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5 Things to Avoid for Good SEO

June 12, 2018/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, SEO /by JJ Rosen

Search Engine Optimization feels like this mystical world that needs to be uncovered layer by layer. There’s really not that much to it — create good content and utilize the tools available to you to make sure your content is seen — but still it seems like there are 40 new articles coming out each day about how to best utilize SEO. Today, we are going to talk about what you shouldn’t do. It’s easy to tell you to link-earn, utilize keywords, and share your content, but what about what you’re already doing that you should stop doing right now?

Here are five things you should stop doing in order to improve your SEO today.

1. Duplicating content.
Sometimes website creators think the more information the more likely they are to rank for their website. Good idea, but it’s wrong. Google (and other search engines) are sophisticated — they know when information is being duplicated or when there are too many pages on a website and that reflects in the ranking. You might think it’s important to create sub-pages for all the services you provide, but if there’s very little content on those sub-pages, it might be a better idea to keep all your services on one page. Fewer pages that have more information are more likely to rank higher on Google. Additionally, you shouldn’t create ten pages with mostly the same information except for a different title (like if you offer services in different cities). Stick with creating quality content for one page and see how well it ranks.

2. Cut off spammy links. They aren’t benefiting you.
Gaining links/link-building is crucial for good SEO ranking, but having spammy links can actually hinder your chances of changing your ranking. “Spammy” links come about when you outsource your link building or your link gets added to an unprofessional directory. It’s important to find these, and remove them if possible. You can submit a disavow document that tells Google you don’t want to be associated with spammy links, which should help with your ranking.

3. Ignoring extensions and social media.
Having great content and a stellar website is important, but if you’re not utilizing everything at your fingertips, your website ranking will only go so far. For local businesses, Google My Business is essential for high rankings. Adding in all applicable information to this extension helps ensure higher rankings from Google and more clicks from searchers. Additionally, social media is a great way to help your website get ranked. More and more people are using social media search functions to find new products and places to go. Platforms like Yelp are constant resources for locals and tourists when looking for places to go in town, influencers are impacting how consumers choose to spend their hard earned cash, and sharing your content and information on social media helps people see your information more organically. Utilize everything at your fingertips, not just the traditional marketing paths, and you’re ranking are sure to soar to the top.

4. Trying to go too big.
The goal is not to go viral overnight. Viral videos/stars/publicity stunts get a huge moment in the sun, but two weeks later few people remember them. It’s important to work toward consistent growth, which often is smaller than we may hope at the beginning — but it’s consistent. This is important to remember if you’re a local business. If you’re located in Portland with no additional locations and no e-commerce site, it’s important to focus your SEO geographically rather than trying to reach all four corners of the globe. Focus on SEO growth strategically, aiming for consistent growth, and you’ll go up in the search results one by one.

5. Focusing on everything but the content.
At the end of the day, the most important thing you do for your SEO ranking is create good content. It can be frustrating to hear this advice, but it’s the truth. If you don’t have good content, no one is going to stay on your page long enough for its high ranking to matter. Create good content, focus on organic engagement, and the rest will follow.

Are you ready to take the next step with your SEO? Contact Cabedge today. With our team of experts, we will be able to come up with an individualized plan to help improve your SEO today.

people with tablets and phones marketing

The Basics of Inbound Marketing

May 23, 2018/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, SEO /by JJ Rosen

For new organizations, it can be daunting to try and attract new clientele. It might feel like you don’t have enough cash to really start advertising and promoting yourself, but in actuality, you don’t need a lot of money to start growing your audience and customer base. With inbound marketing, you don’t have to worry about throwing your marketing money down the drain because it requires very little investment and can be done from the comfort of your own home/office.

Inbound marketing focuses on bringing potential consumers to the final stages of the buying process by providing helpful and relevant content throughout the journey. Inbound marketing makes it easier for potential customers to find organizations through blogs, search engines, and social media. Rather than going out and finding those customers yourself through typical advertising methods, inbound marketing brings the customers to you by producing quality content that catches attention and ropes people in.

