By Winston Burton
Machine Learning: 6 Tips for Getting to Grips
Machine learning is evolving and SEOs must adjust to accommodate these new developments – now is the time to roll up your sleeves and embrace the changes before you notice a big drop in your client’s search engine visibility, conversions, or traffic.
Requiring less and less human interaction, technical SEO may become a thing of the past. In Victor/Victoria fashion, we must learn to balance simultaneously being Search Engine Optimizers and Content Experience Analysts. We must provide clients with quality content experiences through content development while optimizing across the user journey.
Strong and useful content strategy, social listening, and new content development are critical to finding popular topics, trends, and content.
Here are some useful tips to help SEOs adapt and embrace the change:
- Guide The Buyer’s Journey
Consider this situation: a middle-aged woman has hip pain, so she searches [hip pain] on Google. During this “see” stage of the user journey, a useful piece of content would include types of hip pain, images or infographics, and list possible causes or treatments. The content might provide a locator for a specialist with reviews and contact information, allowing the user to schedule an appointment.
The online content provides a good user experience from beginning to end. This is what SEOs should keep producing: content that satisfies all users’ intent.
- Four-Star User Experience
As we’re now marketing to Goldfish, speed is a crucial user experience factor. Web pages should load in two seconds or less, otherwise users will lose patience.
One bad user experience could impact sales or conversions, and if they tell others about the poor experience, the negative impact can multiply.
Slow loading pages lead to decline in search visibility due to lack of engagement.
- Structured Data Is Your Friend
Structured data isn’t for every brand, but for a client with online sales, structured data like Schema can enhance the SERPs by listing product information, prices, reviews, and other valuable data points.
By providing search engines with data in a way that they comprehend, structured data influences your visibility, indexation, click-through rates and can help drive more organic traffic.
- Don’t Underestimate On-Page Optimization & Link Quality
Now, links are about quality over quantity. The more quality links from related domains, the higher search engine rankings will be. I highly encourage conducting a backlink audit to see if negative links are affecting your client’s search visibility.
Don’t forget to monitor your link portfolio! Ask yourself if your site lost any links – losing links from high authority sites could impact visibility and traffic.
- Content Is King
With a surplus of end user data, Google can understand what users find useful and relevant. This enables the machine to interpret user intent and better rank the results. If the end user did not find your content useful, and it did not meet their expectations, your site might not rank at the top of the SERPs for related queries.
Remember: always think and produce content like a publisher. Popular content that generates visits can capture user engagement and allows your site to dominate the SERPs.
Answer box optimization is another way your site can dominate the SERPs and gain clicks. After all, voice search results are pulled from answer box snippets, so by ranking for them, your brand can be the answer for voice search queries.
- Embrace Paid Social
Paid social is the ideal facilitator for content views and shares. I urge you to conduct a small test to see if Social can amplify your content and generate traffic, links, and shares. You can use your own social channels or do outreach to get your content seen.
