by shannon | Dec 31, 2021 | Baltimore SEO, Digital Marketing
Trending SEO Approach for 2022
You know that SEO is a vital tool to achieving online visibility for your brand. But did you know that search engines keep tweaking their AI search algorithms, thereby evolving SEO best practices and trends? Each new update tends to transform the whole SEO landscape. Currently, SEO is gradually transitioning from traditional keyword stuffing to incorporating search intent. To stay on top of SERPs, businesses, brands, SEO technicians, and organizations must adopt the new trends in SEO to appeal to Google. While it’s much harder to rank high on search engines’ first pages, adopting the upcoming trends could make it possible. Here are some of the top search engine optimization trends of 2022 that your SEO team should keep an eye on.
Multitask United Model, or MUM
MUM is a natural language processing artificial intelligence model that Google will adopt to serve and interpret search engine users’ requirements. It will be an upgrade of the current Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) voice assistant model, having a much stronger emphasis on authority signals. Notably, it will employ an answer-centric approach to content. Here, the Multitask United Model will understand the user’s context, feelings, and intent before providing relevant answers to search questions.
MUM can multitask, whereby it analyzes videos, images, and text from 75 different languages and answers complex search questions. That feature will enable users to pose a single question during a voice search and get the relevant answer. The model won’t have to rely on the right keywords as its functionality revolves around user intent. With MUM coming up soon, consider optimizing your website for voice search.
Language Model for Dialogue Applications or LaMDA
LaMDA is a machine-learning model built on Transformer, which is Google’s own neural network architecture. It’s an AI model purposely built for dialogue, and it can read multiple words such as in a sentence or a paragraph. LaMDA uses conversations to find website pages and rank them after a search. Through its AI capabilities, it can pay attention to how these words relate to one another and then predict which words it thinks will be next. It’s also trained on dialogue, a feature that allows users to have conversations with Google during searches. Overall, it’s designed to provide results based on the information users feed it. It’s imperative to optimize your website for voice searches to capitalize on this SEO feature.
Shopping Graphs
Shopping Graphs is a recently announced model by Google after it started paying more focus and attention to improving its capabilities for online shopping. It’s a dynamic, artificial intelligence-enhanced model that is programmed to understand a constantly changing set of sellers, reviews, and product information. It also acquires the data from retailers and brands directly and can determine how all these attributes connect and relate to each other. Shopping Graphs works in real-time, allowing people and users to discover and shop for products that are available at that particular moment they’re shopping. If your brand sells goods online, it’s about time to update your product descriptions.
Passage Ranking
Passage Ranking is a new and trending SEO feature that’s likely to take the online world by storm in 2022. Also referred to as passage indexing, it allows businesses to rank for a specific paragraph or passage rather than the entire web page. Passage Ranking is a good strategy for brands looking to have their pages rank up on top searches. Google has tweaked its algorithm to look at stronger signals about a page, such as the titles and headings. That way, it understands which results are more relevant to the search question. Therefore, it’s imperative to keep your on-page optimization up to date.
Suggested Clips
It’s another top feature for parties that use video marketing as part of their SEO strategy for traffic generation and leads acquisition. Recent changes by Google through introducing two video structured data types: clip markup and seek markup, have boosted video marketing for SEO. The feature allows you to automatically build key moments in your website or YouTube videos and include timestamps and titles on video excerpts. Incorporating these changing video trends into your internet marketing strategy can help your videos rank for competitive terms.
Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals is a set of inbuilt metrics that measures a page’s load speed from a user experiences perspective, capturing the aspects of loading speed, how interactive the website is, and the visual stability of a website. Currently, it is one of the top trending website ranking factors for businesses running web pages.
There are three Core Web Vitals to keep an eye out for. They include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) that measures the loading performance of a page. Google prefers websites having an LCP under 2.5 seconds once a web page starts loading. If your page speed loads between 2.5 to 4 seconds, it needs improvement. And if it loads beyond 4 seconds, Google may rank it low on SERPs.