How to Create Successful Inbound Marketing

The entire point of marketing is to turn random people into leads into customers into promoters. The best way to do this is to give them a reason to care about what you are putting out there. The best way to do that is with inbound marketing.

According to HubSpot, there are a couple of universal phases that one has to go through when utilizing inbound marketing to turn strangers into promoters. Let’s break those down.

Attract: It’s important to bring people to your site with inbound marketing that will resonate with the information you are putting out there. If your target audience member is a mom raising a hectic family, you don’t want to be attracting men who ride motorcycles together on the weekends — they most likely will not convert to customers. The best ways to attract potential customers are through blogging, showing up in relevant searches, and posting content on social media platforms. The more visible you are the better chance you have of attracting potential consumers. It also important to create consistent messaging. Any blogs or social media posts you send out to connect with potential customers should all relate back to your central brand offerings.
Convert: Because you are attracting potential strangers to your services/products with your inbound marketing, you are now going to have to convert them into leads. Leads are strangers that have turned into potential consumers. Once you have brought these people to your information, the path to conversion can vary. Basically, you want to make sure they continue to engage with your content past that initial hook. This can be done through newsletter forms, scheduling meetings, sending individual messages, or importing these leads into a Customer Relationship Management software system to keep tabs on for later engagement. Whatever avenue you take to convert leads into consumers is going to depend on your offering, but it’s important to keep people engaged consistently to ensure they reach that next step in the buying process.
Close: This may be considered the most important step — closing the deal. Now, it’s time to truly turn those leads into consumers. This is done through a variety of channels, but it’s important to open lines of communication, consistently provide good content, and creatively provide solutions to problems with what you have to offer. This can all be done through inbound marketing efforts, like producing helpful blog posts or sharing information on social media.
Repeat: Keep creating good content and engaging authentically with leads and consumers. The only way to ensure consumers will continually come back to your product or service is to continually provide good content and support to them. Keep it up!

Why Inbound Marketing?

You might be wondering why inbound marketing is such a big deal, and it’s because of changes in how consumers make buying decisions. The average consumer is much less likely to be swayed by traditional advertising techniques now — they want to engage with organizations that care about them and provide them with solutions. Because there is an abundance of information at our fingertips with the Internet, consumers are more likely now than ever to comparison shop and do their research before making a final purchase decision. Other factors play into making a purchase as well, such as the ethics of a company, the partnerships a company has with other organizations, and the benefits one gets from purchasing from the company — all of which can be shared through inbound marketing tactics. Consumers are increasingly looking to find answers to questions rather than sales pitches. That’s why inbound marketing, in the form of blog posts specifically, is so helpful to consumers. If you can answer questions for them, they are more likely to buy into what you are selling.

As the world has grown and more and more consumers and providers are entering the market, marketing and advertising has become more personalized. Mass marketing, like billboards and national TV ads, used to move product off the shelf, but now, organizations are leaning toward more personalized marketing, like inbound marketing, to make the sale. Consumers want to feel as if the relationship they have with an organization is personal. Inbound marketing can do that.

Everything relates when you practice inbound marketing. You create blog posts to improve SEO rankings. You share blog posts on social media to attract new consumers. And all of this is done to create leads and relationships with potential consumers. No matter your service or product, you want people to see it. To be seen, you should be practicing inbound marketing. The best thing about inbound marketing? It doesn’t have to cost insane amounts of money. As long as you focus on creating good content, you’ll be able to promote and incorporate inbound marketing without any additional cost.

If you need help creating inbound marketing collateral, reach out to Cabedge today. With our team of marketing experts and content creators, we can help get your marketing to the right people.

Top 10 Tips for Using Google AdWords

May 18, 2018/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing /by JJ Rosen

With a multitude of marketing and development tools available to organizations now, it can be hard to know which ones are worth the time. Google AdWords is one of those tools. If your organization is looking to increase brand awareness, grow sales or generate leads, Google AdWords might be the tool for you. Unlike a lot of other tools available to organizations to help them grow, AdWords is not free, but it is adjustable depending on an organizations budget. The great thing about AdWords is that it is flexible for individual organizations based on budgets and goals. It can be hard to know where to start with a system like Google AdWords, even after taking the certification classes, so here are ten tips to help you make the most of your AdWords account.

