The INBOUND 16 Hubspot conference, held in the classic and historic city of Boston, revealed a few major developments for the future of both digital marketing and business in our brave new world.
My takeaways from the conference:
The Pragmatic Future of Search
Mike King
Looking ahead to the future of Google, Mike King offered up insights on products and search. Technology has created a movement in the marketing industry. It requires companies to create websites that are designed for visual interactivity, with content and SEO focused on real-time answers to people’s questions. Using growth-driven design and humanized content in marketing is a proven method for helping companies to not only stay ahead, but also to produce tangible results. As it has for the past decade, Google is continuously working towards increasing its presence within our everyday lives, and these developments are the next step in that evolution.
Here are a few Google products and technologies changing the future of search:
Stay Ahead With These Top SEO approaches:
- Because Google is now crawling mobile first, having a mobile-friendly website with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is becoming a game-changer for search results.
- Develop content and SEO strategies with long-tail keywords (3 words or more) for voice search.
- Create hyper-targeted content for specific personas and specific contexts.
- Tailor your keywords to audience personas.
- Enforce a high-functioning rendering path.
- Speed up your site in every way possible.
Why You Need to Split-Test for SEO
Will Critchlow
SEO is a science that requires asking questions, generating hypotheses, recording barriers and problems, analyzing solutions, and narrowing down answers.
What should you be testing?
- Add structured data and compare how data is presented in search with or without structured data mark up
- Improve your organic search adverts, which involves updating your meta data with calls-to-action and targeting long-tail keyword integration
- Secure your site with “https” label migrations; compare if the migration truly increases security and performance by comparing data captured pre migration as well as comparing various sites that have not been migrated
Etsy and Pinterest are digital channels that are both executing split-page testing, in which they utilize two different pages to compare content variables and see which page performs better. They have also split test they way serve up content in other ways, for example, changing “the default interface for tablet users to be more inline with (their) desktop experience.”
Here at Walk West, our team is always testing our SEO updates specifically by updating meta descriptions and title tags. After collecting accurate data sets, our team compares our site updates using Google Analytics data. We scour the analytics for detailed information about traffic, conversions, user flow, and more, always keeping in mind the goals of each site.
