5 SEO Trends for 2022 You Need to Know About

5 SEO Trends for 2022 You Need to Know About

SEO evolves from year to year, and it’s crucial that you stay up to date with the latest trends to avoid falling behind. With 2022 here already, we thought it was time for our Orange County SEO specialists to share five top SEO trends for the year ahead.

Greater Focus On Website Accessibility

As the Internet becomes increasingly embedded in our lives, every website should be optimized for improved accessibility. Many people may struggle to use your site properly if you overlook this key issue: for example, around 12 million people in the U.S. have vision impairment and approximately 15% of adults experience some level of hearing difficulty.

Enhanced accessibility can provide all users with a high-quality browsing experience, regardless of their capabilities. It will also reduce the risk of dissatisfied visitors leaving your site with a negative impression of your brand.

More Websites Catering to Voice Search

Twenty-seven percent of the worldwide online population uses voice search on mobile devices. This trend will drive more and more businesses to optimize their websites for voice search in 2022, but what does that involve?

  • Incorporate keywords into questions users are likely to ask, especially on mobile devices, such as “where’s the nearest pizza restaurant to me?”
  • Implement long-tail keywords for accurate targeting.
  • Write in a conversational style.
  • Create FAQ pages packed with relevant, conversational questions and answers.

Increasing Popularity of Featured Snippets

Featured snippets appear on around 19% of SERPs, and they give users a faster way to access information. Ideally, a featured snippet will provide an answer but still compel users to click through for a more detailed insight instead of scrolling down.

In 2022 (and beyond), more brands will structure their content to earn featured snippets. One technique is to use more questions and answers in content, beginning with “who”, “what”, or “why”.

Mobile-friendly Websites Becoming More Prevalent

More than 92% of Internet users around the world went online via their mobile devices as of January 2021.So, it’s no surprise that brands will increasingly optimize their websites for mobile devices in 2022 and beyond.

Mobile-friendly websites are critical to deliver the best user experience and prevent frustrated users from leaving your site.

Combining Video and Long-form Content for Better Results

Brands will continue to embrace longer content in 2022. This typically gives readers more valuable information and encourages visitors to stay on your site for longer, unlike a short piece of content.

And video will remain a key part of SEO strategies the world over. Ninety-three percent of businesses win new customers thanks to videos they post on social media, and companies that use video grow revenue 49% faster than those that don’t. Combining long-form content and videos can help businesses improve SEO campaigns significantly.

Our Orange County SEO agency is here to help you achieve better results, whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to overhaul your current SEO strategy. Get in touch to find out how we can help you today!

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How-Do-Online-Reviews-Impact-Your-SEO-Campaign?

How Do Online Reviews Impact Your SEO Campaign?

Your reputation matters. If you keep letting your customers down, they’re pretty unlikely to keep buying from you — and they might even let other people know just how unreliable you are too.

And they have plenty of ways to do that, including online review sites and social media. But how do online reviews affect your SEO campaign?

Let’s take a closer look …

 

The Impact on Conversion Rates

Sharing your experience of a company’s service takes just a minute or two, but can influence other customers’ decisions for years to come. Businesses actually lose $75 billion a year to bad customer service, and negative reviews can pile up easily.

Still, not every customer will give you a bad review — unless you’re doing something seriously wrong! Good reviews help to build trust in consumers and increase the likelihood of netting conversions.

A recommendation on a reputable review site could give a prospect the information they need to go through with a purchase, especially when they’re close to that part of their journey.

 

Extra Fresh Content

Both good and bad reviews generate fresh content for your brand. Search engines will have more content to read and index related to your site, helping refine its understanding of your company.

If customers talk about your products or services explicitly, they’re actually helping to connect these to your brand name too. Reviewers can help your SEO campaign a little by doing this, without even realizing!

Adding customer reviews to your site means a regular influx of new content, while people leaving links in off-site reviews is another key benefit.

 

Taking the Time to Talk

Always respond to online reviews, even if only to say ‘thank you’. Engaging with customers’ feedback and addressing any concerns they raise shows you actually value their opinion.

People want to see that you discuss issues buyers bring up and don’t shy away from claiming responsibility for mistakes. Your response to a bad review can win favor with prospects, demonstrating your brand’s commitment to your customers.

They could still click through to your site and go ahead with a purchase based on your intelligent comments.

Make sure you encourage reviews too, across your website and social media. The more mentions of your business that are generated, the better your visibility will be.

 

Don’t Forget About Google My Business Reviews

Google My Business listings give customers contact details and a star-based rating for your brand, according to people’s reviews.

This will appear on Google Maps and result pages, helping your organic rankings along with reviews elsewhere.

