Google strikes a careful balance between wanting to provide users a place to find the best information for free and being a platform for advertisers to reach potential customers. So while the search engine giant has been investing in initiatives such as Knowledge Graph, In-Depth Articles and Hummingbird, they’ve also been attempting to drive more people to click on their paid search results.

The result is that while organic search is still very important, much of the best real estate on Google’s search pages has been given to paid search results. You might think that this means you should consider focusing more — or all — of your efforts on paid search and abandon organic SEO. Think again. eVisible firmly believes that organic search results are very powerful and we make them a key component of the online marketing agency services we provide for businesses of any size.

The reality is while the real estate on a Google search result is shrinking for organic text links, there are additional opportunities for organic SEO elsewhere. Here are just a few of the many different search result items that are prominent on Google’s SERP and that help you to boost your visibility:

Knowledge Graph

This is Google’s attempt to bring together the major information on a search item in one place. It pulls information from Google+ along with from recognized information sites such as Wikipedia. Make sure the information on these sites are correct and verified along with adding it to the Freebase.com database.

Image Search Results

You can increase your chances for having an image of one of your products come up in a search by describing the image with keywords in the “alt text” attribute and saving the file with a relevant name. You should also create an image XML sitemap and ensure that a robots.txt isn’t blocking your image directory.

Reviews

You can make sure that reviews of your business — particularly popular reviews — come up in search results several ways, including using a mark-up tool and verifying it with Google’s Structured Testing Tool or using Google’s Data Highlighter.

Authorship

When an article you have written comes up in a Google search, you can have your image and bio also appear by verifying yourself as a Google+ contributor. This is done by linking your web page to your Google profile and then adding a link to the page on your “Contributor To” field in your profile.

In-Depth Articles

While the majority of in-depth articles that are featured in Google search results come from larger publishers, you can increase the odds of your article being highlighted by making sure your Google authorship is verified and making sure specific attributes such as headlines, alternative headlines, images, descriptions and more are marked up to be read by Google.

Video Clips

Having YouTube videos linked to your Google+ account gives you a chance for them to come up as snippets in searches. You can also self-host these videos and make sure that they have attributes like descriptions and titles properly filled in.

In order to make the most of your web-presence, you need more than just a site that has an SEO friendly design for desktop users. More people than ever are using their mobile devices to get online and make purchases. In order to reach these customers, you need to think of your mobile SEO and desktop SEO as two separate but interrelated strategies.

Here are five key things to think about as you develop an independent mobile SEO strategy:

The User Experience Drives Everything: The number one factor that drives a successful mobile SEO strategy is giving the user a positive experience. Not only has Google signaled that this plays a factor when you want to improve a search engine ranking, but it also helps to generate conversions.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly: Mobile sites can be responsive to adapt to readers on mobile devices, or you can create your own dedicated site for mobile users. There are pros and cons to each approach, but it’s important that you have a dedicated way for mobile users to access your site. Doing so will greatly increase your potential for conversions from mobile users.

Have a Clean Design: Having a website design with lots of graphics and other design elements can create major problems for mobile users. With limited screen sizes, clutter can keep people from seeing the most important information on your site. It can also make pages slow to load and make mobile users quickly decide to leave your page and go somewhere else.

Consider How Mobile Users Search: A mobile user likely won’t type in a search with your city name; they’ll almost always type (or speak) a search that says to find something “near” them. Because of this, making sure that your business’ location is part of your SEO strategy and not just a city name can pay dividends.

Grasp User Intent: Mobile users are more likely to be looking for something near them. This means that making sure your location, hours and phone number are easily accessible on the site and through Google+ is critical.

Google’s recent move to restrict access to keyword information was blow to many online advertisers and marketers. For many people, Google’s keyword suggestion tool was the main way that they researched potential keywords to use in SEO and PPC campaigns. But savvy advertising and marketing experts were already using other keyword tools to augment their research. Here are 11 tools to consider when looking for a keyword suggestion tool.

Wikipedia: Going to Wikipedia pages related to topics that are related to your business is already a great way to discover keyword phrases. When you use the SEOQuake Toolbar while on Wikipedia, you can quickly see the words and phrases most commonly used on these pages.

