How to Prepare as AI Battles AI for Control of the SERP

Produce quality content rooted in search engine research.
Figure out the long tail searches your prospects are searching for and deliver a steady diet of tutorial information on those subjects. In your keyword research add in the things that connect to yours in whatever block diagram your products live in. Your customers are likely looking to optimize them together and are looking to undestand "tradeoffs..." and "how to optimize"... . Also include “who”, “what”, “why”, “how”, and “when” in your long tail research (i.e., “How to design a microwave signal chain with positive bias voltage”) and produce Tech Briefs (like this one we produced for our client Custom MMIC) that deliver payoffs to these questions.

Think of every Tech Brief as a short course in the subject matter and you'll woo your prospects and search engines alike. Then carve up these longer forms of content and publish two to three blogs that hit key points, and place a link to download the whole Tech Brief at the end of each blog.

Helpful Hint #1:
Long tail search is your friend. If you sell “microwave filters” but your customers are smart enough to search for “low profile microwave filters for radar”, focus on the latter in both your SEO and Google AdWords or other search engine marketing (SEM) strategies. It's logically what they'll be searching for and will isolate you from the competition. When investing in a Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, the same rule applies. You'll see fewer impressions, but they'll be specific to your key prospect, and they'll also cost you less per click due to the lower search volume.

Create a URL structure that pays off to search bots and users alike.
There are only two things that affect SEO results:

• Your ability to get a page or URL to rank high on a page one SERP.
• Your ability to get prospects to click on your links instead of someone else's.

Search bots care less lately about the words in a URL. But it's still better to use a few keywords in a URL than it is for the URL to make little sense to the search algorithm. But the advantage to maintaining keyword-inclusive URLs comes when a user is scanning a SERP for the best possible result. That's when the user passes over this page:

wwwacme.com/products/html.?!2y_m_9

for this page:

www.acme.com/products/jet-engine-fan-blades

every time.

Integrate your PR, social, content, and SEO strategies

As an agency with a long history of architecting and executing fully integrated marketing campaigns, we've always operated under the principle that each tactic is interconnected systematically with another rather than operating as single-function components. Over the years we've seen the rise of specialty agencies focused on PR, social media, inbound, SEO, web design, content, etc., but we're now witnessing the trend of those silo-oriented agencies tacking on additional services. It's a natural progression. The same trend is happening inside companies with large internal marketing teams. And the reason is simple: If you're engineering an SEO strategy PR, social media, and all forms of content are critical tools.

Let's start with the pure value of your content being indexed on both your site and dozens of other reputable places on the web via PR. Your chances of being indexed on page one of a Google SERP are logically greater when others publish it, too. Second, let's talk backlinks again. They're still a demonstration of popularity, despite the bad taste the black hat world has put on them. But what's critical is to put on your “white hat”. This means ensuring your backlinks come from reputable websites with a long history of complying with Google's E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) factors. Since most every vertical high-tech and industrial market has a handful of dedicated print publications, each with its own website, digital version of their magazine, blogs, forums, storefronts, video libraries, and directories, building PR and social media relationships with the editors and content managers at each of these publications has to be a core part of your SEO strategy, too. Build relationships with the ones that matter most,  follow them on social media, and watch your quality backlinks grow incrementally over time with each new press release and Twitter and LinkedIn post.

Helpful Hint #2:
Include more than one link within each release you distribute to the press (your main URL and a product page, or press release page, for instance) to take full advantage of the opportunity to build backlinks. Include additional helpful links within your own posts to your site that will both help readers get around it will gain you even more points with search bots.

Helpful Hint #3:
Learn about and use content clusters (also called keyword and topic clusters). Here's an example by a manufacturer of portable and programmable wireless test instruments, our client, Vaunix:

On this one "cluster" page they've aggregated all their news, Tech Briefs, blogs, events, and video posts and built an SEO-optimized page like no other that connects through and around all their keyword-rich posts and landing pages and internal product pages. The value to search engines in seeing one deep page with subcategories, as opposed to a few disjointed pages of such content, is extremely high. (This is especially advantageous to companies with limited product lines where natural keywords are organically posted with much repetition within this single cluster page.)

Responsiveness and Load Speed
One blow Google will deliver to your website's organic results (and paid search, or PPC, for that matter) occurs when your site neither loads fast nor responds properly to a visitor using a tablet or smart phone. Plain and simple: you may have some nice content for their users, but if your site has oversized images and bandwidth hogging scripts, like carousels and auto-loading multi-media experiences, and it's not responsive, Google will knock you down a notch on the SERP in favor of others who comply with these SEO standards of compliance. In short, rethink your site so it loads graphics and code in an instant.