Nett Solutions’ Orange County digital marketing experts are here to help boost your online presence with a bespoke SEO campaign — want to know more? Get in touch!

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Is-Blogging-Still-Relevant-to-Your-Business?

Is Blogging Still Relevant to Your Business?

Is blogging really still relevant in a world where social media allows you to communicate with your potential followers directly?

After all, if you can either write a 500 word post on your latest service or share the key points on Facebook, some businesses might now gravitate more towards one than the other for the sake of convenience.

The truth is, blogging is absolutely still relevant to your business in 2017 – and here are some key reasons why.

 

Blogs Fuel Your Social Content

 You need something to say on your social media channels, and somewhere to direct your current and prospective followers.

Simply sharing images and links to your product pages suggests you’re only interested in trying to sell, rather than engage. With regular blog posts, you can consistently share high-value content on your social accounts to entice people to your site with something more than a purchase.

Share snippets of your blog posts as a teaser, along with eye-catching images that tell a story relevant to the content itself.

 

Blogs are Still Effective for SEO

Blogging on a regular basis enables your business to boost your visibility and authority in a number of ways.

For starters: keywords. Back in the day, brands could write blog posts consisting of endless search terms offering little value to the reader, but now Google’s algorithm is far wiser.

The emphasis is much more on the quality of your content rather than the keywords, but they’re still important. Use your most effective ones a few times in a post, but always make sure they don’t affect its readability.

Blog posts add fresh content to your site regularly, which is crucial for solid rankings, as are social signals. Bear this in mind: 82 percent of markets blogging on a daily basis converted a customer using their blogs, while only 57 of those publishing posts once per month did so.

 

Blogs can Help You Build Credibility

Having a wide variety of blog posts on your business’s website builds your credibility. How so?

Blogging gives your brand an opportunity to become a thought-leader, sharing innovative insights and influencing others. This can lead to your blogs gaining a wider readership by peers and customers alike, driving more traffic to your site over time.

Your business will appear more reliable and professional with a portfolio of well-written, well-presented blog posts, rather than a bare-bones site.

 

Blogs Allow for Deeper Communication than Social Media

You have to establish a style and voice for your business on social channels, and Facebook, Twitter etc. are ideal places to communicate with your customers.

However, blog posts enable you to tell deeper, richer stories unsuited to the shorter, sweeter structure of social accounts. Yourself and / or your team can explore your processes, motivations, missions, products, and opinions in more detail.

Your readers will get to know you better, and feel more invested in your brand.

Looking to start blogging for your business, or want to improve future posts? At Nett Solutions, we’re an experienced Orange County digital marketing agency dedicated to helping companies of all sizes build better results! Give our expert team a call now!

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5 SEO Trends Every Business Should Embrace

5 SEO Trends Every Business Should Embrace

Struggling to keep up with the ever-changing trends in the world of SEO?

You’re not alone, but you have to make an effort to embrace the newest, most important ways to boost your organic search to beat competitors. What are the biggest SEO trends for 2018 you need to know?

 

Go Secure for Increased Rankings

Secure websites (those with a HTTPS in their URL) tend to receive higher rankings in search engine results pages. Though there are correlations between HTTPS sites and high placements, cutting-edge security is more of a tie-breaker used alongside other ranking factors.

If two sites are both well-optimized but one has better security than the other, the HTTPS element will win out.

Users are notified if a website they visit is not secure. Don’t give them a reason to leave.

 

Voice Searches for Accurate User Intent

Voice search is far more convenient than having to type your query using a cluttered mobile keyboard, and consumers are more increasingly likely to use it.

You need to focus on building content based around searcher intent rather than a strict list of keywords (though they are still essential). Your content has to be crafted to answer prospects’ questions, using a conversational tone.

More than ever, content must feel organic and valuable.

 

Focusing on User-driven Content

Following on from the point above, you need to make sure your content is worth readers’ time.

Put yourself in searchers’ shoes in relation to your products or services. What questions would you be asking, and what answers would you expect? What information do you need to be converted into a customer?

Try to avoid hitting readers over the head with directions to buy, buy, buy. Engage them, make sure you don’t waste their time, and they will be more likely to remember your brand even if they don’t actually make a purchase.

 

Video – A Growing Force

Video will account for 82 percent of consumer traffic online by 2021. It’s already everywhere, from social media to news pages and FAQs, and you’re missing out if you don’t use it already.

Create entertaining, informative videos on various topics. Make demonstrations for your products, take users on a tour of your business, introduce your team, and present customer testimonials.

Get on YouTube too: it’s the world’s second biggest search engine.

