What is SEO and why is it important in Malta?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about increasing the quality and quantity of user traffic a website receives from organic search results. Basically, SEO is every effort you make towards your website ranking at the top of Google Search results for relevant search terms. For most businesses in Malta SEO is normally something they’ve heard of, but haven’t looked into properly, or brushed it off as an unnecessary marketing expense that they can do without. This results in a huge amount of missed opportunities. Here’s why.

Think about the way you research and purchase a product. We’re willing to bet that most of the time, your journey starts with a Google search. You’re either researching the product type, a specific brand or perhaps you already know what you want. You might just be looking for a website that delivers to your country. 

With that in mind, think about just how many purchasing journeys in your industry are started each day. How many of those is your business missing out on because your website isn’t optimised for SEO, and not appearing at the top of search results?

Another reason that for businesses in Malta SEO is a must is because of international competition. More and more businesses are looking overseas for customers thanks to the boom in eCommerce and the shift to remote work. This means that many businesses are less limited by geographic locations and can offer their services more broadly. This is where SEO efforts & Google Search results become essential. If you can rank well against all your competitors, including international ones, you’re guaranteeing that a large number of potential customers will find you organically.

SEO Services by Switch

At Switch, we understand that your website’s performance can make or break your company’s goals in a number of ways. While we can help you build a beautiful website, it would essentially be worthless without a steady stream of high-quality traffic. That’s where our SEO services come in.

Optimising your website to attract high-intent users from search is one of the first things we suggest. A large percentage of business leaders underestimate the power of SEO in Malta. And in doing so, miss one of the most effective ways of generating leads.

We get this done through a specific process that’s tailored to each of our clients. In the following paragraphs, we’ll take you through what the steps we take usually are. We’ll talk about why each step is so important, and what sets us apart from others in the field. You can also learn more about the importance of SEO in a little more detail if that’s what you’re looking for. Especially about how it can affect your brand’s trust & authority.

If you’re ready to talk about how to introduce SEO into your business, click here and let’s get the ball rolling. Otherwise, keep reading!

How Switch handles SEO in Malta

Context

Understanding the Industry

Before even looking at your website, we study the context of your business and its place within your industry. This is where we will need the majority of your input. At the end of the day, you know your industry and business better than anyone. During the process of onboarding a new client, we also set our research team loose. Their task is to gather every shred of information they can from all the sources available.

Audience Identification

One cannot really understand an industry without also analysing the market that it serves in-depth. Audiences can range from an entire country’s worth of purchasers to a handful of individuals responsible for purchases within organisations. Each audience that we identify always requires a unique approach, as they always differ in their behaviour and interests. Accurately understanding what attracts the right audience is already half the SEO content battle won.

Competitor Analysis

As part of our research, we deep-dive into all marketing being done by all local & international competitors in your industry. This usually results in an understanding of audiences that are currently already being targeted. Along with those that are currently left out and might be worth communicating to. When appropriate, we also analyse overseas players in the industry for further industry insights.

Website Technical Audit

Consistently high-ranking websites are created and optimised in a very particular way. This allows Search Engines like Google to easily scan them to understand their structure and content. The result of this scan judges whether they’re high-quality enough to rank well on search result pages. If your website was not built with SEO in mind, it may be lacking in certain key technical SEO areas, stifling performance.

We’ll perform an in-depth analysis of your website, then highlight and prioritise changes that would greatly improve SEO performance. Suggested adjustments can be related to any of the following:

• Indexing errors
• Low-quality content
• Incorrect Robots.txt usage
• Mobile page issues
• Structured data errors
• Inaccurate metadata
• No internal link optimisation
• Lack of https security
• Slow page speed
• Duplicate content
• Broken links

Content Strategy & Production

Keyword Research

With a strong foundation of research and knowledge of the industry, we can now begin our keyword research. Using cutting-edge industry tools, we determine which attainable keywords are most relevant to your business. These will also depend on what resources we have at our disposal. This is where our creativity and industry knowledge shines.

