We are all continuously looking for new insights to help us become better search marketers. In this article we’ll share the key concepts discussed at major search marketing conferences in recent months, including Pubcon 2018, that we believe you should be aware of to continue improving as a search marketing professional in 2019. The key concepts to understand include:
User intent optimisation continues to be a key priority for SEO strategy Personal assistants, voice search and the pursuit for ‘Position 0’ Google search results are shifting from answers to journeys Customer experience, loyalty and providing a ‘frictionless’ user journey AMP and Progressive Web Apps Single Page Applications
Understanding the user intent of your target keywords continues to be the priority for SEO strategy
All SEO strategies should be centred around a continuous process of user intent analysis of target keywords, with considerable resource allocated towards understanding what information a user is intending to find from each query. The objective is to have the most complete answer that satisfies the intent of each query, whilst identifying all possible keywords across a sales funnel to provide holistic answers for. It’s integral to monitor your ranking performance, so you can continuously test and refine your content to improve organic visibility across the user’s search journey. The tactical optimisation best practices include keyword segmentation based on buyer funnel stage, competitor SERP analysis to determine user intent of search queries, as well as reviews of Featured Snippets to define appropriate content formats. It’s also vital to develop buyer personas, as this can help to answer the intent of search queries in their language and have the most complete answers to their pain points. Remember, if you are successful at understanding user intent and can provide the most complete answer then you will have a great opportunity at ranking in ‘Position 0’.
Google has started to optimise the search results to provide more valuable answers to voice search queries input via personal assistants, such as Alexa or Google Home.
Personal assistants, voice search and the pursuit for ‘Position 0’
Google has started to optimise the search results to provide more valuable answers to voice search queries input via personal assistants, such as Alexa or Google Home. They understand that usage of personal assistants is growing, along with the rise in voice search, and are therefore refining their machine learning algorithm to ensure search quality continues to improve in this area. It is become increasingly important to optimise for voice search, and to ensure that a considerable proportion of your SEO strategy allocates resource towards acquiring ‘Position 0’. The coveted ‘Position 0’ is alternatively known as a Featured Snippet, and is formatted in most cases as a paragraph, list or table. Google has started to create specific tools that can help SEOs to create apps and tools that provide voice based information to users. An example tool would be Actions on Google - which offers developers the chance to create ‘Actions’ and link them to Google’s ever-growing intents catalog. It’s more than likely that Google will continue to release useful tools for search marketers to help them format their content for voice search queries. Between January 2018 and October 2018, a study shared at Pubcon 2018 highlighted that search queries which returned a “People Also Asked” box had increased from 30% to 58%. This shows a substantial increase in Google’s usage of this functionality, something that Gary Illyes reinforced by reminding SEOs to add structured data where available. 98% of featured snippets are served from URLs which are ranking on page one of Google. Therefore, when prioritising resource it’s worth focusing on informational keywords ranking between positions 1 - 10. We suggest analysing your target keywords using ranking tracking software to identify all of those keywords that are returning Featured Snippets.
Google search results are shifting from answers to journeys
Bill Hunt’s recent talk at Pubcon 2018 was titled, “Leading Topics from the SEO Front Lines”, and one of the major concepts discussed was that Google are shifting away from direct answers to queries, and instead offering users journeys following queries. Essentially, it’s a shift from a query to a queryless way of getting information, whereby Google is surfacing relevant information related to interests, or semantic topics, without forcing the user to input another query. Multifaceted Featured Snippets, which provide the user with a journey, are now being tested on desktop, as well as mobile results. Barry Schwartz recently surfaced examples of multifaceted desktop Featured Snippets, which could significantly affect the amount of organic traffic you would receive in comparison to if a search query only had one Featured Snippet.