 

AMP for Stronger Mobile Engagement

The speed of your mobile site affects your ranking, and users simply don’t want the hassle of slow-loading pages. AMP is an ideal solution, creating mobile sites that are faster to load, easier to navigate, and make for a smoother browsing experience overall.

Integrate AMP into your campaign to make sure you maximize your mobile service.

Our team of Orange County digital marketing experts can create a bespoke SEO strategy for your business, incorporating the latest trends. Want to know what we can do for you? Give us a call!

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Schema Markup for Orange County Restaurant Websites: What You Should Know

Orange County Restaurant Website SEOThe restaurant website is a continually evolving animal.

Getting it to do what you want is a lot easier said than done. In most cases, restaurant websites act only as brochures and so getting people to click through still requires classic SEO techniques rather than flashy website antics and bells and whistles. That means, it’s got to show up in the results, and then it’s got to inspire a click.

Schema Markup is first and foremost being used simply to make your website stand out on the Google search results page. It’s unfair, but it really is that simple. That’s not to say that you should consider Schema Markup only as a way of adding some lights around your search results listing, but you could think of it that way. And for most restaurateurs.

Schema.org designed a way to label some of your site’s HTML content so that search engines – like Google, Yahoo and Bing – can better read the content and know exactly what it refers to. When they’ve done that, then they can re-present some of it to searchers on that search results page. Take a look here at exactly what Schema.org thinks restaurants should be indicating.

You won’t be immediately loading up your entire website with every possible Schema code, but because Schema is relatively new (or at least, because it’s only slowly being adopted), it’s a fast way to bump your click-throughs from search engines. In part, that’s because few of your competitors are going to be yet using it. Let’s get going. (more…)

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5 Ways to Get More Out of Yelp (and More Positive Reviews, too!)

orange county social media agencyNo one’s feeling the bite of Yelp’s review filters more than Yelp themselves.

Slated to be the “TripAdvisor for everything else,” Yelp’s heavy-handed, review-crushing filter has lots of small business owners looking elsewhere for listings and reviews. Any positive reviews faked by friends and family are gone, but then, plenty of real reviews – good and bad – are gone, too.

In short, you can’t really automate review editing with a filter. TripAdvisor relies on travel fanatics to prove themselves via multiple reviews. But TripAdvisor will also human-edit where a negative review sounds too fanatical, or a positive review too friendly. But not every broad sector of the market can rely on such a public to correct them. (more…)

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Local SEO Tips for Orange County Restaurants

Restaurant SEO is all about Local SEO. For all but the very biggest and most famous restaurants, and especially in Orange County, there’s always going to be a big slice of the population searching for the right food – importantly – in the right location.

Local SEO is totally “location, location, location” and the great thing is – even obscure or hard-to-guess locations can not only benefit, but really shine. Look at it this way, 34 cities are incorporated in Orange County, and outside of those there are another 15 cities that are unincorporated – but just as good. Every one of these places is subdivided into more neighborhoods, hamlets, corners, zones and areas than any one person can name. Even the nicknames, or totally informal mini-neighborhood names will work and so will your plazas and malls and shopping center names.

You can break them down. So can your customers. If they’re not local, then they’re asking “Where are we?” and they’re getting accurate answers. You don’t have to memorize every place name in the county, just the ones relative to you, your customers, your delivery or service area and hopefully a good sample of the places surrounding.

TripAdvisor lists, at this writing, 7,094 restaurants in Orange County. Getting your restaurant to stand out from the rest is the point of this article.

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Eight Things To Do Today To Get All Your Locations Noticed In Search

Local-SEO-Tips---Whitepaper

As a local Search Engine Marketing Company, we deal with a variety of companies headquartered in Orange County, but have 20, 50 or even hundreds of locations nationwide. It is not small feat to get the local SEO in order for all of these locations.

Distinguishing each of your shops from corporate headquarters or a parent company website can be important or even vital, depending on what services are offered at each location.

We put together these eight vital steps, whether you’re in one, ten or twenty locations. A full sixty percent of the searches made – in your town too – result in a transaction. The market for local and mobile search is, frankly, too big to ignore and an ever-increasing local and mobile search audience is there. The question is can they find you?

Click here to download the Free Whitepaper

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10 Great Content Ideas for your Orange County Beachfront Business

orange county seoNo one, anywhere, makes quite enough of the beaches in Orange County. It’s a great tourism economy and running a business in the Orange County coast can be satisfying and lucrative.

That should be a good thing because there is actually a big opening if you’re running a business anywhere in coastal Orange County – or writing a blog about one. Whether you’re doing content trying to nail traffic, or you’re doing it more for straight marketing and communications, try any, all or just the most appropriate of the following. Take this list, build it out, rough it up and then polish it and you’ll have ten great articles for the next 3 months of active marketing.

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