1. Ensure your landing page is the best possible experience for your target audience.
The best way to utilize your Google AdWords account is to ensure you have a solid landing page that keeps users engaged in what you have to offer. Your ad should be promoting what the link will send them to. For instance, if your ad is promoting a new brand of spreadable peanut butter, your Google Ad should send the consumer to a page about that new peanut butter. If it sends them to a page about peanut butter bites, it will confuse the user, and they will exit the page before finding out any additional information or making a purchase, which you don’t want. Creating an engaging, informative and accurate landing page is the first step to utilizing AdWords effectively and efficiently.

2. Use the right keyword match types.
Keywords are the terms or ideas that define your content. They are the words that users will search to find your website and information, therefore it’s very important to get them right since they are your most valuable tool when utilizing AdWords.

There are four keyword match types:

Broad Match: This is the default match type that doesn’t require any formatting. This will include searches that have misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant queries. It is the broadest way to get your ad seen (as reflected by the term “broad match”), so if your goal is to increase brand awareness, this is a good place to start.
Phrase Match — “keyword”: A phrase match means that as long as the phrase within the quotation marks shows up somewhere in the user’s search query, the ad may also appear. For example, if the keyword is “swimming pools” the search “swimming pools in Nashville” and “Nashville swimming pools” will show users the ad. But, if the user searches “I want to swim in pools in Nashville,” the ad will not appear. You have to be careful when using a phrase match because it may weed out unwanted searches, but it may also prevent desired users from finding your information.
Exact Match — [keyword]: An exact match setting ensures that only the most relevant search results are returned for a user. Exact match actually includes close variations as long as they don’t change the meaning of the search. For example, the keyword [men’s shoes] can show up for the search “shoes for men” even though it’s not the specific phrase. Exact match weeds out the most unwanted search queries.
Negative Match — -keyword: A negative match means that that search term will not show ad results for the searcher. This is best used when you absolutely do not want a search term to bring up your ad. For example, if you’re a college bookstore, and you don’t sell USB drives, it’s important to negative match USB drives, so if someone searches for it, you don’t have to pay for a click that won’t lead to a sale.

3. Utilize negative keywords.
Now that we’ve talked about negative keywords, we can talk about how you should definitely be using them. Negative keywords are important because they ensure you aren’t paying for clicks that don’t lead to conversions. If someone is searching for something that you don’t sell, but you’re not specific enough to weed out those searches, you’ll be paying for people to click on your ad but not make any purchases themselves. The most efficient way to curb those needless clicks is to incorporate solid negative keywords.

4. Utilize every inch of space allotted to you.
Google AdWords has added plenty of real-estate to spice up ads that display alongside searches. There aren’t a lot of characters allotted for that space, but make sure to utilize each heading and descriptive area of text you can to ensure your ad appeals to your target audience. The more specific your ad, the more clicks and hopefully conversions is will lead to.

5. Use ad extensions when applicable.
AdWords has some great extensions that can spice up any ad. In addition to utilizing all the text space allotted, it’s important to use ad extensions to further make your ad stand out to users. Some of the most important extensions include the call extension and the location extension. These extensions make your ad more user friendly and might help you accomplish some of your goals. For a full list of extensions, check out Google Support.

6. Utilize geo-modifications when biding for AdWords.
This is specifically important if your organization serves or is trying to target a specific area, but if your organization serves nationally and internationally, this may not be necessary. For example, if you have brick-and-mortar shops in two locations (say one is in Nashville and one is in Los Angeles) and you don’t serve a customer base online, it’s going to be imperative that you focus your ads in those locations because people in New York can’t be patrons, and you wouldn’t want to pay for them to click on your ad without them being able to visit your shop.

