SEO and Search marketing are critical foundations to good marketing these days. We all know how often search marketing techniques can change over time. Too often though we look at the minutiae of campaign strategies, rather than the broader picture of where the world is moving. In this video, I take the broader picture approach, look at where thee world is going and from there, offer some tips regarding your content strategy, which should feed into future proofing your SEO strategy. I hope you find it useful.
Future Proofed SEO Strategy
Transcription:
Good morning everyone! Enjoying a beautiful spring morning, this morning at Burleigh Heads on Australia’s Gold Coast.
And the point of this video today is, I thought I’d share an experience that I had last week, where I attended a digital marketing conference in Sydney and just some of the insights that I got out of one of the presentations at this conference. Particularly around search marketing and the future of search marketing, where search marketing is going or seems to be going in the future. The point of this is to help you consider your strategy with your content, with your strategy with your SEO campaigns, and how to future proof them based on the way that technology is starting to impact our behavior online.
When we talk about technology, specifically we’re talking about technology in regard to search, specifically we’re talking about the rise of technology around artificial intelligence and chatbots. Good examples are Siri and Cortana how they’re changing the way that we actually, they’re changing the way computers and devices facilitate search.
One of the key points with this is, searches isn’t just search engines anymore, if you actually look at everything you do on your PC or on any device you’ll find that there’s basically a search box everywhere. So you know, this search boxes on obviously social media but there’s search boxes on your e-mails, there’s search boxes in the word processing facilities, and the office facilities and the spreadsheets that you use. You know there are search boxes everywhere. You know just on your PC, there’s a search box on your phone and quite often now that these search boxes are facilitated by some type of mechanised or artificial intelligence style of robot or bot that processes the search for you.
Looking at the history of search, one of the things that we see now is that, you know search for the last ten years or so has been based on keywords. Which is something that we’ve had to learn to do. It wasn’t a natural, it’s not a natural way for humans to search based on keywords. You know, we search rather on concepts or questions and so that’s a habit we’ve learned. But with the introduction of concepts and tools like Siri and Cortana and chatbots and so forth, now we’re actually being given the opportunity to go back to how we’re supposed to and how we’re wired to operate and you know, search based on questions.
So for example when we’re using Siri we don’t say “Gold Coast weather” as keywords and expect Siri to come up with an answer for us. We’ll ask Siri “Hey Siri, what’s the weather going to be like on the Gold Coast tomorrow morning?” and Siri will use that phrase to generate a list of search results for us.
Another example could be if we’re looking for a recipe tomorrow, previously, we might write a search phrase “Chicken rice stir-fry” and that would give us a bunch of different recipe websites that would give us potential options to cook dinner tomorrow night. Whereas, rather we’d ask Siri “Hey Siri, what’s a great recipe for a chicken stir-fry for a dinner party I’m having with four guests tomorrow night?” and we get search results for that and then we find a recipe that we like. Then we might ask Siri “Hi Siri, what’s a good accompanying wine for this specific meal that we found?” So we’re actually asking questions rather than keywords.
So what this actually means as far as the future of search is that, we’re moving away from this idea that search is based on keywords or search phrases and rather we’re going back to the way we used to originally search for things, by asking questions. Building this into your search strategy, particularly around SEO campaigns, start thinking about how you’re creating your content strategy. And how you’re structuring your blog posts and your articles, so you know obviously some elements of blog posts are super important for search results such as: your title, your headings, you know your h1 h2 h3 headings, the URL, that kind of thing.
Start creating content based around answering the questions that your clients or your, if you’re a digital marketing agency, the clients of your clients are asking. So instead of writing content to optimize for keywords, write content that asks and answers questions. Because you know I’ve actually been saying this for a long time in my career in digital marketing is that, you know if your clients are asking new questions, it’s likely that they’re asking those same questions to Google. In the past they might have structured those questions around keywords but now going forward, the search questions are actually going to be structured around questions. So when you structure your blog posts, make the question your title and you’ll notice with this video that that’s how I’ve structured the title of this video, and write a really good piece of content based on answering that question.
If you’re stuck for content ideas, a great place to start looking (and this is a tip that I’ve offered for the last ten years) is in the sent folder or the sent box of your e-mail software. So go to your sent items because your sent items will be full of you answering questions that your prospects and clients have asked you. You’ll have all the content there so create your content out of stuff you’ve already answered. You can probably even just cut and paste a lot of it and then just you know, fine tune it up to make it more readable or make a video about it. But that’s a great place to find questions that you can create your content on, to facilitate a search strategy that will bulletproof your business going into the future with the rise of the new technologies around search.
I hope you find this kind of information helpful because business isn’t just about today, it’s about tomorrow also and this is sort of a like it’s a great insight into where search is going and how to create proper strategy around that for the future.
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