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.

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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.

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