7. Optimize campaigns for mobile usage.
Look around any given room and you’re likely to see people scrolling on their phones. Typically those people are searching for an answer to some inquiry, and if your ad isn’t optimized for mobile usage, you may miss out on potential patrons. The digital world is leaning towards more mobile functionality with every day, so to keep up, it’s important to utilize your ads for mobile devices.

8. Utilize remarketing features.
Remarketing features allow users to target patrons that have already visited their site. For example, if you sell clothes online, and someone visits your site, clicks on a few items, and leaves, with remarketing you can target those clients that have already shown interest in hopes that they will come back to purchase something from your site. This is particularly helpful when trying to improve repeat user visits.

9. Stand out from the crowd by promoting deals or events.
You can use callout extensions (different from call extensions) to promote special sales or events to engage your audience members. This can be an especially useful extension for short amounts of time to drive business because of a special event.

10. Start out with a low budget to test targeting and conversion rates.
Before you throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars, do a test run of your ads and see how they resonate with potential customers. It would be tragic to set a budget of $10,000 a month, just to have it wasted on unwanted clicks and a less than stellar conversion rate. Start off small and see what negative keywords or exact match keywords you may need to add to improve your conversion or click-through-rates.

Using Google AdWords can be intimidating at the start, but with these tips, you’re sure to convert users that click on your link. If you need additional help, reach out to Cabedge. Cabedge has a team of Google AdWords specialists that are ready to help you reach your goals.

Digital Marketing: What it is and Why Your Organization Needs It

May 11, 2018/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing /by JJ Rosen

Marketing, as defined by the American Marketing Association is, “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Digital marketing takes those traditional marketing activities into the digital space. It is a non-traditional field that encompasses a wide range of skills and elements and is essential to achieve success in the world today.

Fundamentals of Marketing

Marketing is all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. It’s about understanding an audience and catering to their needs. It means staying up-to-date on trends in the digital space and using those up-and-coming communication methods to connect with audience members. Digital marketing encompasses a lot of platforms and methods of communication, but it all comes down to being able to promote a product to the right people in the right manner.

Understand your product/service’s benefits and features. When you’re selling your product or service you aren’t selling what it is but rather what it can do for the consumer. Will it make their morning run more smoothly? Will it help them chop vegetables more swiftly? Sweaters don’t fly off the shelf because of the color selection they come in, but rather the promise an organization sells of one living their best life while wearing said sweater. Digital marketers know how to pinpoint those benefits and communicate them to a wider audience.
Define your audience. The main part of a marketer’s job is to understand the audience they are trying to sell to. In the digital space, it’s incredibly easy to get a message out into the world, but it’s not as easy to get that message to the right people. To define your audience, you simply need to determine who your ideal consumer is. Decide what they eat for breakfast. Figure out where they get their information. Determine where they go to get their work done. Figuring out every detail about your consumer helps you determine the right path and message to reach your target audience.
Craft a persuasive message/call to action. The final step to being a digital marketer is to market. Whatever it is you want accomplished (reading a blog post, buying a product, signing up for a service) you need to share it in a creative and persuasive way on the right channels so it reaches the right audience.

Elements of Digital Marketing

The amazing thing about digital marketing is that there are a handful of different avenues one can go down when exploring the field. Because the online space is constantly growing and changing, so is a digital marketer’s job. Here are just some of the elements a digital marketer must have in mind when providing services:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Increasing organic traffic to your website through search engine rankings.
Content Marketing: Content marketing requires the creation and promotion of your own content (think blog posts or videos) to build brand awareness and convert customers.
Social Media Marketing: SMM utilizes social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to promote content and generate leads.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Google AdWords is a type of PPC — marketers pay a certain amount of money based on how much traffic is driven to the site via ad clicks.
Affiliate Marketing: Commonly seen on social media, affiliate marketing is a method of marketing that requires a partnership between a brand and a promoter where the promoter is compensated for talking about the products/services online. For example, a corporation can partner with a blogger to have them promote its new nail polish.
Email Marketing: Used as a means of direct communication with consumers, email marketing is a popular way to promote content like discounts and events.

