Chapter 9: New Opportunities

Technology advances at a pace that is beyond comprehension. This means that the techniques and verticals used in traditional SEO are changing as well.

It's important to be at least familiar with these emerging techniques and trends, as the survival of your business will depend upon it.

We're going to cover voice, image, local, and video search as categories for information location.

While there are new SEO approaches for these categories, the traditional SEO approaches we've discussed will also apply.

Voice

This encompasses all of the virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.

There are two approaches here.

The first is to use all of the standard SEO tactics, put your content onto Google, and mark it with the correct structured data.

The second is to optimize your content for featured snippets. This requires thinking about how users queries' change when spoken vs. written.

Conventional thought is that voice queries are longer and are usually formed as a question.

A great way to get ahead here is by including all the FAQs you can for your target topic.

Image

Image boxes appear above organic results and are supplemented by image search previews that push your users to the page hosting that image. This means that you do need to take image optimization into consideration when building content.

As with written content, make sure your images are relevant, are descriptive, and have a good flow within the context of the page.

Remember, it's important to maintain a great user experience. So make sure your images are compressed, optimized, and lazy-loaded.

Local

With Google's machine learning models becoming more adept at understanding locality, it's more important than ever to optimize local search queries for your business.

Building and optimizing your Google My Business listing is a great place to start. Getting a jump on this can push your website towards being ranked on the Maps section for search. It also lets you interact with your users and answer their questions.

It's also a good idea to have a presence on Yelp. Not only do you get their domain authority, but a lot of users will go right to Yelp whenever they hear about a new business. So they may never search for your business at all outside of that interaction.

Being present in multiple places like this also increases your exposure to voice devices like Google Home, as you have more internet surface area for these devices to interact with.

Video

If you're passionate about creating video content, there's a massive opportunity for your videos to appear on the Google SERPs and on the video tab. While there is some crisscross between Google video and YouTube optimization, there are some unique factors to cover.

If the majority of your audience comes through YouTube, you need to be surgical about your average watch time metric. This is critical if you want your stuff to appear as suggested videos for search queries. To help your target audience find your video content, make sure you're including keywords in your title, descriptions, and tags. Just as you would with a normal web page.

Pro tip: create your own transcripts for your YouTube video. This ensures that it's accurate and provides all necessary information for your audience.

Spend time creating a high-quality thumbnail for your video. This is the first thing users see and plays a large role in getting them to click your video.

Getting good engagement on your video is also a high-quality signal for YouTube. Most creators simply ask their audience to like and subscribe, but you can also use events like giveaways to incentivize this behavior.

While adding a video onto your webpage is the first step in optimization, there's a lot more you can do.

Add your transcripts to your page and then mark the structured data appropriately. This will give Google a lot more context and boost your chance at a featured snippet.

As with all content creation, your foremost goal should be high-quality content for your audience. If this high-quality content can be long-form as well, then you're well on your way to dominating video search results.