Google Dominates Local SEO

Google is imperative to optimizing your website to receive traffic from the search engines. This is especially true of Google My Business and Google Maps as these two services are responsible for giving guidance and directions when someone is out in the community searching for a business like yours. As such, you must keep your listings up to date in terms of your business description, address, phone number, and hours of operation. Make sure you also include photos. All these things are used by Google if they choose to create a Knowledge Panel for your business. You’re more likely to be featured if you have a lot of information available for them to use.

Voice Search Continues to Grow

Voice assistants (e.g. Alexa, Siri) have helped people feel comfortable with talking instead of typing their requests. Experts believe that given time, this will be the most popular type of search. This is because it’s so easy and convenient to perform, especially if you’re searching for something while on the go.

As a business, you must understand the effect of these searches on your SEO. Think about how someone who’s looking for your business would conduct this type of search. Make sure you then optimize your content for this and for feature snippets which is what Google uses for these searches. The best way to optimize for this is to either create a FAQ or a list of features.

Use Local Friendly Keywords for SEO

To optimize your content for local SEO think about what customers would commonly type or say when they’re searching for a business like yours. Make sure to include keywords that reference your city, town, region, and neighborhood. You should also consider adding local landmarks and neighborhoods to your keywords too as they’ll easily meet your voice searchers’ needs.

Seek out Reviews

Yelp and Angie’s List led to the rise in popularity in people looking for online reviews of businesses. Today people aren’t looking for reviews as much, but they still do appear when someone searches for businesses like yours on Google. This is why these reviews are so much more important now. While you shouldn’t ask for positive reviews from your customers, you can still gently encourage them to leave a review for you. Then when you receive positive reviews they’ll be seen as a personal recommendation for your business.

Make Sure You’re Catering to Your Mobile Customers

There’s no doubt that mobile phones and local SEO are intricately intertwined. This is something you can’t afford to ignore. Instead you must:

• Use responsive web design.
• Make sure your website loads quickly, especially on mobile devices.
• Reduce the file size of your images so they’re mobile-friendly.
• Keep your fonts and layouts mobile-friendly. A single column layout with a large font that’s easy to read will work best here.

Conclusion

There really is a lot of information to learn and employ here. As a business owner who already has a lot to do already, this is something that you should trust to the professionals at ISEOU. They’ve helped many businesses improve their local SEO and yours can be next if you contact them today.

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What Research Says About This Topic

When a group of 620 people between the ages of 18 – 85 who considered themselves “tech savvy” were surveyed, most of them admitted that they’ve already incorporated voice search into their daily lives. In fact, 70% of them said they use it a few times a week and 27% say they use it a few times a day. This was especially true of people 65-years-old and above with 88% saying they use it a few times a week and 50% saying they use it a few times each day. Any companies who target this age group must find a way to add this to their marketing portfolio.

The lowest adoption rates for this technology were found among people age 55 – 64 with only 32% saying they occasionally use it. This may be due to the fact that the age group is more accustomed to using screens to search for things whereas their elders are less technologically savvy and find voice search easier.

The devices that are most commonly used for these searches are Google Home and Google Assistant (37%), Siri (25%), and Cortana (4%). Most people 65-years and older are dependent on Amazon Alexa though. This is why it’s important for anyone who markets to this group to focus on Amazon SEO.

What all This Means

Although it’s hard to imagine people conducting most of their searches by 2020, 78% of people still believe that in the next 5 – 10 years at least half of all searches will be conducted in this way. Many people also believe that desktop searches will slowly grow irrelevant throughout this time as well. There are also a lot of people who don’t believe that voice search will completely replace searches that are done on other devices. As such, the future is still unclear but in an exciting way. Even so, we shouldn’t underestimate the role these searches will play in people’s lives and thus the impact they’ll have on SEO and other types of marketing. None of this should be cause for alarm either, especially when you stop to consider that a lot of the way these devices is used is for things like turning off the lights in your home or listening to music while you’re on the go. However, it is still something that marketers will want to pay attention to as it’ll change SEO as we currently know it.