Attempting to rank for the most obvious industry keywords is a tempting idea, however, it’s usually an extremely expensive endeavour. Many-a-time there are other keyword opportunities hiding beneath the surface. These would allow us to capture specific parts of the market with significantly less effort and required resources. Capturing ancillary keywords gives a website just starting to optimise for SEO the chance to begin collecting useful traffic, while also building its authority through great content.

Effective, Long-lasting Content

Putting all the research and technical jargon aside, you still need excellent content to be able to attract your target audience. At Switch, we are a multidisciplinary team of writers, designers, illustrators, photographers, video specialists, and audio dabblers. We’re happy to push ideas around and see how they grow and flourish as each mind adds something to the story. 

With a broad and eclectic set of sources of inspiration and an unusual way of connecting the dots, we’re known for creating work that’s beautifully innovative.

Authority & Link Building

Ranking well in competitive keyword landscapes also depends on the number of times other websites have linked to yours. We call these backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more authority you have in Google’s mind. And the more highly you’ll rank for a given keyword. Google also takes into account other factors, such as your social media presence and online conversations about your brand.

Building quality backlinks and authority is extremely important, but it’s also a complicated process. One of the most challenging but effective ways of building backlinks is to create content that other websites want to link to. The more authority the website that has linked to you has, the more valuable the link.

Through our content strategy and keyword research, we’ll identify the absolute best opportunities available to build these links. With time and effort, ranking for more and more competitive and valuable keywords will become easier.

Optimisation & Reporting

Just like any other marketing campaign, reporting and analysis of results is an essential part of the process. Here’s how:

• Keeping constant track of our progress on each individual keyword we’re attempting to rank for.
• Monitoring the performance of each piece of content we produce, along with what the competition is actively doing.
• Using a combination of our years of experience and the industry tools available to us.

Through an extensive set-up process, we’ll also make sure to be constantly analysing the behaviour of the traffic we’re drawing. This way, we make sure we’re pulling in the intended audience. At the end of the day, getting huge amounts of traffic is useless if nobody is converting into paying clients. Regardless of the results, we will always aim to boost the conversion rate of all the traffic we send to your website through a live content strategy and constant keyword research.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Matching user intent to useful content.

The whole point of a search engine is simple. It takes what people are searching for, scours the internet for it, then provides the closest matches. That may be the mother of all oversimplifications, but that’s the basic gist. This happens really quickly, and it happens literally billions of times per day.

If you want a little more detail on how search engines (mostly Google) have gotten this done over the years, take a look at this video by Google themselves.

With all that context in mind, SEO is basically the act of making it as likely as possible for a search engine to pick your website when someone searches a term that’s relevant to your business.

Quality Traffic

Digital marketing efforts are often measured in clicks. Your marketing team might give you a report on a particular campaign and hail it a success because it generated so many of them. 

But this begs the question – how many of those clicks were actually worth anything?

The click is only the midway point of the journey towards a conversion. If your campaigns generate 1,000s of clicks, but 95% of those clicking users never got past your homepage, how successful are they?

This is the most obvious reason for investing in SEO, and, in turn, investing in traffic from organic search results. Think about your own behaviour. If you’ve Googled something and clicked on a result you found interesting, you’re going to give a decent look at that website. Especially if the site has what you’re looking for.

Trust & Awareness

If a website ranks at the top of Google search results for a relevant query, that result alone provides it with some level of authority and credibility. You’re much more likely to trust a website that occupies the spot usually kept by Wikipedia. Then, if that website ranked #1, the user clicked, then had a positive experience, a relationship has been formed. Even if it’s the first time that particular user is interacting with that brand.

If SEO is properly implemented on a website, it will achieve high rankings on a number of relevant industry keywords. Then, it can enjoy a flow of organic traffic and leads without having spent a single cent on paid digital advertising.

As we’re explaining above, it’s obviously not something that can be achieved at the drop of a hat. It requires technical knowledge, a sound strategy, the means to produce great content, and a little bit of grit.

Does your business need SEO services?

