Search Marketing is changing

Google is no longer the only search engine to focus on in a search marketing strategy. Yes, Google still has more than 70% market share, but a lot of searches that start on Google end up on other platforms such as Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Youtube has become the 2nd largest “search engine†in the United States.

So if you want to get found online and if you want to optimize your content and search marketing strategy for SEO, then you should definitely be aware that there is more to organic search than meets the “Google†eye. Here are some main attributes to pay attention to.

First of all search is social. Google recently expanded its social search capabilities because it couldn’t prevent people from using social sites and consuming/producing content outside the normal web pages. Its recent update integrated the search results onto the first page of organic search results. In this way even more people will discover social sites when they search for content on Google. As a result, companies need to broaden their online footprint to produce content across social media sites that can now be indexed.

Secondly, content is king and this also means it has to reach certain quality standards. Your content can only be treated like a king if it is relevant and valuable for your target group. Rewrite or remove old and non-relevant content from your website and be aware of duplicate content. Google is measuring relevancy to give a quality score to content and penalizes content with low quality. Pay attention to keywords and keyword phrases but keep in mind that your content is made for humans, not for search engines.

Last but not least, make your content shareable. If you want to reach your target audience and ecosystems online, make sure your content can travel to all these places far away from your homepage. Also the more people that share your content the more authority it will get and the higher you will score in the rankings and search results.

You can find the entire blog post and more attributes for organic search here