Whether you need help with your SEO campaign or getting ready for the influx of voice search, there’s one company you can count on: I SEO U. Check out what their satisfied customers are saying about them then pick up your phone and give them a call. You’ll be glad you enlisted their help.

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Video Marketing has the Corner on the Storytelling Market

Although you might not buy into this concept, there’s a larger point behind it that you simply can’t argue with. All the major upward trends wrap around videos. This is because it has such a huge potential upside. Just look at Twitch if you don’t believe this is true. Other proof here can be seen in how Facebook has made a major investment in Watch and IGTV and the fact that throughout 2018 TikTok underwent major growth. All this makes it clear that developers and marketers both agree that video lies at the heart of all digital communication in the future. This is something that many small platforms are also grasping hold of now.

The consumer insights company Toluna recently surveyed 1,000 digital customers. In doing so they discovered that about 53% of people haven’t watched any brand advertising on social media within the past three months. This means that approximately 47% of those surveyed had watched in. This is something that Unmetric has also discovered. In fact, they’ve tracked billions of views of branded videos on various video platforms.

Unmetric gives Samsun as an example of this. Samsung had a powerful story behind their #VoiceForever campaign, which is why it became the top video on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram in 2018. It received close to one million views. Of course, it also received a lot of promotion to push it towards success, but this still shows that video marketing is important.

Spending Money on Video Marketing

Not every business has a lot of money to spend on this endeavor. You also can’t predict what the future holds in this arena, which is why you must stay on top of what’s currently happening. The good news is that Toluna’s survey also showed that people who watched branded videos watched them in the following places:

• 43% watch them on Facebook
• 38% watch them on YouTube
• 18% watch them on Instagram
• 13% watch them on Twitter

It’s also interesting to note that while 18% of people say they preferred text or photos and about 30% said they preferred video, 52% say they had no preference. Nonetheless, about half of those who do watch video advertising will seek additional information. Of course, only about 20% of those surveyed were between the ages of 18 – 34. This is important because if more people would have fallen into that age range then video watching would have increased. Once again, this proves the importance of knowing your audience before engaging in a video marketing campaign. This will save you both time and money.

This advice really is no different than what we’ve been seeing since 2017. However, it’s something that many businesses still haven’t grasped hold of because they’re already involved in too many other things that are bringing them a good return on investment (ROI). If this describes your situation, there’s good news for you: I SEO U has helped many businesses, just like yours, with video marketing over the years. These businesses’ successes are testament to why you should contact us and let us help you with your videos starting today.

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Be the Best

Many people think that law firm SEO is a set of tricks that makes Google think you have the best content. However, the search engine’s algorithm can see right through this. This is why you should focus on building great content, answering your clients’ questions, and making up for your competitors’ incompetence’s.

Don’t get Fixated on the #1 Position

Google chooses page content that provides clear, concise answers and definitions to search queries. They place these things in small boxes at the top of their site calling them a “featured snippet.” Many search engine experts refer to this as “position zero.” These contain well-written content written in down-to-Earth language (e.g. instead of “Will a grocery store’s premises liability policy help me if I’m injured?” write “Can I sue the grocery store because I slipped and fell, hurting my ankle, on a wet floor?”). Presenting questions and answers in this fashion will help you law firm SEO by encouraging Google to feature you in position zero. This will also help you optimize for voice searches.

Optimize for Voice Search Too

While you may not think that you’d need voice search, the statistics show otherwise. Take a look for yourself:

• About 39 million Americans own a voice-first device (e.g. Alexa, Google Home)
• 2 billion+ people own smartphones with internet connections and either Siri or Google Assistant
• Cortana is available on all Windows 10 and newer computers
• Chrome browsers have Google Assistant

With this popularity comes the growing number of people asking questions that are answered through Google’s featured snippets – something you’ll want to optimize for. To optimize your law firm SEO start with providing the information the user is looking for. Be concise then go into more details later.

Think of Link Building as a two-way Street

Links for law firm SEO are still quite valuable. You don’t want junk though (e.g. links from bulk directory submissions, purchases, exchanges). It’s also important to remember to link to high-authority sites yourself as well. You can become one of these sites yourself by providing well researched articles that are backed by legitimate sources (e.g. articles about car accident rates linking to an insurance industry report; articles about estate planning linking to examples in the law itself). Ultimately your goal here is to show the search engines and your readers that you’re not making information up. You want to clearly demonstrate that your information is based on facts that are well documented by legitimate sources. All of this will go a long way in helping you improve your law firm SEO.