- First Input Delay (FID) that measures interactivity. The recommended FID by Google is 100 milliseconds. A website with less than 100 milliseconds is Google’s friend, the one with an FID between 100 to 300 milliseconds needs improvement, while sites with an FID above 300 milliseconds are likely to have a low rank.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measuring the visual stability of a website. Currently, Google recommends a score of below 0.1 seconds. Sites with a score of 0.1 to 0.25 seconds need improvement, while those with a score above 0.25 could have a poor rank.
Combined with mobile-friendliness, HTTPS protocols, and the lack of page advertisements or interstitials, Google’s algorithm will rank your website’s user experience high. It’s clear that user experience is at the top of Google’s ranking algorithm. If you haven’t already made your website user-friendly, it’s time to do it to meet the recommended Core Web Vital Scores and stay on top of the game.
Final Thoughts
There’s a need for evolution and timely adoption of the above upcoming and already launched strategies for your business to succeed in the current internet space. These measures can help set your website apart and make it unique from those of your competitors. However, incorporating such trends could be a hill climb if you aren’t an SEO specialist. Worry not since Virtual Surge has got your back. We offer a wide range of web-based services, including search engine optimization and auditing. Feel free to contact us to find out what we have in store for you.
by shannon | Dec 25, 2021 | Baltimore SEO, Digital Marketing, Local SEO, Posts
What You Need To Know About Google’s December 2021 Product Review Update
Product reviews are consumer opinions or feedback regarding goods or services. Many business websites have product review sections that allow customers to rate and review the products they have purchased. Such reviews are public, and they may influence the purchase decisions of other prospects. These reviews often use an affiliate link to products listed on a commerce site, intending to guide those finding the reviews useful towards the purchasing page. Recently, Google announced the December 2021 product review update. The algorithm update will impact product review pages and will take three weeks to complete. Here’s what you should know about Google’s product review update.
Product Review Page Ranking Assessment
In its announcement, Google indicates that the update will occur through an automated assessment specific to the product reviews webpage. It also communicated that the product review pages will be subject to similar ranking factors as those that apply to regular web pages.
The Timing
The December 2021 product review update has been a gradual process launched and commenced in April. If you have made improvements on your product reviews page, you may see changes in terms of ranking. Google conducted a spam update in early November followed by a core algorithm update during the last days of November. Many might argue that the updates are ill-timed due to the Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities which are the busiest shopping seasons. However, the updates haven’t been too disruptive. Businesses shy away from performing updates during such seasons since it could lead to unintentional loss of web rankings. But the opposite could happen. Google announced that the goal of the update was to reward sites with authentic high-quality reviews and to improve the quality and usefulness of reviews it shows to users.
New Product Review Best Practices
Based on clientele feedback, Google warned that the two new product review requirements are aimed at fishing out fake product reviews. First of all, any product review should show that the person writing it has used the product in question. That’s because many of the reviews are low-quality reviews stemming from affiliate sites that post a rewritten version of the product’s specifications and features. The second requirement is that the product reviews offer multiple purchase options. The goal is to enhance the customer experience. Google is looking to adopt these measures as part of its future product review algorithm updates. Therefore, these two best practices have a high likelihood of becoming future ranking factors for product review pages. The sooner you adopt and implement the practices for your product review pages, the better your SEO position.
Promoting Quality Product Reviews
With user feedback in mind, Google provided guidelines on how to review products through a new document titled writing high-quality reviews. Let’s explore some recommendations you should follow to abide by Google’s guidelines:
- The product under review should be from a user’s perspective or point of view.
- The reviews should demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the products under review. It’s imperative to show that you are an expert in your niche.
- The product reviews should incorporate audio, videos, or other links which give evidence of the specific experiences reviewers have had with the product. That helps to support your expertise and the review’s authenticity.
- Share and provide quantitative evidence on how the products measure up in various performance categories.
- Provide evidence for the unique features of the products and how these features set them apart from other products they compete with.
- Offer coverage for other comparable products potential clients can consider or provide explanations about which product might be best for certain circumstances or uses.
- Provide reviews that discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product based on original research conducted on the product.
- It also helps to have a comprehensive description of how products have evolved from previous releases. That addresses any issues and influences consumers’ final purchase decisions.
- Reviews should identify key decision-making factors for the products category and how the product performs in those areas. For instance, a review on a car could provide information on safety, handling, fuel economy, and energy efficiency, which are vital decision-making factors before purchasing a vehicle.
