PILLAR 3: SEARCH TIP OF THE DAY
1. Focus on a variety of keywords: Plan our keyword strategy with precedent-set statistics and a gaze into the future of how certain phrases may perform. The days of targeting broad keywords are coming to an end. While they tend to have a huge search volume, they don’t attract highly targeted traffic and they are expensive to rank. Targeting long-tail search queries not only attracts qualified “buyer” traffic, but these terms will typically have much less competition. Keyword research along with understanding the shopping and purchase patterns of the target consumer can help to identify search terms and phrases to go after.
2. Optimize for mobile search: Mobile-friendly websites will rank better with Google. To ensure you are mobile optimized, you should avoid common mistakes described by Google, including faulty redirects, mobile-only 404s, blocked media, and slow mobile load times. Although it may feel like Google is trying to make our jobs as inbound marketers more difficult, they ultimately want to provide the best user experience, which should be the goal of your website as well.
3. Increased Importance of Earned Links: A successful link strategy depends on both quality and quantity of inbound links. Avoid low-quality links that will get your site penalized. Google’s disavow tool and LinkAssistant’s Anti-Penalty Link Audit will help you find and neutralize harmful links.
4. Brand Mentions and Citations: A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on a website other than your own. A co-citation is the appearance of your business name etc. with other businesses like yours. Citations (also called brand mentions or implied links) are an important authority factor. Depending on your business, there are two types you should consider obtaining:
- Local Citations: Local businesses like dentists, plumbers, and attorneys should get listed on directories, Internet Yellow Page and review sites such as Yelp, YP.com, Google+ Local, and so on.
- Industry Citations: Local companies with a national footprint should look for industry-specific citations. A structural steel company, for example, competing with similar firms across the country will need citations on manufacturer directory sites.
5. More Focused Social-media Approach: Social media was once just a platform to share content, so businesses would sign up for every social platform under the sun and blast their content everywhere. Social media is now a marketing channel as well as a customer-service channel. Your social audience expects your brand to engage with them on a more personal level.