If you have (or need) a website which will generate leads/purchases with the right traffic sent to it, then you definitely need SEO services. If you had to take potential leads and spread them out on a scale from cold to hot, the majority of leads that are generated through SEO are definitely on the hot end due to their intent. And what business doesn’t need more hot leads?

For businesses that want to be ahead of the curve in Malta SEO is a no-brainer. That’s because of a combination of competition from overseas markets, along with the apathetic approach to SEO that many local businesses suffer from. If you’re ready to take the next step and are looking for a guide, click here.

Free SEO Audit

Still unsure whether your website needs an SEO strategy? Why not start with finding out where your website stands from a technical SEO point of view? Just fill in the form below to get a free, no-strings-attached audit of your site, sent straight to your email.

SEO Trends in 2022

If you want to read about the very latest trends dominating SEO in 2022, and how they will affect your SEO efforts in Malta, click below.

Further Reading

If you’d like to learn more about SEO, here’s a list of articles we’ve put together at Switch on the subject. These are based on our decades of experience, and include tried and tested tips & suggestions. We hope you find them useful.

Planning 2022: SEO

Local SEO in Malta: 3 Essential Tips to Get Started

Why Writing for SEO in 2021 is Bad SEO Advice

Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out.

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

The post SEO Malta: A Complete Guide appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Click below for a free PDF version of our overall 2022 marketing trends report.

Intro to SEO Trends 2022

The practice of SEO has been the equivalent of a cat-and-mouse game for years now. SEO experts are basically just trying to keep up with Google’s latest updates, and always trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the algorithm game. 

That was true for 2021, and will continue to be true into 2022. 

But the direction Google has been steering its ship towards for many years now is clear – make search more helpful to humans through AI. Here’s a list of SEO trends that you’ll definitely need to be aware of if you want your business to make the most out of SEO in 2022.

Not an SEO practitioner? Read this first

We’ll be getting into a few technical details throughout the article, so here’s a very short Cliffs Notes version of what you can expect in the rest of this article. If you want to get straight into the nitty-gritty, skip this part.

1. Familiarise yourself with Google I/O – it’s a yearly event where Google announces changes to the way search works. This year’s edition reinforces what we already know – content that follows EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) will continue to win.
2. Write content that answers questions, so it has a good chance of appearing on Featured Snippets in search result pages. Quick, snappy, clear answers to common questions.
3. Look up what Google Shopping is if you sell things online. Thank us later.
4.  Get in touch with your Web Developers and ask them how your website’s Core Web Vitals are doing and make sure your website works well on mobile.
5. Create lots and lots of good video content that your audience will find useful, and make sure you clip-mark it.
6. Wean yourself off of third-party cookies for advertising purposes. Start finding ways to build your own first-party data using SEO.

Trend 1: Google is working on understanding context across data formats

The way someone asks a question and the way they type a query into the Google Search bar have always been a little different. Ever since the introduction of voice assistants though, Google has understood that their definition of a search term needed to broaden. 

Over the past few years, they’ve developed their AI to understand longer and more complex searches that come from voice users. 

They’re now taking that to the next level with something called the Multitask United Model, which they showed off during Google I/O 2021. In more understandable terms, MUM is an AI model that focuses on natural language analysis – it basically tries to understand the meaning and intent of human language beyond face value, and provides contextually accurate results based on that analysis.

It’s also capable of generating responses while drawing information from multiple sources and formats of information, even across different languages. What we’re trying to say here is that Google is attempting to consolidate all the data it already has, and make complex search terms that seem more conversational in nature possible to search.

Imagine asking Google whether your hiking boots are good enough for taking on Mount Fuji by snapping a photo of them and just asking. Google would then take the data from the photo, and give you a definitive yes or no answer, along with information about the best hiking gear for Mount Fuji. That’s the level of helpfulness Google is trying to reach using MUM.

So what does MUM mean for SEO practitioners? 

Will it be a game changer? Not necessarily. The exact way MUM will be drawing information from the internet is yet to be determined, but if it’s anything similar to previous AI models, there will be a continued emphasis on EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). 