- Have reviews that incorporate descriptions of a product’s design and its effect on the user beyond what the manufacturer says.
- Product reviews should include inbound or outbound links to other resources to help the reader make an informed decision.
- Quality product reviews also include outbound links to multiple sellers to give the reader options to purchase from a seller of their own choice.
To Sum It Up
With product review algorithm updates taking force, it’s time that you align your website and product reviews page with the above requirements. It can be a daunting endeavor to embark on the process yourself, but that shouldn’t worry you. You can contact the website specialists like those at Virtual Surge. Let us manage your reviews and align them with Google’s update requirements while you focus on what you do best-run your business!
by shannon | Dec 1, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
The Importance of Backlink Audit And Its Impact On SEO Strategy!
In the digital age today, a website is the perfect tool to increase your business visibility online. However, the competition has the same tool at its disposal, making it imperative to go the extra mile to stand out and appeal to a massive audience.
One of the best strategies you can adopt is using backlinks and examining their performance through backlink analysis. Let’s dive right into it.
Defining Backlinks
Backlinks are incoming links from other web pages directing website visitors to your site. If another person links to your content, you’ve got a backlink. These links are typically inbound links since they represent another website’s traffic redirecting to your web pages.
One easy way of getting high-authority backlinks is spying on the competition by checking their high-ranking content or social media activities. Alternatively, you could find broken links in the websites of businesses in your niche and offer yours as a replacement.
What is Backlink Analysis?
Backlink analysis is an SEO strategy that involves the comprehensive review and analysis of a website’s backlinks. You can perform backlink analysis on your website, or your competitors to analyze performance and ranking. That helps identify any issues that could potentially improve or affect your website’s search engine rankings.
Steps to Follow During Backlink Analysis
It’s vital to follow these simple steps when performing backlink analysis:
- First, choose the site you want to analyze. Prioritize your site and then check out your competitors’ websites.
- Next, select a backlink auditing tool. Common backlink analysis tools include Google Search Console, Moz Open Site Explorer, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. Each tool has unique features and performs the analysis efficiently. It’s possible to use various tools at a go to enable a more comprehensive backlink analysis.
- If you’re checking out the competition’s website, consider using SEMrush. Its features allow you to compare your website’s performance with up to three other competitor websites.
- Now comes the actual analysis. Here, you enter the website domain into the search bar to initiate the analysis process. The result will be a massive dataset that you can collect and record for scrutiny.
- With the data at hand, an expert digital marketer can help you analyze the backlinks and create an effective backlinking strategy.
Things to Prioritize When Performing a Backlink Analysis
The backlink analysis process involves a large amount of data that can easily overwhelm you. However, you can focus on key information that’ll eliminate the hassle but still offer valuable insight. Some things to look out for include:
- The number of backlinks. Comparing the number of backlinks linking to your site and the competition lets you know your website’s performance regarding authority.
- The content that the referring domains link to. Checking out the content these domains point to gives insight into the high-ranking keywords you can use to generate other content on your website.
- The web pages with the most backlinks. While most inbound links often point to the homepage, other pages could perform better. Knowing which pages have the most backlinks enables you to figure where to focus your efforts on.
Why Perform Backlink Analysis?
Impress Search Engines
Backlink analysis is paramount for any website to rank high in SERPs. It exposes your site to a much larger audience and helps build your domain authority. Getting your content and brand in front of a larger audience may earn you new leads and ultimately increase your sales. At the same time, higher domain authority will boost your general performance in search engine results.
Identify Bad Links
Backlink analysis also helps to identify bad links, including those originating from spammy websites. If Google sniffs out these links, your website may get penalized and lose out on ranking high. It can be pretty tough to overcome such a blow to your SEO efforts. That’s why backlink analysis is critical to identify bad links and disavow them using Google Search Console. Note that even if you have various high authority backlinks, one bad link could affect your credibility! You need to eliminate all spammy links and remain with quality backlinks to show your site is credible, trustworthy, and deserves the top spot on SERPs.
Outrank the Competition
Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks can show why you’re finding it difficult to stay ahead of them and appear at the top of SERPs. Additionally, looking at competitor domains allows you to acquire link-building opportunities for your web pages. Remember that backlinks link back to content, so you can also get content ideas to use in your pages and attract links.