Digital marketing is a big world to tackle — that’s why Cabedge is here to help. We have a team of able digital marketers who consider communicating their passion. Contact Cabedge to get a personalized digital marketing plan for your organization today.

The Basics of Google AdWords

May 8, 2018/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing /by JJ Rosen

Cabedge is a dedicated design and digital strategy organization. Having one foot in each world, Cabedge employees have a pretty good grasp on how to make your website beautiful and functional and how to promote it to the World Wide Web. Google AdWords is a handy tool that can be used to promote organizations for an adjustable fee.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a way for companies and organizations to advertise online to connect with customers through the Google Network. AdWords makes it easy for businesses to set goals and budgets and connect with intended audiences to increase awareness of a product or service or to increase sales. Google AdWords has a bunch of features and services that patrons can use to better promote their organizations. Let’s take a look at some of those now:

AdWords Express: Automates managing keywords and ad placement for businesses to make AdWords management easier.
Google Partners: Allows users to become certified in Google AdWords. Certification is not necessary to use Google AdWords, but it teaches the fundamentals and best practices of the tool to help users utilize it best.
Remarketing: Enables businesses to show advertisements to users that have previously visited their website. Remarketing allows users to further segment audiences to better display advertisements.
Ad Extensions: Google AdWords allows for a variety of extensions that can be added to a business’s ad to better serve it’s consumers. Some extensions include a clickable phone number, the ability to leave reviews, price displays, and more.
Keyword Planner: Estimates the amount of traffic per-month for selected keywords and offers alternatives.

Benefits of Using Google AdWords

Google AdWords is not required to run a successful business, but it does help at the end of the day in attracting new and existing customers. Here are some of the biggest benefits of using Google AdWords to promote a business online.

It’s measurable. The biggest benefit to advertising through Google AdWords is that it is completely measurable with price-per-click metrics. Businesses can accurately attribute consumers actions to AdWords campaigns.
It’s flexible. Businesses can make AdWords applicable to any need. Users can easily add extensions (talked about previously), specify keyword matches, narrow the audience scope for an ad, and more.
It pairs well with SEO. While businesses can’t just completely forget about SEO, AdWords works alongside SEO to improve engagement and reach. It’s not a quick fix to get more sales, but AdWords will inevitably reach a wide range of people for a cost.

AdWords can’t do all the work for you, and it shouldn’t, but it does have it’s positives when it comes to engaging a target audience.

Cabedge prides itself on its knowledge of SEO and Google tools, including AdWords. If you’re looking for help starting or managing your AdWords campaign, look no further. Reach out to Cabedge today to talk about your goals.

Search Engine Optimization 101

May 4, 2018/0 Comments/in SEO /by JJ Rosen

You’ve heard of it, you’ve seen it around the web, but you’re not 100 percent sure you really understand what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and what it does for your organization’s online presence. Cabedge is here to help. As a dedicated web design and marketing agency, Cabedge knows a thing or two when it comes to SEO. We help organizations every day improve their web presence, which includes search engine ranking and SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which put simply, means to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results, in turn increasing potential visitors to that site. SEO helps organizations get traffic to their websites through free, organic channels, like Google search results.

How Can You Improve Your SEO

There are tons of ways to improve your SEO. Some are more acceptable than others.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO utilizes SEO techniques that focus on engaging a real human audience rather than tricking a search engine. That means a little more work may be involved with these tactics on the front-end, but that work pays off since it guarantees real engagement with your content now and in the future. Here are some of the ways you can engage in White Hat SEO:

