Voice search is an important marketing trend, with consumers wanting convenience when searching

Voice search is the future of online marketing. If your business is not optimized for voice searches, you cannot expect to reach your audience and achieve its growth targets.

The digital marketing landscape is ever-evolving, with strong new trends emerging time and again. Voice search is one of the prominent trends coming to the forefront. The reason is obvious - users love the convenience of searching by saying the search terms rather than typing them.

With the voice search trend set to grow even bigger, embracing voice search becomes imperative for every business. To benefit from voice search, there are SEO innovations to be put in place. But before delving deeper into optimization strategy, let us talk about the basics.

What exactly is voice search?

As the name suggests,…

Google is transforming from a search engine to an answer engine, which you should use to shape your SEO strategy for the year ahead

These days we are witnessing the biggest evolution of Google as we know it. Google is transforming from a search engine to an answer engine. That evolution is bringing new challenges to online publishers and businesses changing our marketing priorities and goals. We went from this: [caption id="attachment_149977" align="aligncenter" width="645"] [Image Source][/caption]

to this:

in a matter of seven years. As you can see, there are fewer organic results and more answers in the above-the-fold part of search engine result page. [si_blog_banner_cta]

Google is the answer engine

Google is planning to become the ultimate answer engine and we find the evidence of that in its recent patents,…

Struggling with a small SEO budget? Here are five tips to help you get more bang for your buck.

Every business, big or small, should be thinking about SEO. In a world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain visibility online without paying for it, SEO remains the one true organic marketing channel. But things that are organic are not necessarily free. While SEO clicks are by definition ‘non-paid’, the process of getting those clicks almost always carries an indirect cost; whether that’s an investment of your own time, staff costs, agency or consultancy fees, tools, training, or a combination of these things and more. SEO - or at least good SEO - rarely comes cheap. [si_guide_block id="80207" title="Download our Free Resource – 10 business-limiting SEO mistakes" description="Discover some really common mistakes we have seen again and again as we have worked on SEO consulting and training projects."/] For businesses on tight budgets,…

Google has changed search listings related to featured snippets, e-commerce to grow by over 30% in five years, Google urged to rethink third-party cookie blocking, Netflix named favourite UK brand

Google has dominated the news this week following its announcement that it has changed search results to deduplicate listings that appear as featured snippets. Find out how it could affect your strategy by reading the full story below. New research has suggested that e-commerce is going to account for a fifth of all retail by 2024, as consumers turn to convenience rather than heading to the brick and mortar high street. [si_blog_banner_cta] In other Google news, it has been asked to rethink its decision to block third-party cookies by 2022 due to the impact it could have on digital advertising. Finally, Netflix has taken the top spot away from Aldi to be named as the UK's favourite brand while a couple of brands have taken…

Get a handle on the jargon to understand technical SEO and get your site ranking higher. 

Does your web developer speak almost exclusively in jargon, with an occasional smattering of what sounds like Klingon? Do they use phrases like ‘latent semantic indexing protocols’ in everyday conversation? Do you find yourself listening with a glazed expression, nodding along as a stream of acronyms pass through your noggin and you ponder, ‘What does TTFB even mean?’. Like it or not, your web developer is a key player in your organisation and you need to communicate effectively to maximise your web presence. In the real world people often get their first impression of your business from your bricks-and-mortar premises. Similarly, your website delivers that first impression online and the way it’s designed dictates if your business is perceived as an attractive high street boutique or a run-down bargain basement. The better you’re able…

A three-step process for brainstorming, collecting and refining your keyword list

Whether you’re putting together a pitch proposal, preparing for an interview or working on a comprehensive SEO strategy, keyword research enables you to develop a clear understanding of what people are really searching for online. It’s a simple yet fundamental task that serves as the foundation for any small or complex project. Effective keyword research removes the guesswork and provides a level of objectivity based on real user behaviour. I’ve often been confronted with requests to use certain words or phrases because they seem right or align neatly with a particular brand positioning. But when we’re creating content that we want to surface in search, we must mirror the language of our customers. [si_guide_block id="5762" title="Download our Premium Resource – SEO gap analysis Excel spreadsheet" description="An SEO gap analysis helps you review your market share of consumer searches by comparing the number…

When it comes to your blog SEO, which type of domain is the best option? We've taken a look.

Where you host your blog relative to your main site is one of the more important decisions involved with setting up a blog. If you get the decision wrong, you may fail to get the hoped-for SEO benefits you have worked hard to convince your colleagues about. But, if you get it right you can almost immediately see new, incremental visits you wouldn't have attracted without the blog. [si_blog_banner_cta]

The three main blog hosting options

The three options are straightforward. Let's take some examples: 1. Subfolder - http://www.domain.com/blog e.g. http://www.econsultancy.com/blog 2. Subdomain - http://blog.domain.com e.g. http://blog.zopa.com 3. Separate domain - http://www.newdomain.com e.g.  I can't find a good example - can you?

So which is the best blog hosting option for SEO?

I often ask this question in my SEO classes and ask for…

Managing all the data associated with SEO can be difficult, but Google Sheets can make it more manageable to handle and compare your data.

Managing SEO tasks requires you ti handle a lot of data. While most SEO tools obviously include their own analytics packages, it’s often awkward to gain a clear picture of your overall situation while jumping between these platforms. Enter Google Sheets.  If you didn’t know, Sheets is Google’s free cloud-based alternative to Excel. On top of easy collaboration, its main benefit for SEO professionals is direct integration with Google’s other tools. Chief among these are Keyword Planner and Search Console.  In this article, we’ll look at a number of ways you can leverage Google Sheets to manage your SEO tasks. This will include tricks to save time coordinating projects, as well as concrete ways you can find and leverage data to improve your search…

As regular SEO techniques improve your global ranking, local SEO improves the ranking of your brand in your area, helping those who live close to your location find your business easier

Local SEO represents a series of steps that allow your content to reach online users that live close to your business. As regular SEO techniques improve your global ranking, local SEO improves the ranking of your brand in your area, helping those who live close to your location find your business easier. It is a strategy that every local brand crafts according to the number of locations they operate in, as opposed to global SEO that includes the use of techniques with worldwide metrics in mind. More than 50% of users that perform local business searches end up visiting the local office within a day. A well-implemented local SEO strategy allows users to contact you or get important…

It isn't always easy to determine exactly why you've dropped in SERPs and have seen a traffic dive

You might know the 'flush of victory' when your content eventually hits the first page of search results and attracts significant traffic. Can you imagine the moment it drops one day? Perhaps, this has already happened to you? You’ve taken the effort and have created high-quality content, which should have been fresh and engaging for quite a long time, but something went wrong. Time passed and you've noticed that the page isn't performing that well anymore. The reasons for this may not be obvious at all. If you want to know how you can diagnose the problem, recover and prevent the same decline next time, this post is for you. [si_guide_block id="35519" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Managing SEO playbook" description="This guide is for marketing and digital marketing managers who need to manage Search…