Partner With Expert Digital Marketers
The bottom line is, backlink analysis is a crucial component of your SEO strategy as it offers great insight into your website and competitors’ web page performance. However, the process can be daunting to achieve on your own. That’s where Virtual Surge comes in. We’re a seasoned digital marketing firm with expertise in link building and backlink analysis.
Don’t think twice about contacting us whenever you’re ready to create a lead-generating link-building strategy. We’ll work tirelessly to achieve your goals. Reach out to us today!
by shannon | Nov 19, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
Website Optimization For Holiday Season
Holiday seasons are the ideal time for any business to gain a massive target audience and catapult sales. Now is when there’s ideally a spike in online traffic and purchases. That’s why it’s vital to prep your website for the holidays and capitalize on the heavy traffic, gain new customers, build your reputation, and increase your online visibility. One easy way to prepare your business for the peak festive seasons is by optimizing your website for the holidays. Here’s how you can do website optimization for holiday season.
Advertise Your Seasonal Products and Offers
The most basic way of priming your site for the festive season is by featuring seasonal products and offers on your home page. That goes a long way in capturing the attention of your potential clients and keeping them on your website. Ensure that you feature best-selling products and services to increase the chances of sales. You can look at stats from past holidays on products and services that sold well and feature such products to lure previous customers in. It’s also vital to feature any offers for these products or services.
Additionally, create product bundles and sell various products at a single package and price to further create awareness of the services you offer. Remember that each holiday season has its unique colors. These colors play a key role in capturing your audience’s attention. As you advertise your products, ensure that you integrate theme colors associated with the particular holiday. For instance, fall colors such as orange, yellow, brown, and green can be ideal for the Thanksgiving festive season. Later, you could switch to red, gold, and white for Christmas.
Plan Out Your Seasonal Content Strategy
Another way of optimizing your site for a holiday is by updating your content. The content present helps attract organic social media shares and natural backlinks to your website. It can also bring in website traffic and transform the site visitors into actual customers. If your website has engaging, easy-to-read, and relevant content, it’ll make your page have high authority and increase your website rank on organic search engine results pages. As you plan out your holiday season content strategy, make sure that you create content that caters to seasonal needs. You can:
- Research your competition’s marketing strategies and perform surveys on consumer needs. Your sales team can also help determine what’s selling and what’s not. Later, create content on the products amassing a lot of web traffic on the competition’s website and your website.
- Ensure that the content you create complements your products and services. Moreover, it should be customer-centered. A good and effective content creation strategy is generating content that brings solutions to most consumers’ problems. You want your audience to turn to your business whenever they face a challenge.
- It’s also wise to optimize the content by using keywords related to the holiday season. That will make your content rank high and increase your visibility on search engines. Eventually, there’ll be many people clicking on your website to view your content.
Create Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media platforms are ideal avenues to sell your brand during the festive season. The platforms have very large traffic throughout, which you can leverage if you play your cards well. One way of increasing your website visibility is by linking it to your social media pages. That way, your social media followers can easily access your web page when they need what you’re offering.
Your social media campaign team, content developers, and content support team can come up with a campaign that employs a holistic approach for maximum impact and sales during a holiday season. The content developers are particularly crucial, as they’ll create the content that your social media visitors will engage with. Great social media content includes aspects like holiday-based keywords, trending hashtags, and relatable information. That way, you’ll easily improve your exposure on social media and draw traffic to your website.
Ensure That Your Website is Reliable and Consistent
A slow site is a major turn-off in the world today, where fast internet technology stands supreme. The slow-loading website is likely to put off website visitors, and you’ll lose out on potential clients. Therefore, it’s imperative to avoid any form of outage or delays on your website. Also, remember that most people conduct searches on their phones. For that reason, it’s best to ensure that your website is responsive on various devices, besides having a fast loading speed.
Here are some things to do to ensure that your site’s performance is consistent and reliable throughout the holiday season:
- Ensure that your website, social media, and customer support teams are available during the holiday season. It would help to have an efficient staffing routine to cater to any problems when they occur.
- Put in place an emergency plan for any unexpected website performance issues.