Create quality content: The first step to getting people to your website is to create quality content. It may be frustrating to hear, but if consumers enjoy what you are putting out onto the Internet, they are sure to check it out and share with others.
Ensure your site has a good user experience: Just like creating quality content is essential for page rankings, it’s important for the experience a user has on your website to be of a higher quality. This means pages load swiftly, it’s easy to search for information, and the navigation is user friendly.
Make sure your site is mobile friendly: Google is set to launch it’s mobile-first index sometime in 2018, so it’s more important now than ever to have a good, mobile friendly site for consumers to use on the go.
Utilize keywords and meta tags: To help search engines crawl your site, you should be using keywords and meta tags. Keywords are the words that define your topic and users will search to find your content. Typically, a user can find keywords throughout your published content. Meta tags, on the other hand, are not visible to users and are only displayed in the code of your website. Like keywords, they are related to the content on your page and help its SEO.
Design an easily navigable site: Having a site that is easy to navigate is great for user experience, but it also ensures that bots can easily crawl your website to improve your SEO. When a bot crawls your website, it is following links to make an index of your site. The easier it is to crawl, the better your SEO.
Earning quality links: A great way for a search engine to see that your website is a trusted source of information is to earn links from other people on the Internet. The more links you have from outside sources, the better trusted your website will be. Link earning can be a form of Black Hat SEO, so you have to be careful when earning your links. Do it the right way, and you’re website is sure to succeed.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO strategies are frowned upon for violating search engines’ terms of service. These practices are not approved of and could result in your website being banned from certain search engines. Black Hat SEO tactics involve:

Hidden Text or Links: Like we mentioned above, getting other websites to link to your content is essential for good SEO. But if you do it the wrong way by hiding text or links on yours or others websites through the code, systems can actually track this now, which may lead to negative SEO.
Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is exactly what it sounds like — jamming so many keywords into the text of a page that it ranks highly, but comes at the cost of a valuable user experience.
Cloaking: Cloaking is the method of displaying different information to search engine crawlers than to users to ensure better indexing. This can look like a page of text crammed with keywords to a search engine while it appears like a normal page to general users. In general, this is a frowned upon practice because it is dishonest.
Link Manipulation: There are a variety of ways a user can manipulate links to fools users and search engines. Purposefully hiding a deceptive URL in display copy, purchasing misspelled variations of popular URLs, and openly redirecting users to phishing scams are all ways of manipulating links that violate search engines’ terms of service.

This was just a basic overview of SEO and some tactics that can be used to improve your SEO now and in the future. For a comprehensive overview of SEO, check out Moz or Wordstream for further resources.

If you need help developing an SEO strategy, reach out to Cabedge. With experience in web design, SEO and content creation, Cabedge is sure to be able to help you achieve your goals.

Why Video Creation is Essential to Your SEO Ranking

March 9, 2018/0 Comments/in SEO /by JJ Rosen

In 2018, users are going to increasingly be looking for video content to give them information. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and more and more people are searching for videos now than ever. Video content is growing in popularity as a way to virtually teach lessons and share information to a wide audience, which is more often than not an international audience.

Video content made specifically for YouTube has the ability to increase SEO rankings for your organization because Google owns YouTube. Therefore, if you are creating content for YouTube, it means that content will get double the attention from Google. Google is already displaying videos as search results for general searches and image searches with 55 percent of search results containing a video of some sort.

YouTube viewers can also turn into website visitors or patrons. It’s easy to click on a YouTube video, listen to what a creator has to say, and click into their description box to find a link to their website or to products they were talking about. YouTube, like other social media platforms, serves as an advanced form of generating viewers for your other, targeted content.

Additionally, you can embed videos in your written content to boost SEO rankings and views and encourage users to stay on your page longer. The added work of creating and editing video content will pay off when your written content soars through the rankings in 2018 due to your improved SEO.

Looking for some help creating video content or in utilizing your current video content to promote sales of your product? Reach out to Cabedge today to get started!

How to Make Friends and Influence Link Earning for Better SEO

March 9, 2018/0 Comments/in SEO /by JJ Rosen

Link building has always been important to a website’s SEO, but now more than ever, the practice is about engagement and relationship building. As Google’s machines get smarter, they can realize when links are disingenuous, and then stop giving those links as much credit in their SEO formula.