Keep Your Website Updated

When you don’t keep your website updated, there will come a time when you must completely rebuild it. If you’ve reached that point in time, make sure you rebuild it with these tips in mind:

• Use Google’s mobile-first indexing (e.g. schema markups).
• Make sure your website loads quickly and is easy to navigate.
• Offer interactive elements so your visitors are engaged with your content which should range from short questions and answers to longer, more in-depth pieces.
• Clearly describe your firm’s work and results.
• Include a clear call to action and an easy way to contact your firm.

With a little help from ISEOU it’s possible for your law firm to remain competitive throughout this year. We’ll help you focus on your users, provide them with high-quality content, and refresh your website so contact us today.

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SEO and Marketing Funnels

People are searching differently today than they did in the past. Of course, what they’re searching for is also changing. Most of these searches (about 60%) are done on mobile devices which is why Google now uses a mobile first index recognizing that every customer’s buying journey is different and involves different types of searches at different times.

The same thing has also happened to the marketing funnel. Since Google dominates the search engine market with about 3.5 billion searches per day, you’ll want to make sure that you’re listed high in their SERPs. By looking like an expert here more people will want to buy your product or service.

Website Speed

When you go to pickup a few items, make sure you definitely pick up speed since it’s a factor when it comes to how your website ranks in Google’s SERPs. If you can shave even a fraction of a second off this (e.g. compress images, use a content delivery network, a.k.a. CDN), you’ll improve your users’ experience and Google will appreciate your website even more, rewarding you with a higher ranking.

EAT

Although Google is quite sophisticated, it still needs human help, which is why Google has a team of human helpers who manually assess results and pages to improve algorithms. One thing that’s stressed to these reviewers is EAT – expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This is used for ranking a page’s quality. Using EAT, Google deems a high-quality page to be one that’s appropriate for the query, has contact information, and has a good reputation.

Voice Search

How people conduct searches is changing because mobile devices are so popular today. These searches continue growing in number today, which is why you should optimize for them – something that requires a different approach than traditional SEO because different language is used. It’s also important to remember that when desktop searches are conducted people are willing to read long articles while mobile users need fast answers. This is because people who conduct mobile searches are typically looking for:

• Information about businesses (e.g. address, hours of operation)
• Directions
• Information about traffic and/or weather
• Questions that have a straightforward answer

What you must remember when optimizing for these types of voice searches is that Google gives preference to high-quality content that’s well-structured and also meets all of the person’s needs. While these are important to remember when you’re developing a voice search SEO strategy, you must also:

• Focus on general topic areas, not specific keywords
• Concentrate on getting your website listed in the featured snippets
• Watch for how new home devices (e.g.. Google Assistant, Alexa) will continually change these things

SERPs

One of the biggest trends you’ll see in 2019 is on-SERP SEO. Here, instead of optimizing content for the best ranking in SERPs you’ll optimize it so you’ll get listed in the search engine’s featured snippets. You may not even receive any click throughs to your website at all. This change sounds counter-intuitive but it’s happening because people who conduct searches today are impatient because they’re on the move and don’t want to click through to a website. They want the information on Google itself, which is why we’ll probably see Google experiment with other features this year (e.g. “people also ask,” the “knowledge graph”). Many people believe this is why we’re also seeing mobile zero-click searches increase by as much as 11.5% over the past two years.

Conclusion

These are just some of the things we’ll see change this year. Google is obviously the driving force behind most of these things. Hopefully you’ve been able to pickup a few items about what you should do with your SEO in 2019. If all this seems like too much for you to handle though, make sure you hire a company like I SEO U to help you with everything.