Amazon.com: Amazon has provided users with free access to a wonderful SEO resource: books related to their subject. Search for books and look for “Look Inside” books with free previews. Many keywords can be found in the chapter or section titles. Another way to use Amazon for SEO purposes is to just start a search on products related to your category. Amazon’s Auto Correct feature will suggest lots of related phrases and versions of your keyword.

Press Release Sites: Visit press release distribution sites like PR.com or Yahoo News to get a sense of what companies in your space are saying about themselves. Browse through industry categories and search press releases to find frequently used words and phrases by your competitors.

Soovle and Ubersuggest: Soovle will help you by automatically creating lists of keyword suggestions across multiple search engines (such as Bing, Amazon, Yahoo and YouTube). Ubersuggest takes a longtail approach by getting keywords from regular searches along with specific searches like News, Shopping or Videos.

eVisible’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: Our own free tool gives you a large list of potential keywords based on words or phrases that you provide. It’s fast, easy to use and gives you plenty of great keywords to use. You can find the Keyword Suggestion Tool at https://www.evisible.co/tools/keyword-suggestion/.

Followerwonk: Using Followerwonk to determine the influential social media experts in your space gives you several avenues of keyword research. You can scrape these people’s Tweets using a service like AllMyTweets and then feed the content into a word cloud generator like Wordle to find frequently-mentioned terms. You can also export title tags using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider into Wordle.

Prismatic: When you are searching for SEO keywords specifically for social media, Prismatic is a great tool. You can follow topics by category and browse social media updates to find frequently-used keywords.

Google Correlate: Google hasn’t completely dried up as a source of keyword research. You can use its Google Correlate product to search for the most frequently searched for terms within a given time frame. You can compare search rates on a weekly or monthly basis or across different time frames to see when the right time to use a keyword might be.

The rules of search engine optimization have changed dramatically in the last few years. Google responded to the glut of low-quality content with Panda and Penguin, algorithm updates that placed an emphasis on quality content and organic search engine optimization rather than keyword-stuffed articles and manipulating site code.

The most important thing to think about when creating an SEO strategy for your website is the visitor experience. This wasn’t always the case; until recently, Google wasn’t concerned about the user experience when determining site rankings. This has changed, as Google is smarter about reviewing sites in a way that mimics how users interact with the site. In short, the best way to improve your link popularity is to have a website that provides useful content and information to visitors.

Adapting to the new SEO landscape means rethinking old tactics that were considered to be the industry standard just a few years ago. Here are four examples of how SEO strategies have shifted recently:

Build Blog Relationships Instead of Buying Links

While Google still places a high value on having your site linked on other sites, the concept of “buying” a high volume of  low quality links via a link network is no longer considered to be a good SEO strategy. In fact, if done incorrectly, you might get punished by Google for this. Instead, you should focus on doing outreach to blogs that are a natural fit for your site. Reach out to them and try to enter into a mutual relationship where you provide their readers with interesting content in exchange for links.

Focus on the On-Screen Design of Your Website

It’s still important to have a website that has a common sense architecture and that has a solid internal structure. But it’s now just as important to have a site that looks great and has content that flows naturally. Google’s spiders can read sites to analyze where and how content is displayed and you need to have a website design that takes advantage of this.

Expand Beyond a Limited Set of Keywords

Until recently, the prevailing method that search engine optimization consulting services used to increase a site’s page ranking was to focus on a limited amount of keywords and use them in the page content, title tags and header tags. Google is now smarter about how it evaluates keywords for rankings. It’s better to come up with keyword groups of related words and use them organically in your on-site content.

Concentrate on Branding

Google frowns on paying for anchor links on unrelated sites. Instead, it wants to see your company’s brand have strength. If this occurs, the power of your brand will give an extra boost to your related page rankings.

Doing SEO efforts, building social media platforms and other online marketing activities are useless unless you have a plan. Just like how you wouldn’t go for a hiking trip into the woods without a detailed map, you shouldn’t do online marketing tactics without establish your marketing plan first. Developing your marketing plan helps you to get the most out of your small business Internet marketing and maximize your ROI.