That’s why it’s crucial to build relationships with people before asking for a link. It isn’t easy, but nothing worth having ever is. To build relationships with potential linkers, start with engaging on their platform — blog, website, social media, etc. This shouldn’t be hard since anyone you’re reaching out to for links should be writing/producing content you’re interested in. Guest posting is also an important way to cultivate links and relationships. Because guest posts are give-and-take (you’re giving content and taking a link), others are more likely to work with you in the future. And, if you have the ability, try to meet people in person. Reach out to get coffee or meet over lunch. It can be intimidating to meet people offline in the digital age, but it could lead to a very beneficial relationship down the road.

Paying for links and leaving links in comment sections is a thing of the past (the very, very long ago past). Search engines are smarter than that now, and they are increasingly looking for genuine links and relationships between link givers. Put in the time to build relationships with people in your online community, and the links will come organically.

For help growing your link building community, look no further than Cabedge. With years of experience in SEO, Cabedge can help you come up with a personalized strategy and link building plan to help improve your organizations SEO.

The Age of Voice Assistants: How to Get Noticed

March 9, 2018/0 Comments/in SEO /by JJ Rosen

You might have gotten used to calling Alexa for your every waking need, but Google is still trying to figure out how to rank these searches properly.

Voice searching is on the rise with gadgets like Alexa and Google Home. Searching is a whole different ball game than it was five years ago, and SEO is changing because of it. Elements like search terms, keywords, and mobile-friendliness change how people are searching with their voice, and therefore, how Google indexes those searches.

One of the biggest changes, is in picking up on human’s natural speech patterns. Typically, when a user searches for something on their desktop or mobile device they are using different syntax than they do in their normal language. For example, say someone is trying to find out if Domino’s is open on Thanksgiving. If they are typing in the search they might try, “Domino’s hours,” but, if they were to speak the search, they are more likely to use full sentences, “Hey Google, is Domino’s open today?”

Because of the need to pick up on varying syntaxes and search words, things are changing for SEO rankings. To appear in a voice search now, it’s important to be featured on the first page, and it helps if you’ve got a featured snippet. Featured snippets look like this:

And they sit at position zero on a search page. This featured snippet would be the first thing a Google Home would read out to its user in an answer along with the website name.

Along with featured snippets, elements like long-tail keywords, mobile-friendly sites, and including a question/answer format in web pages are growing increasingly important with the rise of voice searching.

One thing is for sure — with changing technology comes changing SEO practices.

If you or your organization need help staying up to date with SEO trends, reach out to Cabedge! With years of experience and an understanding of how swiftly SEO practices are changing, Cabedge can help with it all. Contact us today, and we can get started on a plan personalized to your needs.

The Knowledge Box Takeover

March 9, 2018/0 Comments/in SEO /by JJ Rosen

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are constantly changing — becoming smarter to show users exactly what they are looking for. When this happens, it means fewer people are actually clicking through to websites because they can find the answer they are looking for right on the SERP.

In 2012, Google introduced what are known as Knowledge Boxes.

Knowledge Boxes (also known as Knowledge Panels or Knowledge Graphs) are quick blurbs of information answering search questions from users. Typically, these excerpts come straight from Wikipedia pages and make searching easier and faster for users. These knowledge boxes are increasingly taking over for Featured Snippets.

A featured snippet is an excerpt of information from a website other than Google and serves as position zero on a SERP.

Featured snippets used to be a great way for websites to increase their click-through-rate, but with the takeover of Knowledge Boxes, they are slowly becoming a thing of the past. To improve SEO rankings in the age of the Knowledge Box, users need to be working earnestly to link build, promote, and ensure their sites are on page one or two of the search results.

Knowledge Boxes are not the end of the SEO world, but they do mean users need to adapt. While Featured Snippets haven’t gone away entirely, content creators need to work with intent to ensure their content is seen around these large information boxes.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO in the age of the knowledge box, contact Cabedge — a digital marketing firm that understands the intricacies and trends of SEO to help your organization get to the top of the rankings.