So keep creating content that other humans will find genuinely helpful. Use visuals, videos, long-form content if you want to rank well, and make sure your website is technically up to Google’s standards – more on that later.

All this was announced at Google I/O 2021 – a yearly event where the company shows off its latest developments across their products – including Search. Taking a look at the developments that Google announces is essential for any SEO practitioner to stay updated with what’s coming. And it is genuinely insightful.

We’ll be discussing more of what was announced at Google I/O 2021 later in this article.

Here’s a compressed version of the event if you’re interested:

Trend 2: Featured Snippets & Passages

As part of Google’s shift towards answer-based search results, featured snippets and excerpts are being rolled out globally. In Google’s ideal world, every search term has a definitive answer that it can provide with confidence – that’s what the featured snippet tries to accomplish.

As an SEO practitioner, you might find it difficult to rank your page for a highly competitive, broad keyword, but through well-written, answer-based content, an excerpt of your page could be used to answer a long-tail search term – essentially leapfrogging higher ranking and more authoritative pages. 

So make sure that you’re using your titles and headings in a way that allows Google to easily understand the content of your page, and easily lift passages to answer commonly asked questions. 

In the above screenshot, the website that provided information in a clear, simple, step-by-step format that directly answered the question posed by the search term was placed in the featured snippet. The website itself didn’t even rank in the first page of results for the search term!

As a bonus, featured snippets are also the answers that Google Assistant provides users who are using Voice Search.

Google has said that 7% of all search terms will include a featured snippet once it rolls out globally, so this is definitely something to keep in mind when creating your content. 

Trend 3: Google Shopping: Real-time Product Data

The evolution of online shopping was given the equivalent of a can of Popeye’s spinach during the pandemic, and Google has taken note, and adapted. Thanks to their existing infrastructure, Google is capable of drawing data from across the web to provide extremely accurate recommendations based on search terms.

Using partnerships with global eCommerce providers such as Shopify, along with a huge amount of data straight from retailers, Google Shopping offers product results based on a number of different factors such as availability, reviews, loyalty schemes, and prices. They also removed the fees and commissions that previously existed to use their platform to make it more accessible to smaller businesses.

They call the underlying AI model Google Shopping Graph.

Google is in a unique position in terms of eCommerce. If its shopping platform truly takes off, it could even pose a threat to some of the online retail giants that don’t want to play ball with them. If the item you’re searching for on Google shows up on the search results page with the best available deal from across the internet, why would you bother going to Amazon?

If it’s not present already, make sure you’re looking into the Google Shopping platform for your eCommerce site, otherwise you could be seriously missing out in 2022. 

Trend 4: Core Web Vitals & UX Optimisation

As the pool of data and websites has become richer over time, Google Search has become pickier. For example, if your website has excellent content, but loads very slowly on mobile, you’re likely to get shunned by the search engine. 

In order to judge your website from a technical point of view, Google is adding something they call ‘Page Experience’ to the list of factors that can have an impact on whether or not your website ranks well on search result pages.

Google defines ‘Page Experience’ as: 

“a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.”

What are these signals you ask? Well, there are 4.

Core Web Vitals

The most important is Core Web Vitals, which measures 3 main metrics on your website. These are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures loading performance. Google recommends aiming for an LCP under 2.5 seconds after a page starts to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. Google recommends an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. Google recommends a CLS score of less than 0.1.

The above may or may not sound like technical jargon to you, but in plain English, Google is measuring:

• How fast your website loads
• How quickly it responds to input by the user
• How stable your website’s visuals are (in other words, it measures whether elements on screen are moving around way more than they should)

If you’re not entirely sure how your website is performing on these fronts, you can follow Google’s own instructions (warning, more technical jargon incoming) or ask your web developer to look into it. The scores you’ll want for each of these metrics are as follows:

If you want a quick idea of your website’s technical health from Google’s perspective, you can also run a quick PageSpeed Insights report. 

Mobile Friendly

This isn’t exactly 2022-worthy news, but it bears repeating. Your website needs to work well on mobile, otherwise it’s useless to a huge percentage of your potential traffic. Google knows this, and will penalise your website severely in its search rankings if you ignore it.