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Nobody is an “Expert”

Most people view SEO professionals as being trustworthy, confident, knowledgeable, and dedicated. However, this is usually a façade since most of these professionals are too busy to work on their own self-confidence. In fact, some of these professionals will even go so far as to tell you that they’re not really an expert – they just make things up as they move along. When you stop and think about it, this makes a lot of sense since there’s no concrete roadmap available here. Practitioners have simply learned how to adapt to whatever gets thrown at them. This is proven over the years as they’ve been told that implementing various tactics will increase a website’s rankings and visibility but ultimately these tactics don’t hold true to their promises.

Old Strategies are Dead – New Challenges Lie Ahead

• Although promises obviously hold no weight, there are still some important parts of SEO that marketers need to pay attention to, including:
• Google has introduced a variety of SERP features over the past two years. This has resulted in organic results getting fewer clicks.
• It’s getting harder to find new organic results for certain queries. This is why it’s becoming common to see a SERP that only has two ads, one Knowledge panel, related searches, and a total of 6 websites. (In the past, there were always at least 10 available.)
• A growing number of search queries are featuring snippets in their SERPs. Marketers believe this will grow as Google continues to revamp their featured snippets and implement new ones too.
• Recently Google increased the length of meta descriptions from 150 to 300 characters. This may pose a threat to SERPs in the near future.
• Google properties now own a large part of the SERPs in niches like travel, shopping, and videos.
• Voice search is on the rise today. Marketers believe that it will consist of about 50% of searches by 2020.

Seizing New Opportunities

Even with all of these potential threats, SEO is still a good way to invest your marketing budget. After all, search volume continues to grow even though people are clicking on less of these searches. There’s also no doubt that Google is still the top source of traffic online today.

With these things in mind, there are some opportunities you’ll want to take advantage of, including:

• Featured snippets have lowered organic click-through rates, but if you get this position you’ll also get a lot more traffic – including a massive amount of voice search opportunities.
• Google’s “People Also Ask” results are expanding. It’s important for websites to be optimized for these questions.
• It’s important to implement AMP regardless of what type of website you have. This will help increase traffic.

While many parts of SEO remain the same, others continually evolve as Google learns how to give its visitors the best search results possible. It’s important for your business to keep up. Since you’re already doing a lot, you’ll want to hire a marketing firm with proven results. I SEO U will help your business adapt and stay ahead of its competition. With over 20 years of experience we’ll help you seize the moment and bring great returns to your business.

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Local SEO is a totally stand-alone form of SEO all unto itself. Not taking advantage of the tools and techniques afforded by today’s local SEO procedures is like cutting one’s throat.

The follow-through regards using tried and true techniques and new and innovative ones. Don’t underestimate any of them and be prepared for the learning curve that each may require.
You may already be familiar with some and have been using what you have for some time, but you may be unaware that you’ve gotten into a rut and hadn’t realized that there are new ways to old ways.

Reviews And Citations

One thing is reviews and citations. You have to make sure these have your updated and correctly spelled NAPs (Name Address Phone) and that each place these are posted utilizes as much efficient space as possible. You may have to go all the way back to earlier reviews and citations to make sure you’ve updated them and let not one of them have anything incorrect.
You need to use social media to get your customers and fans to add positive reviews and citations whenever they make a purchase or have enjoyed your goods and services for a while. It says a lot when a long-term customer continues to sing your praises and when they comment and share your posts and other posts.

This causes a link building base of local SEO that Google will see as viable and of great importance. It will boost your authority and other sites, bigger than yours, will take notice and be more amicable should you wish to get hooked up with them.

Schema Markups

Do not let your schema efforts go without optimizing. You have to make sure the tags are up to date and correct and squeeze in as much local data about yourself as possible. Adapt them to mobile and voice search too. This will allow for the crawlers to find you and list you properly and that means fans and surfers will get your results just where you want them.

As mentioned earlier, the voice search is the big thing now. You must adapt to it if you want to stay in the game. The reason is that voice goes hand in hand with mobile, and the two have rocketed to the top of the search engine game. Voice search is growing rapidly because of better hardware and software. It frees up people’s hands, especially drivers and people doing chores. Your sites have to have the right local SEO data on them so that when someone gives a search command, it recognizes that your sites not only exist but having been optimized correctly will appear at the top of the search results.

