There are many ways to get ranked at the top of Google, even if your site isn’t first in the standard results. However, without optimizing your business website for them, you’ll likely never be included.
The key is to learn about the alternatives Google offers, besides the search results page you already know and love. By taking some steps to optimize your site accordingly, you can be included in some lesser known search results—which could increase your overall traffic figures.
In this post, we’ll give you a rundown of Google’s other search results options, and how to optimize for them. By the time we’re finished, you’ll have all the necessary tools to pull in more organic traffic.
Regular search engine traffic is still the foundation of SEO. Even if much of your traffic comes from the alternatives we’ll discuss next, your pages must rank well to begin with.
Before moving forward, you need to take a hard look at your bottom line and ask: Is investing in SEO right for my business? We’re confident in telling you, the answer is (almost always) a resounding yes!
[Tweet “The best time to start investing in SEO is right now.”]
The Knowledge Graph is a project by Google that enhances its search results with semantic search information gathered from all over the web:
Semantic search has a lot to do with Google’s shift towards entity-based search—essentially places, people, and things. Google keeps a knowledge base of identifiable data logged away in order to present a box of information about your search topic next to or above regular links. These results are easier for searchers to glean the information they need, and could also bring a huge amount of traffic to the lucky source sites.
Optimizing for the Knowledge Graph is an extension of your existing organic search strategy.
Google largely relies on structured data to source its information for the Knowledge Graph. With that in mind:
You may have noticed a box above the results page when Googling a question. It includes a summary of the answer, extracted from its source webpage, along with the page title and URL. This is called a featured snippet:
Simply put, featured snippets are chosen from short, concise answers within your blog post content—and they can bring in crazy amounts of traffic.
We’ve covered how to do this in a previous blog post, but to sum up the process:
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), enables sites to offer self-hosted, rapidly loading pages for mobile. The AMP Carousel is a feature only available on tablets and smartphones, where AMP-enabled articles show up in a carousel above the rest of search results:
Sites can load up to four times faster with AMP, which greatly improves the user’s experience. In turn, you can benefit from a 27% bump in conversion rates for every second you shave off your site’s loading time.
There’s no doubt that images increase on-page reader engagement. However, they get indexed and returned in Google Images too:
When optimized correctly, Google Images can be a strong supplemental source of traffic. Google offers a few tips for successful image publishing:
Video can be powerful for normal SEO thanks to Google’s Rich Snippets—you could even get a video thumbnail to the left of your page in normal search results:
Videos are a powerful way to engage and attract quality leads, and marketers agree it is highly effective for conversions. Although videos show up in 70% of normal results, Google have also provided an an entire section dedicated to video search, similar to images.
Finally, news is often prioritized above other search results, while also having its own dedicated section within Google:
In order to get your site considered as a news source, Google looks for the following attributes:
The bar for inclusion is high, but the traffic benefits can be worth the effort.
Once your site reaches the minimum requirements, follow these steps to be considered for Google News:
There are many ways to increase your search traffic, and the steps for leveraging those channels is learning what they are, then optimizing for them. Firstly, rank your site well for regular search. Next, make sure your site is running a schema as it’s recommended for most advanced SEO situations.
There are many channels to choose from, so it’s best to pick those that align well with your business strategy. Let’s recap:
Are there any other channels worth optimizing for? Let us know the direction you’re taking in the comments section below!