Not sure whether your website is really mobile friendly or not? Fear not, Google has another test you can run that you can show to your web developer.

HTTPS

The third factor that makes up Google’s Page Experience rating is security. You need to make sure your website has a security certificate. In plain English, just make sure your website has that little security lock next to the URL on Chrome.

This one.

If that little lock isn’t there, you need to give an earful to your web developer, cos this is pretty basic.

Intrusive Interstitials

The last element that affects your website’s Page Experience is ‘No Intrusive Interstitials’. Google loves its jargon doesn’t it?

Don’t you hate it when you load a website that seems to have the exact information you need, but as soon as you enter the site, a bunch of pop-ups and banners appear trying to get you to sign up to their newsletter? 

Well, it turns out that Google doesn’t like that either. So make sure your content isn’t getting hidden behind a bunch of annoying crap as soon as the website loads. This applies for desktop, but especially for mobile, where the lack of screen real estate makes these issues more obvious.

That said, your page won’t be penalised for pop-ups that are legally required, such as cookie usage notices or age verification notices.

Don’t do this.

Trend 5: Suggested Clips & Key Moments

You have most likely noticed recently that video results are turning up more and more often at the top of search results over the past few months. That’s because Google understands that sometimes, the answer people are looking for is best explained visually, using a relevant video.

For example, let’s say I’m an aspiring musician, and I want to quickly get an example of how to pluck a cello. More than likely, I’d take that exact term: ‘how to pluck a cello’ and run it through Google search. Just a few months ago, I would have been given a set of search results, and maybe some video options as well.

Now, though, Google takes it a step further through ‘Clip Suggestions’. Not only does a video appear at the top of my search result page, but a particular clip is selected, showing me exactly what I’m looking for. See for yourself:

If I click on that option, I’m taken to the video itself (not YouTube, just the video), and the suggested clip begins playing.

In the past, this YouTube channel would have likely never really been close to ranking this high up on a search result page. But Google is flexing its video muscles by including more search functionality into its YouTube infrastructure. By analysing the video visuals and audio, Google is able to understand what exactly is happening in the video, and whether it would be valuable to someone who is searching.

A while ago, a feature was added to YouTube videos called ‘Key Moments’, where video creators could essentially bookmark, or segment, their videos. This way, just by mousing over the video, you could get a quick idea of what’s in the video itself.

Extremely useful for those who like to watch YouTube videos, right? Not only. Google is using this extra data gathered from the video creators to provide even more detailed, and specific information on Google Search results.

The screenshot above is from a video review of the latest Apple laptop. Most likely, this video is the absolute best way of getting a quick but in-depth understanding of this product. So if I search for ‘m1 max macbook pro review’ on Google, this is what shows up:

Not only does the video itself show up first, but Google also provides me with a breakdown of exactly what’s in the video, using the Key Moments feature mentioned earlier.

So what’s the lesson for SEO practitioners? Well, thus far, video has mostly been a ‘nice-to-have’ in the SEO world. Now though, with Google giving more value to video results, video is going to be a ‘must-have’ sooner rather than later. Not only should you have videos that accompany your text content, but ideally you’re also creating high-quality, standalone videos that thoroughly answer the questions your audience is asking.

Trend 6: SEO will be essential for first-party data

With the slow, drawn out death of the third-party cookie, you could be forgiven for having a relatively lackadaisical approach to building your own audience database. After all, we’ve been successfully targeting new users through paid formats such as Google Display and Facebook Ads for years now.

The problem is that it’s not sustainable in today’s social climate. People are resisting having their personal data used for advertising purposes, and with good reason. While most advertisers are just trying to sell their products to people they hope might be interested in them, recent events have shown that ultra-targeted advertising can be weaponised for more nefarious purposes. Plus, a lot of people don’t like big tech companies they don’t trust holding so much of their data.

So, in a this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things move, tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are being forced into giving up some of their ability to sell their users’ data to advertisers.

