July 2018 SEO and Social Update
Overall Trend
What does this mean?
This means focusing content and building natural links continue to help promote positive rankings. Ranking stagnation at this scale is something to be expected every once in a while. During months like this, staying the course of optimization and promotion remain the key to growing down the road.
SMX Advanced 2018 Highlights
During June we had a chance to attend SMX Advanced in Seattle. We have been attending this conference for years and always get great insight into current and future trends of search marketing. This year was an exceptional year with lots of great speakers and information. Below are our main takeaways from the conference.
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Mobile Friendliness
Mobile was a prominent topic at SMX. And with Mobile First indexing and mobile speed getting a boost in the core algorithm, it certainly makes sense. There will be a bigger focus in the next couple years for businesses and SEOs to provide a great, fast, and unique experience on mobile and dig into the mobile experience of users.
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Rich/Featured Snippets
Getting position 0, or a feature as a rich snippet were also heavy topics. Many speakers covered how they achieve or push for these with their clientele. Each had varying degrees of success with most noting these are great for traffic and branding but yield fairly little ROI. Some even noted spotty ranking or even disappearing or changing snippets. Google themselves reiterated featured snippets are not stable and that they will continue to change frequently. This is great for those brands looking to push for popular queries, but has much less application otherwise.
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Voice Search
Capturing and gearing content towards voice searches was almost synonymous with featured snippets. The overall trend for searches using voice input continues to grow. Many speakers noted having Q&A-type content like FAQs or conversational-type content as key to helping voice search users. This also potentially leads into using this kind of content for chatbots or ranking for featured snippets.
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Site Usability/Features
Helping users continued to be an underlying message in almost every session. Search providers like Bing and Google noted that useful content should always take priority when loading. They also noted the increasing necessity to stand out and provide useful tools to keep users and promote brand affinity. It was also hinted that adding various ways to interact with website content is quickly becoming a requirement to create a great user experience. Eventually, that will mean adding tools and various ways to use your website’s content to optimize the user experience.
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User Intent and Content
This topic certainly is nothing profoundly new, but it remains a good reiteration and reminder to keep user intent in mind when building content and pages as the key to long-term success organically. Speakers also reminded us about providing various types of content as a part matching user intent, meaning queries and content that could best serve a user and their intent may be different from just text. Experts stated the best option is utilizing search engines themselves to solve this. Once you find a good keyword you want to use, check the query in a search engine. See what shows up and why. If you see what you provide is way off, you will want to reconsider the keyword or you may want to create content to match and beat what others are currently providing.
What does this mean?
Overall the take-away here is to make your website and the content within easier for searchers to use. This could mean adding pages around common questions or adding new functionality to your site. Keeping everything mobile and diversifying your content is no longer a want, but a need, while keeping user intent at the forefront of your mind when striving for top rankings and organic traffic.
