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What Is a Featured Snippet?

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The featured snippet is the most coveted position pursued by search engine optimization Kitchener companies. Not every search option returns a featured snippet, but the most popular search questions do. Companies love to rank for this position because it provides the opportunity to distinguish themselves from competitors. It also confirms that they are the subject matter experts on the specific topic, which customers begin to notice when this ranking is consistent across related queries.

What Is a Google Snippet?

Featured snippets are the highlighted answers in search position zero. They illustrate what Google decides is the best answer to a query. Google displays this information without the need for a potential client to click on your website while still crediting you for the information.

Google also provides rich text associated with every other result provided. It increasingly highlights the specific text on web pages that answer a question, even if it does not rank in search position zero.

What Are the Different Types?

Google provides four main types of featured snippets. The main difference between all four is formatting.

Listicles

If you write a listicle article, Google might use the headings from the list to answer someone’s questions. For example, say you write an article on how to change a tire. Each step and its subheading would be another item on Google’s list.

Tables

Google might go a step further with formatting and present the information in the form of a table. The table does not always have visible lines, so you might confuse it with lists. A common query Google responds to with this format is when you look for the annual weather averages of an area. It provides a table showing the month, high and low temperatures and the inches of rain received.

Paragraphs

Not surprisingly, most featured snippets take the form of regular paragraphs. In some cases, Google will string together information from different paragraphs to create a new paragraph that answers the specific query.

Video

Sometimes, the best answer to your question is a video. Marketers believe that videos will become more prevalent as featured snippets, over time. Videos are most likely to rank in featured snippets for how-to queries, such as, “How to change windshield wipers”.

Google featured snippets

Is It Worth Ranking for This?

Some companies believe ranking for a featured snippet does not provide any real benefits to the business beyond exposure. After all, if clients can see the answer without clicking on the website, why would they visit? In spite of these concerns, one study showed that when companies rank for search position zero, they increased organic traffic by roughly 516%.

Another important reason to rank for featured snippets is the prevalence of voice search. Virtual assistants, such as Google Home, Siri and Alexa, have popularized the practice of asking Google questions by speaking to it.

These answers tend to come from featured snippets and rich text. Voice search does not immediately lead to sales conversions, but Google credits the website for the information. Over time, consumers notice when they hear the same subject matter expert’s name over and over again.

What Can I Do To Get Started?

The high competition for the featured snippet position makes it difficult to rank for, but that depends on the keywords. When you work with our search engine optimization Kitchener specialists, they complete keyword research and determine which keywords are easiest for you to rank for. Niche keywords, especially long-tail keywords are worth aiming for when the competition is too stiff for more popular search terms.

Are you looking for new ways to improve your website ranking performance? Unwired Web Solution can help you outrank your competitors and convert current onlookers into your best customers. Contact us for a quote.

Why You Should Be Doing A Quarterly Content Marketing Audit

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When looking at how to improve SEO, doing a quarterly content marketing audit is essential. While this may be a new term from some people, it has been an important part of online marketing since day one. To get the most out of your website, experts recommend doing a quarterly audit of your content. If you are looking for content marketing services in Canada, the professionals at Unwired Web Solutions have the tools to make sure your content is helping your SEO. 

The performance of any content website follows an 80/20 rule which means that 80% of traffic is a result of just 20% of content. This means that only a few articles are the ones pulling traffic and creating conversions. The trick is making sure your 20% is performing well and keeping up to date information. 

Why You Should Do an Audit

A well-performed content marketing audit can provide deep insights into your marketing strategy in terms of the blog articles and content that are performing the best. Most people tend to write content and never go back to it once it is published. However, over time it may become outdated or completely irrelevant. 

This is why it is a good exercise to keep revisiting your content quarterly to keep check on its usefulness and make sure all the information is up to date.  

By performing a well-executed content audit, you will find out which pages or blog posts are your top performers. You will also find which topics your audience most engages with, and it can give you a chance to find any posts that have exceeded their expiry date. Your audit will provide insights that will enable you to increase the focus on future efforts to increase sales, provide lead generation, and give you details about your marketing progress. 

Before starting your quarterly audit, it is necessary to define your objectives. A content audit is not an easy task and can strike fear into the most experienced marketers. By clarifying your business needs you can objectively look at your content and see if it covers what you want to achieve. 

By defining your business goals, you will be able to select performance parameters and list the best content classified into 4 categories. These categories include:

  1. Engagement metrics
  2. User behaviour metrics
  3. SEO metrics
  4. Sales metrics

Create Content Inventory

Before deciding on how to audit your content, it is important to decide what type of content you need to review. Internal content such as blogs, news, product reviews, landing pages, or external content can all be part of your audit. 

Once you have decided where you will put your focus, you can start your inventory. Collecting the URLS’s of all the webpages you want to analyse is called a link analysis. This will provide a list of all pages that need to be checked for your audit. 

As you analyse each page, recording your data in a spreadsheet will provide a quick and easy way to reference each one later in time. This will also allow you to get the full picture and draw inferences about your site by looking at your metrics as a whole. 