Final Word

There are lots of free tools for optimizing your local content. Google offers such tools for overall SEO but is also proficient in local SEO. If it all seems too complicated, then it might be time to hire a local SEO expert to get things set up and rolling along for the long term. Remember, this is not an overnight success kind of thing.

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For the SEO marketer or webmaster, the amount of study can be exhausting. They have to be on top of the latest technologies and techniques. One slip up could mean a plethora of problems down the line. It means adapting to new technologies and techniques even when one has just finished adapting to familiar ones. This can be frustrating and in some cases, catastrophic. For example the mobile adaptation problem.

Since the majority of people use mobile devices for computing, websites have to be modified to suit that venue. The majority of searches are from mobile devices and if your website can’t be easily accessed or read because of Mobile’s dimensions and parameters, people are likely to ditch your site and go elsewhere. In a case like this, you’re losing money. If you own hundreds of sites, it’s going to be like starting all over again. That is going to cost you lots of time and money.

So if you had caught onto the mobile rise and used available tools, many of which are free, you wouldn’t have so daunting a series of tasks ahead. This is why you need to realize even things like voice search is something you had better be ready for. The rise of Artificial Intelligence, and in the near future, quantum computers.

It’s not a stretch to say that overnight, everything you’ve got on the web will need to be modified or scrapped altogether. Developers are already practicing and inventing new technologies that could become major profit. It’s happened before and it will happen again. The key thing here is the function.

People use computers to communicate and acquire. To do both they need to search for things. At present we use search engines. Just think what would happen if search engines were no longer need and some new search process emerged? It would cause chaos throughout the world’s markets. If some new search algorithm included far more advanced AI than is used now. The search engine or search technology would know from habit what you will be searching for and do it for you.

Scary, isn’t it?

Well, that’s just part of life. Things change for the better or worse. The difference here is that you have the power to adapt to those changes and use them to your advantage. It means staying up on the latest stuff as well as the theoretical. As harsh as competition on the web has proven, it’s not a position you would want to be in should you hesitate.

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First of all, one has to realize that the old techniques of SEO are going by the wayside, yet there are still SEO companies promoting and using these useless tactics. It’s because they’re lazy and impatient and are only out to bilk customers for the quick money. You need to know as a customer, that any SEO company you go to has to be on top of their A Game and not lead you around to an expensive and frustrating experience. Tomorrow’s SEO game calls for tossing out the old, enhancing the sure fired present skills, and mastering the future trends.

Before you panic and think you’ve got to drop everything you now know, don’t. It’s just a matter of not being stubborn or an obnoxious know-it-all, thus being able to embrace sensible and logical SEO engineering.

Link building:

Link building is a staple of today’s SEO. It calls for having links coming to and going from your website. Since search engines used to favor the number of links a site had, people would stuff their websites with links to the point of overwhelming. Google and the other search engines caught onto this tactic and now it will get you penalized severely. That doesn’t stop some scammers from conning customers into thinking it works. What will work for the foreseeable future are links that have relevance to a site, provide valuable data, and are from authority sites.

Mobile is the big winner here. Mobile is soon going to be the ultimate power in the universe like the Death Star. Within a few years, mobile will be the default to computing and your websites had better be designed and engineered to exploit this change most efficiently. Luckily there are free online tools from Google to help you do this. If you hire an SEO expert, make sure to ask about mobile. Take into account, however, that devices used for mobile today might be obsolete within five years. That being said, you’ll need to keep up on everything mobile so you’ll not be left in the dust.

Voice search is another thing to be considered. Computing is being engineered for the easiest usage so that hands-free options are available. Now that Siri is popular and people are used to it, the technologies behind voice operated systems are going to improve a thousand-fold. That means more options to search using voice. SEO must be able to accommodate voice search as it’s predicted voice will be a dominant factor in the years to come and more.

There’s a good chance new search options will emerge like ‘eye search’ where computer operation is initiated and controlled by eye movement either by some sort of glasses or sight responsive device. It may be a few years before this kind of technology hits the shelves, but it’s better to be ahead of the curve and study up on such futuristic search options.

There are far more futuristic concerns for SEO and it’s a good idea to do your homework. Attend an SEO seminar online or live. Ask the questions and test the systems but don’t think you can outsmart Google.

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