Addison Taylor
When you hear about SEO success stories, they are mostly about how smaller, lesser-known businesses make it big in the digital world. They target the right audience, optimize their website and content in the right way, and pay attention to the smallest of technical details. And voila! They land on page 1 of the Google search results.
This increases the quality and quantity of traffic that their website receives. And thus, boosts their conversion rates.
But when you are responsible for a Fortune 1000 brand’s search engine optimization, even the smallest changes feel like you are steering a ship.
Your audience is not limited to a small group of people. You don’t need to add meta titles and descriptions to one, two, or ten pages. You have thousands of pages to optimize. This not just takes a lot of time and effort but also requires a consciously thought-out strategy.
And the large-scale strategic approach to search engine optimization that you need to adopt is termed enterprise SEO.
Unlike smaller businesses, you do not just want to rank in the search engine results for a handful of long-tail keywords. You need to be found for even short tail generic keywords. And you have to make sure relevant pages of your business website show up in location-based searches. Plus, you might also have multiple domains or subdomains that need to be optimized.
And for all this, you can avail professional SEO services. But that is not the end of what you need to do.
You also need to make sure that you identify and act on emerging trends. You cannot wait for a trend to go viral before you join in.
And three emerging trends that have become important factors to be considered while strategizing enterprise SEO strategies are – Visual, Voice, and Vertical search.
How do these factors affect your enterprise SEO campaigns?
And how can they be integrated into your strategy?
Here’s a simple guide to get you started:
Visual Search
Google Lens is a cool AI-powered tool. You can scan almost anything with your mobile device’s camera and get related results. Want to read the review of a book? Scan the book cover, and you’ll find what you need. Want to know more about a monument? Click a picture and get all the details. And there are plenty of other ways you can skip typing or speaking and still get relevant Google search results.
And all this is visual search. Fun, fast, simple, and the future of how people will search.
What is it?
Visual search allows users to enter real-world images into the search bar. It could be anything from screenshots to internet images and even photographs. And then, by using AI to understand the content and context, search engines return relevant results.
Users can now turn their mobile cameras towards products and get the desired results. Smartphones have now transitioned into visual discovery tools.
Google Lens and Pinterest Lens are among the top technology players in this segment.
Why do you need it?
Pinterest gets over 600 million visual searches. Every month. Now, that should be reason enough for you to believe that your customers want to search visually.
And that’s not all. While the demand is soaring, the supply has started emerging too. Amazon, Bing, and several other retailers have started taking efforts in this direction.
Now, if you don’t want to lose the opportunity to be found by your audience and do not want to give a heads up to your competitors, it is time you start working on your visual search strategy.
How to strategize for visual search?
Some of the implementations that you should be carrying out site-wide to enhance visibility in the visual search include:
- Use images on all pages. And optimize all images for faster load speed.
- Add Call To Action (CTA) to your images to make them visually appealing. Even if you are using stock images, do not use them as it is. Add your business logo to the images you use to make them stand out.
- Create an image XML sitemap for your website.
- Use relevant keywords as image file names and alternative tags.
- Maintain a proper hierarchy of pages on your site and carry out proper internal linking (using anchor texts).
- Build a uniform and aesthetic brand image across all platforms. A specific color scheme or your logo on all the images will help users and search engines better understand and identify your brand.
- Though image search reporting is limited, collect data, and make sure you are meeting any surges in a specific type of search query by updating relevant image results.
Voice Search
If life does exist on other planets and we ever have intergalactic visitors in the future, they’ll surely feel that we are a very chatty species. What they might not realize at first would be that we’d all be chatting not with each other but to our devices.
As a lazy species, we look for comfort. And it is far more easy and comfortable for us to ask Siri/Alexa/Cortana or any other voice assistant to do things for us than doing it ourselves.
What is it?
Text results are not sufficient anymore. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) are changing how users search and search engines return results.
And brand voice has got a literal meaning now.
People ask their AI-powered devices for what they need. And the most relevant results are what the AI-assistants readout. In most cases, users do not need to look at other results. So even if your content ranks second for a query, it won’t do you any good.
Why do you need it?
Voice commerce sales are expected to touch the $40 billion mark by 2022.
Scehma.org has recognized the need for ranking specifically for search queries and has introduced Speakable structured data format. Though it is still in the beta testing phase and available only for new, it is clear that that’s the future.
The trends are a clear indicator of why now is the right time to build your voice search strategy.
How to strategize for voice search?
Follow these steps to strategize your campaign for voice search:
- Use speakable structured data wherever possible. And make sure you follow Google’s guidelines.
- Optimize your content for long-tail, conversational and question-based keywords.
- Keep the tone of the content conversational.
- Ensure that your website is mobile responsive and make sure it loads fast.
- Even though reporting is limited in the voice search segment, make sure you keep an eye on statistics.
Vertical Search
Search is the base that aids brand discovery and helps users make decisions. But as search engines get more sophisticated, search has also become more dynamic and fragmented.
Users today don’t carry out searches for just getting a lot of choices. They need the right answers to their questions. And they need it fast. And that means they do not want to spend time navigating through results that are not even the desired format. The solution? Vertical search.
What is it?
Google has long been the search engine that ruled our web behaviour. But that’s changing. Specific search engines for specific types of queries are now gaining ground. Product searches on Amazon and image-based searches on Pinterest have emerged.
And even Google is indexing multiple formats of results in different segments as a part of its Universal Search. You get an option to go to the image tab or the video tab, or the news tab if you are looking for something in a specific format.
Why do you need it?
Content and queries are spread across different formats. Businesses need to find out which format is the most demanded by their audience.
With Google and other search engines becoming more and more consumer-centric, brands need to make sure that they catch up. And rank in the relevant query with content in desirable formats.
How to strategize for vertical search?
To optimize your campaign for vertical search, here’s what needs to be done.
- Understand your audience’s behavior. Identify what part of the vertical search you are most likely to benefit from. And then create content in that format.
- Have a uniform brand presence across social media
- Properly use structured data.
- Use integrations with specific vertical search engines.
Where to Begin?
Now that you know the factors that you should consider before strategizing your campaigns for enterprise SEO, here is what else you’ll need.
- Robust tools to gather data, carry out wide-scale optimization, and track performance.
- Expert SEO and analytical skills.
- And experienced personnel to take you forward.
And you’ll find all this with an SEO Company like Uplers. If you are looking for professional SEO services, Uplers can bring to the table a team of global experts, robust technology, and ahead-of-the-time strategies.
If you don’t just want to keep up with the trends but spearhead trends, hiring the best SEO company is the first step you should take.