Assessing Your Content

By evaluating each piece of content, you will be able to place them in one of three categories. 

  • Keep: This category will contain pieces that perform well and will be kept as part of your future content marketing strategy. 
  • Update: This content needs to be updated to make it more efficient or relevant to future searches. 
  • Delete: This is content that is beyond improvement and updating it will take too much effort. This can contain content that was set up for seasonal marketing that has since lost its purpose. 

While performing your content marketing audit it is necessary to keep your long-term marketing strategy in mind. By finding your successes and failures you will be able to understand what changes need to be made to reach your target audience and get better conversion rates. 

In today’s fast-growing world, performing an audit regularly is necessary to stay relevant and improve your online engagement. A frequency of 3 to 4 times is recommended, though you can adjust this to suit your company. Performing a content marketing audit is no easy feat, and many people need content marketing services to help them perform the task. If you want to make sure your site is up to date and at peak performance, contact our experts at Unwired Web Solutions today. We will be happy to assist you with your audit to make sure you are getting the SEO exposure your business deserves. 

SEO Expert Tip Focus On User Experience

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The internet is a crowded environment. It takes planning and effort to make sure that your website gets noticed. For the past three decades, search engines have been cataloging content on the web, and content providers have been looking for ways to ensure their sites land on the first page of the search results. Search engine optimization is a set of processes that seek to improve site visibility and rankings for search results that are relevant.

These days, Google algorithms direct traffic on busy internet highways. Keeping up with the ever-changing methods the company uses to determine what gets seen in search results is not easy. Unfortunately, any changes they make ultimately alter optimization strategies. This leads many businesses to hire an SEO company to do the work for them. While it is important to get people to visit your site, there is more to a good SEO strategy than simply getting views. 

Prioritize Your Users’ Experience

In 2021, optimizing your content so that it turns up in relevant search results is going to take more than just getting people to your website. Getting visitors to stay on your site is imperative to good rankings. The quicker they leave, the lower your position falls. There are multiple ways you can create content that is engaging enough to make people want to stick around. Your optimization strategy should utilize more than one method, but each should seek to place the primary focus on user experience. Possible strategies include:

  • Write content that is centred on medium-tail keywords, and make sure that that page is high quality. Make it meaningful and relevant and get rid of the fluff.
  • More people are inclined to watch a video than read a post, so take advantage of opportunities to create engaging video content.
  • Optimize your content to show up as a featured snippet by incorporating keywords, lists, images and graphs into your content.
  • Write long-form content that has some staying power, rather than providing information that is likely to change in a few months’ time.
  • Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly. So many people use their devices these days that a mobile site is considered the primary site, rather than the desktop version.

Perhaps it seems intuitive that user experience is important to finding and keeping customers. It has always been the key to any successful business. The internet and search engines have altered marketing strategies, but, in the end, SEO rankings are circling back around to placing importance on user experience to determine which sites rank high and which sink into the depths of search results.

Familiarize Yourself With Google’s RankBrain

So, what’s driving the shift in SEO strategies? Simply said, it’s Google. The company utilizes a number of elements in its ranking algorithm, and RankBrain is one of them. Google now uses the “learning” capabilities of artificial intelligence to determine what ultimately shows up on search results pages.

This AI is capable of ascertaining probable user intent based on the way people interact with the results that turn up for a given search query. If a user clicks on a link for your site, and then immediately leaves, it tells the AI that your site wasn’t what that person was looking for when they entered the search terms. When they spend more time on your page, RankBrain takes it to mean that you are providing them the information they are seeking, which, in turn, boosts your ranking, drives more traffic to your page and increases your lead generation and sales.

Give Your Business a Boost

Keeping up with the ever-shifting landscape of SEO is a full-time endeavor. Unwired Web Solutions makes it our business to stay on top of the newest trends in marketing. Our SEO services provide you with the most up-to-date approaches to optimizing your site, driving more organic traffic to your online properties. Take the next step in growing your business by contacting us today!

Top 5 SEO Trends For 2021

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With a new year comes all new trends in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). But for many business owners, SEO can be a confusing world filled with concepts that they may not be familiar with. However, by simply getting to know the top 5 trends for the new year, you can stay ahead of your competitors. For those looking for professional, reliable services for search engine optimization in Kitchener, Unwired Web Solutions has got you covered. Our team of leading experts can help improve your search results and expand your customer base.  

A great search engine optimization strategy should be relevant and stay on top of trends. By taking a look at what is ahead for SEO professionals in 2021, you can get a good idea of what your business may be lacking. We have asked our top SEO experts what the top 5 trends will be for the new year. 

1. Focus on The User

While this is not a new concept, it is important to refocus and fine-tune your approach as searcher behaviour and intent changes all the time. Getting into the head of your customers and understanding the nature of why people search the way they do can greatly benefit your business. 

Part of this means that SEO pros will start to transition away from traditional practices that will hold less value as the algorithms get stronger. Writing meta descriptions for every single page will become a thing of the past while more focus will be put on better understanding of what is happening within the search engine results page and searcher intent.

