Abby Buchan-Howard
Hosted by Maryna Hradovich of SEMrush, Secrets To Search Dominance is an Inbound 2018 session about teaching marketers to ensure that their content is always optimised for SEO and positioned to dominate search results across the internet.
With Maryna’s techniques being applied, marketers learnt how to make sure that they can stay one step ahead of the competition.
Maryna Hradovich
Maryna is VP of strategic growth and development at SEMrush. She has a passion for digital strategy and was instrumental in the setting up of SEMrush’s US infrastructure.
Dominating Search
To succeed at dominating search you need to remember that browsing online doesn't just take place on a desktop now. 70% of all searches take place on a mobile device now.
SEMrush have found that in the UK there is over 85% of online purchases being made on a mobile device.
With Google trying to make user experience better through their algorithm updates, it's important to make sure that your site is just as friendly towards mobile as it is to desktop browsers.
Mobile First SEO
Mobile First Indexing
In the past Google has ignored URL for mobile. But this is changing.
If you have a separate mobile version of your website then Google will be more likely to penalise your site for it. You can avoid this by optimising you main site specifically for mobile to be more user friendly.
Google reads sites that aren't mobile friendly as broken when conducting a deep crawl of the site.
This can result in your rankings taking a severe hit. You will appear lower on search pages and your statistics will be impacted as a result.
To avoid this, Maryna recommends that your site should be prioritising the mobile visitors because mobile search dominates more than desktop now.
However, she warns, don't ignore desktop completely; you have to have a balance.
Optimise For Speed
The speed of your website has a huge impact on your bottom line.
Large companies, such as Amazon, lose over $1 Billion in sales every year through their site taking longer than the 7 second threshold for load time.
The optimal load time for a website, to avoid losing traffic, is actually 3 seconds, but statistics show you have up to 7.
If a customer clicks onto a page that takes longer than this to load then they are more likely to go to a competitor; you lose a sale and your rankings take a hit. s
Accelerating your mobile pages can have a huge impact on your rankings and traffic.
AMP (accelerated mobile pages) load 85% faster than on a desktop which makes them more appealing to the people browsing on mobile devices, who we already know make up your majority of traffic.
AMP pages are already being used by some of the biggest brands online including Thrillist, Google and SEMrush.
But this isn't just an optimisation trick for big brands; small companies can benefit as well!
Google doesn't include AMP in the overall ranking factors but the data from the hits from visitors is still collected.
By examining your data you will be able to see the impact just from having those pages out there for your brand.
Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning
AI is the future. Google is growing its AI capabilities to further understand the websites that it's reading.
Google is already able to understand what you are likely to search for by remembering what you have looked for in the past.
They now have an algorithm called RankBrain which can understand the entities that you search for to pick through them and assume what you are going to search for later with semantically related results.
The role of AI in search is to understand our behaviours and preemptively act to give you what you need.
Remember: optimise for voice search when thinking about RankBrain!
To optimise for RankBrain you need to optimise for natural search and language. With the rise of voice search, optimising for language is critical.
To do this you have to create holistic content that is geared for featured snippets. These are the only thing that Google will read to you in a voice search so you need to be optimising for them.
Conclusion
As Google gets smarter there are a variety of things that you need to be thinking about. By optimising for mobile and thinking about how people's search behaviour is changing then you will be able to dominate search results and grow and thrive as a company.
Find out how Insynth can implement SEO techniques so that your website visibility soars.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.