Frequently in our office, a comparison between SEO and PPC is made where SEO is the plodding marathoner, maintaining a steady pace to eat up the miles and win the race, while PPC is the sprinter, rapidly looping the track to top their best time. While this a simplistic analogy often told to familiarize clients with the difference between paid and organic search, it still embodies the fundamental conception of SEO as a slow but steady endeavor. And it would be, except for that one minor detail - the ever changing algorithm. Adding in considerations of algorithmic shifts takes SEO from a marathon to a high impact sport, where one minute you may be dodging a tackle, then spending the next 40 running continuously up and down the field.
Just as every great game calls for a strategy, any successful SEO campaign needs planning and foresight to be effective. Move too slow and you’ll see your rankings plummet, move too fast and you’re wasting precious hours on tactics that may never come to fruition. The SEO question of 2012, and the reason we all wish we had clairvoyant powers, is what tactics do SEO experts need to start using, and which are going to leave us twisting in the wind?
1. Is Schema necessary?
By now, we’ve probably all heard about Bing, Yahoo, and Google’s collaborative effort to categorize and identify every piece of data on the Internet. The question is not so much “What is Schema,” but “What is Schema good for?” So, when your clients start talking about this “Schema thing”, here’s what you should know:
- Ecommerce sites: Schema is best for ecommerce sites with defined attributes. X inches wide by Y inches tall is the data search engine engineers salivate over, and being able to correlate products across multiple domains gives search engines a head start on the ultimate goal, providing extremely relevant results.
- Locations, news, and consumables: Even if your site isn’t focused directly on selling, if you have definable data that is mass-produced, you should jump on the schema train. Schema.org continues to refine accepted tagging to expand the categories it will recognize as attributes.
- B2B, service oriented: Your time will come, but it is not now.
2. Should I put resources towards Google+?
Don’t like Google+? Too damn bad. Google doesn’t care, you will use it and you will like it! Even if you don’t have a Google account, much less a Google+ account, you will still be exposed to the behemoth pulling every available scrap of relevant data that it can access. Beyond the SERP real estate Google+ has hijacked, if you’re running any type of PPC campaign you can link your AdWords account to your Google+ account. Ad extensions such as these directly influence your CTR, which directly influences your quality score.
For SEO, it’s even more important. Being on Google+ means you have a greater opportunity to occupy that top level real estate, in multiple verticals. I say greater because Google has clarified that it does pull results from different sources, but the majority are + results. Tell a client that they’re missing an opportunity to appear in 3-4 different places on the site and they’ll jump on the Google+ bandwagon.
3. Should I be embracing Google Places?
Yes. End of story. If you have a physical location, you should be using a Google Places account. If you don’t have a physical location, you should be doing your best to get one anyway. There are big business opportunities in local search, and local search queries and results continue to grow each year.
4. Is 2012 the year I should be putting effort toward mobile?
As much as I would like to encourage any whole-hearted leap into embracing mobile search (I’m sure you’ve all seen the metrics), not every client needs to put resources toward it. Analyzing mobile search metrics can provide an initial confirmation of increasing mobile visits, or can dispel the notion that you’re missing an opportunity. If you do have missed potential, mobile can still be a confusing value proposition. Considerations of duplicate content, mobile domains, and alternate keyword strategies are all priorities when strategizing a mobile campaign. However, if you work in a location-specific industry, ecommerce, or do have supporting data that a large proportion of visitors are from mobile sources, investing as soon as possible is the best bet. Mobile search is only going to grow, for every sector.
The bottom line
Is SEO ever going to be fleet and nimble? No, probably not. But using the same old rules with only slight modifications is no longer sufficient to maintain a successful SEO campaign. We should not be waiting for clients to request new services, but should be proactively advising them on which options are the most relevant to their industry. Staying informed about major trends will not only help your clients grow their business, it will help you grow yours.