It takes time and effort to develop a cohesive and successful marketing plans. Here are seven steps you need to take in order for your marketing plan to have a chance at succeeding:

1. Identify Your Position in the Marketplace

Customers are drawn to businesses that they consider to be leaders within their industry. Just as importantly, if they feel that your company is made up of experts in their industry and are people who spread reliable and useful information to customer, they will be very receptive to your marketing efforts. Your marketing plan should include ways to interact with people within the industry to build your credibility.

2. Strengthen Your Brand Positioning

At its core, your brand is really a summation of the way that people feel about your company when they hear its name. Ideally, you want people to have immediate positive associations with your brand regardless of the situation. Engaging in brand reinforcing tactics such as charitable campaigns or non-product targeted advertising can give people a good feeling about your brand.

3. Build Long-Term Awareness of Your Brand

Many people ignore a company or their brand if they have no need for their services at that exact minute. But subconsciously they might remember the brand if it is reinforced. When they are suddenly in need of what your company has to offer, the building of long-term brand awareness pays off and you have a new customer.

4. Attract New Customers

Performing web analytics on your current customers is one of the best ways to develop tactics to attract new sales leads and turn them into customers. Do research to find out how customers decided to purchase your goods or services. This can be as direct as sending customer surveys or you can track the entry points that people used to get to your site and make purchases.

5. Retain Existing Customers

It’s a common mistake to get so concerned about marketing efforts designed to bring in new customers that you end up ignoring your current customer base. Remember that any place that your current customers come into contact with your brand is a marketing opportunity. This can include your website, social media sites, ads or even the packaging on your products.

6. Plan for Success

The online world is filled with companies who were so successful that they saw their sales skyrocket faster than their infrastructure could keep up. This usually leads to shipping delays, unfulfilled orders and dissatisfied customers. Your marketing plan should have plans in place for what to do if you meet — or exceed — your “best-case scenario” expectations for your marketing plan.

7.  Analyze Your Results

If you don’t know how to analyze the results of your marketing efforts, there’s no way that you can know which tactics work or why certain tactics failed. Make sure that your marketing plan has clear and quantifiable goals and has ways in place to measure the success of your tactics as you work toward your goals.

Google recently announced the launch of a new feature that places search results for “in-depth” articles of more than 2,000 words prominently on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It’s the logical next step of Google’s campaign to improve the overall quality of search results. Previous updates such as Panda had punished low-quality and off-topic content. Featuring in-depth articles highly on a results page serves as the reward for people such as SEO copywriting services which produce high-quality and relevant content.

In terms of SEO, the addition of in-depth articles has the potential to be a game-changer. With these articles receiving such a prominent place on Google’s SERP, it makes sense to put significant emphasis on creating this sort of content. Whether you plan on using outside article writing services like eVisible or creating the content yourself, it’s important to know the basics of how to create the right copy and specifically why evergreen content is so important for these in-depth articles.

What is Evergreen Content?

Much like its name implies, evergreen content are articles and blog posts that are always “fresh” and never get old. This means the content isn’t related to news stories that will change over time or become irrelevant. The ideal bit of evergreen content gives readers information that will as useful to them years later as it is when it is first published.

Why is this so important? By making this content relevant over a long period of time, you will be able to see the benefits of traffic and site rankings from it for months or even years to come. Finding the right topics is often one of the most important elements in creating great evergreen content.

You can use many of the same tools that you would use for your SEO research when planning your evergreen content. Keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner will give you an idea of the types of keywords that are being searched for over long stretches of time. You can augment this research by tracking your older posts using Google Analytics to see which topics perform the best or use Google Trend to identify hot topics that may be relevant over the long haul.

Best Topics for Evergreen Content

As you read articles on the Internet, you’ll notice certain types of articles come up again and again. This is because their formats lend themselves naturally to evergreen content. When you are looking at creating in-depth articles for SEO purposes, consider some of these story ideas:

• “Best” Lists (“Best Restaurants in New York”)
• Top 5 or Top 10 Lists ( “Top 10 Tourist Attractions in London”)
• “How To” Articles (“How to Fix a Leaky Faucet”)
• Beginner’s Guides (“Beginner’s Guide to SEO”)
• Funny/Worst Compilations (“Worst Band Names”)

Writing Your Evergreen Content

The first thing to do when writing your evergreen content is to understand your audience. If it’s a technical audience, you can use more complicated and advanced terms. From there, do your research and use that as the basis for the outline to your article. With more than 2,000 words to write, it’s easy for in-depth articles to lose focus without an outline.

