Voice Search Optimization: Preparing Your Content for the Future

Voice Search Optimization: Preparing Your Content for the Future

Hey there, forward-thinking marketers and content creators! Ready to dive into the world of voice search optimization? Grab your smart speaker (or just your smartphone) and get comfortable, because we’re about to explore how you can prepare your content for the voice-activated future that’s already here.

Before we jump in, let me share a quick story. Last year, Slinky Digital Agency worked on SEO for a local pizzeria – let’s call it Slice of Heaven. The owner, Tony, was skeptical about voice search. “People order pizza with their fingers, not their voice,” he’d say with a chuckle. Fast forward six months, and 30% of their online orders were coming through voice-activated devices. How’d we do it? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to explore today.

Understanding Voice Search: The Basics

First things first, let’s break down what voice search actually is. In simple terms, voice search is a technology that allows users to perform searches on the internet or a device by speaking into a microphone, rather than typing their query. This could be through a smartphone, smart speaker, or any other voice-activated device.

For Slice of Heaven, we realized that people were increasingly using voice commands to find local restaurants and place orders. This insight formed the foundation of our voice search optimization strategy.

Why Voice Search Matters for Your Business

You might be wondering, “Why should I care about voice search?” Well, let me give you a few compelling reasons:

  1. Changing User Behavior: More and more people are using voice assistants for everyday tasks.
  2. Local Search Dominance: Voice searches are often local in nature, which is great for local businesses.
  3. Featured Snippets: Voice search results often pull from featured snippets, giving you a chance to leapfrog competitors.
  4. Natural Language Processing: Voice search is making search more conversational and natural.
  5. Mobile-First Indexing: Voice search aligns perfectly with Google’s mobile-first approach.

According to Google, 27% of the global online population is using voice search on mobile. That’s a huge audience you could be tapping into!

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How To Ensure You Become The ‘Near Me’ Law Firm When Prospects Search On Google

How To Ensure You Become The 'Near Me' Law Firm When Prospects Search On Google

SEO campaigns for legal firms and lawyers usually have several objectives, although some are more important than others. The main priorities of an SEO campaign implemented on behalf of a legal firm will tend to be focused on getting the law firm’s website ranking at the top of Google.

For those unaware of how SEO and Google’s search results are related, the main thing to consider is that rankings occur for every possible search term that someone might enter into the search box. For any given search, Google’s algorithm will instantly display the top ten websites on the first page of results that it has calculated to be the most relevant and suitable for that search term. SEO is designed to ensure that your website is the one that Google displays first.

User Experience

What Google wants to promote is user experience or UX. UX is what Google aims for, not just in its search results, but for the person searching when they click on any of the results it displays. This means that Google will measure and assess every website page and whether it offers anyone landing on it from a Google search a good user experience.

A good user experience will be subjective for each individual as each has different likes and dislikes, however, their actions when they arrive on a website will tell Google a lot about that website’s UX credentials. UX will manifest itself by a website being highly relevant to the search, having high-quality content, and ease of use, such as having simple navigation.

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What An SEO Audit Of Your Website Should Be Assessing

Everything and everyone that needs to perform functions cannot do so over the long term without some checks on their well-being. Whether it be an aircraft having safety checks, or a sports star having a fitness check, the same principles apply. The same can also be said for an SEO campaign, because if it is not checked and audited to assess what, if any, results it is producing then it potentially is serving no purpose.

An SEO audit is not just about checking internal links and anchor text on your website, albeit we do not say that to diminish their importance. Instead, we are referring to the fact that there can be as many as two hundred or more individual elements that influence the ranking of your website which is why it is often an SEO agency that business owners will turn to when they need an SEO audit.

However, if you wish to carry out your SEO audit there are going to be some checks that are more important than others. You will also find it easier if you take each category of SEO and check them in turn. Here are three of the main categories of SEO that you simply must check during your website’s SEO audit.

Technical Audit

Many who are new to SEO make the erroneous assumption that SEO is only about what people can see, read, and click on. Whilst these are all essential for SEO, they are not the only influencers of ranking. Much of that influence happens behind the scenes and is never seen by any visitors, although how the website behaves for them might be affected.

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7 Marketing Tactics That Can Help Family Lawyers Boost Client Acquisition

7 Marketing Tactics That Can Help Family Lawyers Boost Client Acquisition

Unless family lawyers are seeing new clients request their services regularly, that practice is in danger of becoming unviable. Given the nature of family law, and that some aspects of it such as divorce and adoption, whilst prolonged procedurally, are ultimately a “one-time” event, the danger is that, as existing client cases are completed, there are no new clients to take their place.

Family lawyer practices that are aware of this issue have several options to try and attract new business, and one which has proven to be more effective than most is digital marketing. With the internet playing an ever-increasing role in everyone’s life, it is online where most people who might be seeking the services of a family lawyer will start their research.

Those family lawyer businesses which have taken the wise step to create a digital marketing campaign or have had one created for them, are the ones whom those searching online for the sorts of services they offer, will find. Those family law businesses which have done nothing will continue to see their client numbers, and thus their revenue, diminish.

Several online marketing tactics can be used to attract new clients, and by reading further you will see that we have outlined seven that have proven to be the most effective for family lawyers seeking to use the internet to boost their client numbers.

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Top 7 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools For Businesses

Top 7 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools For Businesses

The internet has had a significant impact on how businesses operate even greater than the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries and it means that if a business wants to succeed today, then it must have a website or at least some form of online presence that allows them to market themselves.

