that are usually placed just below paid listings. According to Google, these rich results are taken from a combination of ratings and reviews, which includes stars and possibly snippets or user reviews, and then combined with relevant information such as phone numbers, addresses, map locations, and the like. There is now support for rich results in the Google Search Console, so you can find out how the rich result is impacting your website.
There is also a separate Rich Results Test that can be used to debug any funky URLs on your side, so you can do some troubleshooting on your end. Snippets or rich results can be surfaced by Google if your website has enabled structured data for reviews and ratings. When you fix bugs and issues with your markup, such an action will trigger a re-crawl from Google so any important changes are taken into consideration.
5. How are you doing with Google’s mobile-first policy?
Google’s mobile-first policy has been in effect for a couple of years now, and the current set of guidelines and best practices have been updated. Below is a fast review of the things that you may have missed (hopefully not) about rolling out or implementing a fully mobile-ready website:
– Meta robot tags on the mobile site and the desktop site should be the same.
– Google frowns up lazy-loaded content or content that will only load when triggered by physical interaction of the reader. A good example of this would be images that are hidden unless the user swipes a finger up or down/left and right. The Googlebot will not load such content.
– Do not block crawls with a disallow directive, as mobile sites often access resources that have different paths from the resources used by the desktop site.
– The mobile site should have the same amount of content as the desktop site. If your desktop site contains the ‘full experience’ and the mobile site contains just the fat and trimmings, you’re doing it wrong. If this is the case for your website right now, consider updating its content and menus ASAP.
– Content headers, as well as menus should be the same on the mobile site. Don’t force users to transfer to the desktop site to be able to navigate more content.
– The mobile site and desktop site should have identically structured data.
– Follow the Better Ads Standard principles when figuring out where to display ads. The Coalition for Better Ads have identified the following types of ads as least agreeable to mobile users: pop-up ads, prestitial ads, mobile pages with more than 30% ad density, flashing animations, poststitial ads that require a countdown to dismiss, full screen rollover ads, large sticky ads, and auto-playing ads with sound. For desktop, the following ad experiences have been identified as the most bothersome for desktop users: pop-ups ads, auto-playing ads with sound, prestitial ads with a countdown, and large sticky ads. In the video ads category, the following are least preferred by the respondents in the most current studies: long, pre-roll ads that cannot be skipped, mid-roll ads, and large display ads.
When uploading image content, make sure that you follow these principles:
1. Mobile sites should have good quality images. Do not use the lowest resolution images for mobile versions of your site.
2. Use supported formats for images.
3. Avoid using URLs that change every time that a page loads an image resource. Google will not be able to index your resources.
4. Make sure that alt text images in the desktop site are the same in the mobile site, too.
