Making the Most of Your Content for Blended Search
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In the first part of this article, I talked about the ways in which Google’s Universal Search (and other search engines’ blended search) changes the equation for SEO. I tried to get you thinking about what you’re currently doing with your content, and the changes you can make. In this part, I’ll cover that subject in more detail, and talk about using social media to promote your site.
Before I dive back into this subject, let me talk a little about the different kinds of content that can turn up in a blended search. I didn’t cover it in enormous detail in the first part, though I did include a screen shot that illustrated the point. Blended search results can include images, video, news stories, blogs, book listings, PDF documents, and local search results. These kinds of results can turn up for just about anything now. If your content is almost completely text-based, you might see your site pushed down in the SERPs, even if you’ve held an excellent position for years.
So in the first part, I asked to you to take stock of your content, optimize it, and be prepared to create new content. I said that you should have a plan so you can promote your new content on social media sites. But let’s back up for a second. What do you do if you’re stuck about the kind of content you can create to promote your site?
You can try to approach it from the opposite direction. Think of the kind of content that shows up for a blended search, and figure out the best way to take advantage of the format on your site – in a relevant manner. For example, if you’re releasing a new product, you might create a video that explains how to use it. If you sell what many people consider to be a boring product (like duct tape) you might create a blog that features some of the unusual ways it has been used by your customers. You could even create an image gallery, like this one from 3M:
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