Just as tasks in the offline world are made easier with the use of tools, the same applies online. There is a multitude of software and tools available to business owners and such is their quantity and diversity that it would take 1,000s of articles to explain each one of them, which we are not going to do here.

However, what we can do is point out 7 key areas of digital marketing that play a key role in a business’s online success, and highlight one of the top tools or software that assist in its implementation.

Social Media Management – Sprout Social

With the influence, social media has on so many people’s thoughts and decisions it is imperative that businesses have a presence on at least one social media platform where they know their audience is. To help manage their social media activities Sprout Social proves an array of tools allowing for post scheduling, responding to messages and analytics.

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5 Key Questions You Should Ask Before Selecting Your WordPress Website’s Theme

5 Key Questions You Should Ask Before Selecting Your WordPress Website's Theme

If the web design for your new or redesigned website is going to be based upon WordPress and its CMS, then there is no shortage of decisions that you need to make to turn your initial thoughts into a fully functioning website. Everything from the colour scheme, the number of pages,  which pages you are including, content creation, and integration with other applications, are but a few of them.

Near the top of that list should also be which WordPress theme you are going to use for your new web design, however, that is not always an easy choice. We say that not because there are not any great themes available, but the exact opposite. Because there are so many excellent options, narrowing your theme choices down to one, is no easy task.

Ever willing to help our readers, we are going to try to make that task somewhat easier for you by providing you with 5 key questions that need to be answered as part of the process of selecting a WordPress theme for your website. Any theme where you are less than 100% convinced of the answer is a theme that may be best passed over. Here are those 5 questions:

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Social search from Google – what does it mean for search results

Social search from Google - what does it mean for search results

Google has recently announced a new social search feature which is launching on google.com initially, which allows for users to use a ‘+1’ button to show whether a search result or ad in Google was helpful. These search results will appear in your search results page with the ‘+1’s visible, clearly indicating to others that these are the most effective (or most liked) results and ads.

Linking these ‘+1’s to your network such as your Gmail contacts, will allow you to see whether anyone you know in your network has found the search result or ad useful. This might lead to improved quality of traffic to sites, and provide more insight into the effectiveness of adword campaigns on Google.

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Cyber Monday: Tarnish Your Brand, Slash Profit, & Kill Customer Loyalty, All in 24 Hours

Cyber Monday Tarnish Your Brand, Slash Profit, & Kill Customer Loyalty, All in 24 Hours

Ah, Cyber Monday is here: the peer pressure fuelled day when all retailers mutually agree to cut their profits and encourage their customer’s addiction to discounts and promotions.

I know that sounds a bit pessimistic, maybe even downright harsh, but hear me out.

There are really only 2 reasons why a retailer would offer Cyber Monday promotions: to gain new customers or reactivate old ones. Let’s talk about what deep discounting does in both situations:

Acquiring New Customers: Suppose a man offers a woman $1,000 to go on a date with him. She accepts. How much of a chance do you this couple has at a long term, quality relationship? Any business transaction based on bribery (and let’s be honest, that’s essentially what discounting is) only produces low-quality, low-affinity relationships. Customers acquired through steep discounting are far less likely to rebuy unless a similarly steep discount is offered again. If you’ve ever run a lifetime value calculation on these customers, you’ll undoubtedly find that it’s much lower than your typical customer LTV. (If you’ve never run this analysis on your customer database, please do yourself a favour and run it!) When discounting is the foundation of the relationship, future price increases are simply out of the question.

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5 Principles of Social Media Copywriting

5 Principles of Social Media Copywriting

Anytime a new medium comes along, we bring along the baggage of an old medium. Case in point, social media. When I peruse the Facebook pages of the world largest brands, I’m struck by how inappropriate the copywriting usually is. In many cases, it seems as if someone in the PR department received the unfortunate assignment of running the company Facebook.

More than any other channel, social media deserves its own unique set of copywriting principles. Below are what I consider to be the 5 most important guidelines when writing copy for social media. Most of these recommendations are geared towards Facebook, but they can be applied to other platforms as well.

1. Keep it Short & Shareable
Short copy always wins. Bite size content is significantly more likely to be consumed or shared, regardless of the platform. Here’s my strategy: First, write your status update using as few words as possible, but without losing its impact. When you’re finished, review the copy and eliminate another 20%. If you’re like me, you’ll find that you regularly use unnecessary filler words that can be easily eliminated. Better yet, get used to writing within Twitter’s 140 character limit, regardless of whether you’re using Twitter.

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3 Timeless Social Media Tips

3 Timeless Social Media Tips

There’s a part of me that hates change. I despise the fact that much of what I learned 3 years ago about social media is now irrelevant. Are there any principles from today that will still stand years from now, regardless of what the new hot network is? I’d like to suggest at least three.

1. Focus on the Feed, Not the Profile
This is a classic mistake I’ve witnessed on countless platforms. The brands that spend the most time pimping out their profile pages, whether on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, tend to have the worst engagement of all. I’m going out on a limb to predict that the new Facebook timeline and upcoming Twitter brand pages will not change this. Yes, milestones, and pinned posts, and cover photos are cool for branding, but if your content sucks, no one will ever see them. People will still primarily interact with your business through the newsfeed.

Your content is what makes fans care, not a pretty profile page. Content isn’t just king, he’s a ruthless dictator that jealously demands your allegiance.

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