More than anything else, you need to make sure that your content is truly evergreen and that it’s is uniquely valuable. If it’s information that people can get somewhere else, it won’t be as valuable. Even if it’s on a topic that’s been written about before, put your own spin on it. This will increase the chances that it is shared by readers, increasing overall clicks while also sending valuable social signals to Google about the quality of the piece.

Online content writing is a mixture of artistry and hard-nosed realism. You want to write content that is engaging, intelligent and answers questions that website visitors might have. At the same time, you are writing this content for a reason: you want to gain and retain website visitors and eventually turn them into customers. You also want to help your search engine ranking if possible by using proper SEO tactics in your writing.

Simply put, there are a lot of factors to consider. However, you don’t have to sacrifice quality for usefulness when it comes to online writing. Use the same approaches that providers of content writing services use when they approach creating online copy and you’ll have website content that is ready to be used as conversion bait.

Write About the Benefits of Your Products: Contrary to popular belief, visitors don’t land on your website because they are looking for a solution to their problem. They know that the type of service you provide will help them to solve their problem; they want to know if your particular solution is better than the competition. Instead, promote the benefits of using your product or service – especially when compared to the competition

Use Testimonials to Sell Your Benefits:  Customer testimonials have the power to make an immediate connect with a website visitor. If they see that someone who is “just like them” is enthusiastic about the benefits they received by using your product or service, they are far more likely to be convinced than if they simply are reading sales copy.

Images and Videos Have More Power Than Written Text: It might be rough for a content writer to admit, but pictures and videos can lead to substantially higher conversion rates than pages that are solely text-driven. Images can show customers using your product, compare your product to the competition or be infographics that show valuable data a customer might use to make a purchasing decision. Similarly, video can be used to highlight customer stories and draw the viewer closer to your product. An ideal page would integrate video, pictures and text to tell one seamless story.

Don’t Force a Commitment: You might think that the phrases “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” would mean the same thing when used on an eCommerce site’s button. However, testing has shown that potential customers react to the two phrases in much different ways. Telling a customer to “Buy Now” forces them to consider the act of adding something to their cart as a firm commitment, and often keeps them from following through. Instead, use softer language to encourage customers to build their cart before making a final purchasing decision.

Keep Your Web Pages Simple and Well Thought Out: Nothing hurts conversion rates more than a cluttered web design that obscures the overall message that you want to visitor to have about your products or services. It’s important to keep in mind that simplicity is the key when it comes to web design. You need to determine what the most important impression that you want visitors to have about each page and design it to this.

Often, cluttered web pages happen because the designer don’t have a clear concept of the overall flow of the website; this leads to trying to cram as much information into every page as possible. Putting the time into mapping out each page of the site and what should go on it will alleviate many of these issues.

Attempting to determine the proper tactics for mobile SEO has been a mystery in the past. Google has given few clues about how to approach mobile design as part of professional website development. But things have changed in recent years as Google has started to give some major hints on the types of elements that they consider important for mobile sites. There are three ways to handle mobile content and Google has recommendations for each method:

Use a New URL

In many cases, web designers decide to direct mobile users to a completely different URL to access content. When this happens, Google would like to see the link canonical tag on mobile pages to direct to the desktop version of the site and the link alternate tag on desktop pages to direct to the mobile version of the site.

Google also wants separate user agent redirection lists to be set up for different types of mobile users. For example, a user of a Samsung Android phone will be directed by the server differently than the user of an iPhone. This integrates responsive design into the equation, changing the layout to fit the specific screen width of the device.

Same URL With Different HTML

Another way to approach mobile design is to use the same URL for desktop and mobile versions of the site but have the two sites have different HTML. When doing this, Google recommends adding a Vary HTTP header to the server response. This will allow Google to read and crawl both the mobile and desktop versions of the URL.

Same URL and HTML

This is the preferred method of handling mobile and desktop sites by Google. In this case, you would use CSS3 media queries to create different looks for the site. Google prefers this method for several reasons. Two of the most common reasons for implementing this approach is because it brings all ranking metrics to one URL and it is very easy to implement.