Industry veteran and SEOphile Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable graced the Brandify Summit audience with his deep knowledge and insights on day 1 of the event. Schwartz took the audience down into the technical side of SEO, painting a picture of it's foundational elements and adding color by explaining recent updates and preparing for what is to come.
Overview of SEO
Types of SEO factors range from on page like content, site architecture, HTML, violation and penalty avoidance to off page SEO like trust, links and personalization. In terms of content, quality and the research behind the content makes all the difference on page. Schwartz notes that Value, matching, natural language, relevance (trends) and rich content like images and videos all help bolster strong on-page visibility.
While Schwartz gave a deep dive into the importance of crawlability and quality of content, the most relevant area that brand marketers continue to find themselves struggling with remains the mobile and accelerated mobile friendliness of online properties. If you aren’t aware of Google AMP and haven’t tried Google’s Mobile Friendly tool, you’re (in tech terms) lightyears behind,
Additionally, personalization locality, otherwise known as geo-awareness, is foundational to search success today. Being able to mark up and optimize content knowing the local area or the area someone is located in drives relevance and thus personalization, upranking your brand against that of others competing for the same queries.
Preparing for 2018
Google My Business
SEO is still one of the most important and core ways to optimize your brand for location-based marketing. Schwartz underscored this, saying "All your metrics can directly be tied back if you are using SEO as part of your strategy."
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