Aside from posting frequency, having shareable content is essential. Followers are more inclined to share posts that contain videos, high-quality photos, and infographics. For example, research shows videos and images in tweets create 200% more engagement, and there is 39% more involvement with Facebook posts that have photos.
Another way to get the most from social media is keeping a “healthy” back-and-forth with users. Businesses should respond to private messages and comments as soon as people send or post them. It builds robust relationships when a company addresses negative comments with helpful and personalized replies and thanks to users when they share a positive experience.
Ranking with Google Means More Now Than Ever
Having a high search engine results page (SERP) rankings on Google boosts the ability of a business to get leads and traffic. It also presents a company as being authentic and an authority in its industry to an audience of potential customers. According to current data, web visitors base their perception of a company as being more authentic depending on where the business lands in the SERPs, which gives the first few websites listed an advantage over the rest. As a result, if a company has a vast number of competitors, getting to the top might be a challenge.
Local ranking especially is of high importance these days. It makes the need for local SEO (search engine optimization) critical. Google My Business (GMB) offers businesses a free listing, which will show a company in Google’s Local Finder and Google Maps when users search for a company near them. You may want to claim your GMB listing to increase organic rankings in searches.
Your Google My Business listing will need certain information you can enter about your business. Details needed include your company’s phone number, types of acceptable payments, address, and business hours. Another feature of GMB is Google Posts, which allows you to post relevant content about your business, such as advertising copy, a Call-to-Action (CTA), an image, and URL that links to your website’s landing page.
Another way to improve your Google SERP ranking is by having engaging, high-quality content on your website. Blog content creation is the highest priority of marketers, according to a recent Hubspot poll. Many professionals feel on-page content development is an SEO tactic with the most efficacy that should be mobile-optimized, contain useful links to external and internal content, keyword-rich, written to address the target audience’s need, on top of being mistake-free.
To gain favor by Google, it also helps to get more backlinks. These link from other sites to your own and carry weight with the search engine’s ranking factors. Visitors are likely to view your site as an authority when it has incoming links from high-authority domains, which improve your SERP ranking and bring in more traffic.
Make sure your website offers a good user experience, which you can identify using Google Analytics. The top-ranking factors for Google include such things as pages visited by users, time spent on the site, and bounce rate. A website that is enjoyable to use and easy to navigate with valuable information will cause visitors to stay on the site longer, visit more pages, invite more people to engage with your site’s content, and help boost your ranking.
While ranking No. 1 on SERPs is a commendable feat, a goal of reaching “position zero” is just as admirable. Google often responds to questions asked in searches by displaying an answer box or featured snippet. Sprinkling your site with authoritative answers to potential consumer questions may improve your chances of Google selecting your content for this featured spot above the first search result listed, with a link to your website that could boost the visibility and credibility of your brand.
This year, your business should take the most valuable lessons for business growth from last year, which includes harnessing the power of data by developing a strategy for change and improvement based on the analytics of a North Star metric. At the start of a new decade, business owners should not sleep on the power and influence of social media for marketing and social selling. Finally, last year taught businesses that optimizing their online presence with Google My Business and SEO tactics will increase the chances of ranking high in SERPs — especially in local searches — gaining more traffic and appearing as more of an authority by Google, as well as becoming an authentic business to consumers.
