5 things you need to do when you’ve saturated search (…or think you have)

So your SEO efforts have been successful and paid dividends: lots of traffic and highly visible for all your big terms as well as high converting long tail traffic, so where next?

There are always small tweaks you can be making for ongoing optimisation, and keeping up with Google’s search quality changelog is a job in itself. It made 50 amends in the last month alone. Did you know about all of them?

This post looks beyond the ongoing optimisation and looks at five aspects of SEO you should consider implementing next.

1. Rich snippets
Rich snippets are pieces of information that are displayed below your search listing which offer users and search engines a better understanding of the content that will appear on your page.

Implementing rich snippets is a must. Google now supports an array of common uses for rich snippets such as business locations, reviews, product information, authorship and recipes. One of the best places to start for rich snippet is Schema.org

Ultimately, rich snippets will increase your natural CTR and, in a competitive market where each listing on the first page of search results offers the user some kind of benefit, rich snippets can help you stand out in the crowd.

2. Mobile content
Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile has been in action from December last year and was introduced to improve search quality on smartphones. Crawling the web, it learns which web pages and content are designed specifically for mobile and no doubt favours them in search listings to improve search quality on smartphone devices.

You may have successfully delivered your SEO campaign on desktop, but mobile results can be very different and it’s important to capitalise on this growing market by making sure your content is mobile-friendly.

3. Broaden your horizon
Other than purchase intent keywords (users looking to purchase immediately or close to purchase) there could be other opportunities further up the purchasing funnel where you have the chance to influence a potential purchaser.

e.g. An e-commerce store selling guitars could target search terms around ‘how to play the guitar’ or even terms as generic as ‘music lessons’.

4. Natural search attribution
Other than direct response, what role does natural search play in your customer’s journey and how can you optimise it by delivering the best suited content? Being able to understand the full customer journey, and the channels they use to purchase, is key for the last point to actually work.

Using the same example, you would probably see traffic for ‘music lessons’ have an awful conversion rate to sale, but measuring how it impacts the overall conversion rate and uplift in sales could demonstrate how valuable this traffic is.

5. Social search
Beyond the number of shares, likes, tweets and +1’s, as technology develops social search will undoubtedly become about the sentiment and context in which a brand is mentioned and, potentially even more importantly, by whom. It is likely that a search engine would place a higher level of authority on a more influential social profile.

This is mainly theory, but I would back it up with the fact that Google is investing time into better indexing of social profiles on over 200 social networks and that it is already able to determine the most relevant profile based on a search query. Given that this is generally more interesting than link building, I hope it happens!