By paying closer attention to search results, SEO pros can get a leg up in creating content in the way that searchers desire to consume it. It is now more important than ever to focus on learning what a user is looking for and learning how to fill their needs. 

2. Mobile-Friendly Sites

Mobile-friendly sites are becoming more important than ever since Google rolled out mobile-first indexing in 2019. This means that the search engine looks primarily at the mobile version of a website, considering this the “primary” version instead of the desktop version. Moving forward, it is estimated that nearly 73% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025. By checking how effective your mobile site is and monitoring your mobile usability, you will have better chances of staying on top of Google’s search results.  

3. Utilize Video

For those who have been avoiding video, you better get over being camera shy. Online video seems to be the way forward. YouTube now has over 1 billion users and it is growing daily. According to Cisco, video is projected to surpass all other content forms in terms of consumption, so if you want to get your information heard, you better fire up the camera! 

But video alone will not get you ranking on Google. Your videos must be optimized with a video channel name and description. Keep in mind that your description should not be crammed with keywords but provide a user-friendly overview of what your channel is all about. 

4. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search technology has come a long way thanks to innovations such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa. By 2022 it is estimated that 55% of all households will own a smart speaker. 

Voice search is now something that needs to be considered for keyword creation. When people do a voice search, they tend to use longer more natural-sounding phrasing. For example, when using voice search a person may say “What are the new fashion trends for 2021?” by they may type the words, “new fashion trends 2021.” Keeping the way people will be searching in future in mind when creating keywords will help immensely with SEO. 

5. Refer to the EAT Principal

More than ever, quality content is critical for ranking success. But what is “quality” in Google’s eyes? The easiest way to make sure your website stacks up is to refer to the EAT principal: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google looks at these factors to decide if a webpage has useful, quality content. 

The best way to ensure your site has quality content is to make sure you are publishing topics that your client values. Be sure to back up any claims you make with statistics and facts. Linking to reputable sites such as .edu and .gov and having credible sites linking back to yours are also ways to fulfill the EAT criteria. 

By following these top 5 steps you may be able to improve your SEO and attract more customers to your site. Having a knowledgeable team in charge of SEO can ensure these new trends are applied to your site and stay on top of search results to stay relevant in your field. If you are looking for search engine optimization in Kitchener, contact Unwired Web Solutions and talk to one of our experts today.

How Blogs are an Effective SEO and Marketing Tool for Your Business

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When was the last time you did an online search to answer a question or solve a problem? You probably did so at least once today. There’s also a fairly good chance that you found your answers on a blog. Every day, your customers are online doing exactly the same thing. Don’t you want to publish an article that gets their attention? Online marketing services can help make this possible.

Foundation for SEO

Search engine optimization requires content to thrive. Marketers then work hard to ensure this content ranks highly in search results and attracts your most likely customers. Website copy can achieve this, but this information is static. To truly improve your website’s discoverability, you need more content and you need to find room to fit the right keywords on your website. Blogging helps make this happen.

Traffic Driver

Did you know companies that publish blogs regularly attract far more traffic than those that do not? Hubspot attributes this to the fact that every new blog post is another indexed page for your website. This ties back to the importance of organic traffic from SEO. Blogs also improve the quality of readers you attract, because blogs tend to attract people looking for solutions.

Compounded Value

Business owners often feel discouraged when blog posts do not garner a lot of traffic on the first day or within the first week. However, that blog will continue to attract traffic for some time to come. Because of this, older blog posts tend to outperform newer ones, with exceptions for those that go viral. Hubspot estimates that 90% of its leads come from blogs published months before.

Passive Investment

You have likely heard all the perks of passive income. You do the work once and it continues to feed your bottom line for some to come. Blogs work in the same way. While you are sleeping at night or off on the weekends, the blog posts you published continue to work on your behalf. This organic traffic is much more cost-effective than relying solely on expensive ads and labour-intensive marketing strategies.

Branding

In the early stages of business, you may not feel as drawn to the concept of branding. However, as your business grows, you see more and more the importance of distinguishing yourself from your competitors. Blogs give you the opportunity to create and maintain a certain core message or tone. It also gives your company and its key workforce the opportunity to showcase their expertise.

Engagement

Creating content that informs is crucial, but creating content that engages is of equal importance. The more people like, share or comment on a blog post, the more value it earns for search engine ranking. It also makes your content more memorable and improves the chances of more people seeing it. Your blog post may even go viral.

Customer Experience

All around the world, more companies are investing in creating a good customer experience. Customer support is the primary tool companies rely on, but content offers a great opportunity as well. Companies often turn common customer questions into articles. They can then link to these expanded answers via the use of the “Learn More” buttons.

Partnership

Not all blogs published by your brand will live on your website. Sometimes, you earn the opportunity to write for major publications or popular blogs. This can help you tap into the overlapping audience of more established blogs. If the admins allow you to use do-follow links, it also helps your SEO strategy through link-building.

Blogging is a core component of online marketing services and compliments most digital strategies. If you would love to see it become a part of your own, contact Unwired Web Solutions today.