- It would be prudent to perform a load test for your website to test its ability to handle the high traffic it’s likely to experience during the holiday seasons.
- Avoid adding new features or functionality to your website until the holiday season is over, as that may affect functionality.
Contact the Digital Marketing Experts
The online visibility of your webpage during the holidays is vital to amass a huge audience and increase business. There’s so much to think about, from optimizing your site to creating content and anything in between. But that shouldn’t be a problem. You can always trust expert digital marketers who have substantive experience with internet marketing matters.
Virtual Surge is a full-service digital marketing agency that serves global businesses. Call us to inquire about our services.
by shannon | Nov 7, 2021 | Baltimore SEO
The Impact of Social Media in SEO
The relationship between social media and SEO remains quite oblivious to this date. Although most business owners recognize the importance of being active on social media platforms, some often fail to acknowledge its impact on other digital marketing efforts. A strong social media presence can enhance the impact of other online marketing activities, SEO included.
Despite that, understanding this relationship can be quite difficult, which is why you should read on to understand the history between social media platforms and SEO. By the end of this article, you may also learn how it can affect your business’s SEO strategies.
The History Between Social Media and SEO
A website’s social media page may fail to have a direct impact on its search engine rankings. The situation can be more complicated. Essentially, nobody outside Google truly knows what the search algorithms can or can’t do. Most people often rely on public announcements for this information. In 2010, Danny Sullivan acknowledged that Google had social signals that help in ranking organic results. This theory was further confirmed by the former leader of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts. He modified his findings claiming that the search algorithm doesn’t treat social media profiles as ranking signals, but rather as independent organic search results.
Two years later, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes, agreed with Cutt’s point of view. In light of this information, it’s evident that social signals can impact organic search rankings, although not directly. However, websites that rank high organically most probably have a strong social media presence based on the content published across various platforms. Therefore, while Google will rank websites with impactful social media profiles, these profiles don’t directly affect how low or high they rank. As a general rule, the entire website should perform well for it to rank highly.
How Social Media Helps SEO
While it may not directly impact your website’s search engine rankings, you can use social media to improve your SEO.
- It Can Boost Content Performance
Social media platforms are a great way to share any content related to your business products. If you post content on your website without sharing it on any other platform, you may be wasting the resources you used to create the content in the first place. Social media sites provide a wider audience than you would have if you used your website alone to share content. Essentially, if you have more people viewing and engaging with your site’s content, you’re likely to obtain more positive user signals, which can benefit its search rankings.
- Social Media Profiles Can Rank for Search Terms
As a business owner, you’re probably more concerned with how your website ranks than how the social profiles rank. If potential customers search for your company using branded search terms, there’s a chance that your business’s social media accounts may rank alongside its webpage. Although the audience may be interested in learning about what your company offers through the website, many people may also want to see what you publish on social media. Social media accounts can provide a different perspective of your business alongside additional information about your products and services to clients that need it.
- It Can Attract More Traffic to Your Website
The ultimate goal of having an SEO strategy in place for your business is to increase its online visibility and attract more traffic to its website. However, focusing on improving the site’s search rankings may be the best, if not the only way, to attract more visitors. Staying active on social media and posting content relevant to your audience can also improve the traffic to your website. Social media helps tap into a wider audience, including customers who may not have discovered your company through an online search but require the products or services it offers.
If you’re using SEO for the first time, it can help you attract more visitors than search engines. SEO can take a long time before it starts bearing positive results. While the wait may prove worthwhile eventually, you may not get the traffic you need right at the beginning.
- A Good Social Profile Can Build Trust
Consumers today are overwhelmed with alternatives when it comes to making purchasing decisions. However, while having many businesses to choose from may be a great thing, it has also made it harder for customers to find a reliable service provider. Clients expect a legitimate business to have a social media presence and may label a company without one as untrustworthy. If you use SEO to boost your company’s online reputation and build trust with your potential customers, having a robust social media presence can be a powerful asset.
In a Nutshell
Every effort you make online to improve the presence of your business should work in tandem. Social media and SEO have individual benefits for businesses. However, when used together, they can prove to be more effective in helping you achieve your digital marketing objectives.
If you would like more information about how social media can help your SEO strategies, reach out to the online marketing experts at Virtual Surge.