This means that, as a (hopefully) non-malicious advertiser, you’re going to have to fend for yourself if you want to target new interested users and build conversions. 

SEO is definitely one of the best tools for that job. 

For example, by creating content that is genuinely useful and interesting to your target audience, you can generate a database of interested users through email sign-ups. 

Say you have an excellent piece of content about the Marketing Trends of 2022. You publish it online, but it’s a pretty long, but valuable piece, so you also offer an option to your audience to download a specifically designed PDF so they can read it at their own pace. In exchange for the PDF, you ask for an email address.

If your piece of content is good enough, and you’ve built a solid reputation with your audience, most people would gladly provide their email address because they know they won’t regret it later on as they’re emptying their spam folder. 

That’s the way you can leverage SEO to build a first-party database. But, doing that takes a lot of time and effort. And even though the death of the cookie is still a while away, you need to start building that database. Yesterday.

To Wrap Up

The evolution of Google Search, and by association, the SEO industry, has been slow, but steady. Every update seems to add a little bit more of what humans are looking for, rather than what an algorithm would. 

What’s great about this is that, even though there are less ‘hacks’ and quick wins to be had, it means that it should be easier than ever for genuinely good, human-focused content to rise to the top of search results. The difficulty lies in creating that content, rather than getting it to rank.

We hope these 2022 SEO trends help any practitioner on their way to creating genuinely useful content for their audiences. If you have any questions or would just like to have a chat about SEO, drop us a line.

In the meantime, happy ranking.

Want to read more marketing trends for 2022?

Here are a few more resources we’ve put together, with more on the way:

Web Design Trends 2022

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

Seven Regional Marketing Trends We Want To See More Of

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

B2B Marketing Trends 2022

The post SEO Trends 2022: More Human appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Or it takes the right moment at the right time with the right word. 

With Google, both apply. 

‘Just Google It’

It started with social media. Originally, ‘googling’ was coined for the Google Friends network, when Google was still a cached webpage on Stanford’s systems. Larry Page signed off with the phrase ‘have fun, and keep Googling!’, and nearly a quarter of a century later, we use ‘google’ instead of ‘look it up’, instead of ‘search engine’, and instead of ‘find out yourself’. 

Similar to Skype (or now, Facetime) and Hoover, Google has ourobouros’d itself: it is not longer referring to a search engine but to a way of thinking, and by extension, to the way we think about things through Google. 

And that way of thinking has changed us, from how we shop to how we find things. 

Googling It: The Beginning

The interesting thing about Google is that it has been mythologised as the first search engine. 

It wasn’t. Google wasn’t even the second or third: it hit roughly 8 years after the first search engine went online, and ten years after the invention of the Internet. 

What Google did better than any of the earlier search engines was ranking. AskJeeves and AltaVista were much bigger search engines at the time, but they delivered web page results according to relevance. Those results didn’t always have what you were looking for: they were just the first results that used the most keywords to what you were looking for. 

But people don’t always look for exactly what they type. 

Sometimes, they look for an answer that can’t be put into words. Not exactly. Not how they need it to be. 

So what Google did was change the way they delivered search results. Instead of basing how pages ranked depending on relevance, they ranked pages by popularity – by how many people had visited those pages, spent time on those pages, what they took away from those pages. 

The early Internet of the 90s wasn’t an organised font of knowledge, as it is now. It was a collection of pages, loosely collated into something forming a database. Before Google, finding what you were looking for was as much luck as it was curation, sometimes more. 

Changing the way they delivered search results was a small thing. 

It was enough to change us. 

How Google Changed the World

People have always been curious. They’ve always wanted to know things, no matter how irrelevant to their lives those kinds of things are; it’s the thrill of knowing that draws. 

Google makes it easier to know. You don’t need to skim past a lot of other data to look something up. If you ask Google, ‘what’s the best Italian restaurant in Malta?’, it’ll give you links to the definitively best Italian restaurants in Malta.

That immediacy is what elevated Google from a search engine to a verb. 

Google gives us the answers, fast and accurate. We don’t need to think for ourselves anymore, not really – why troubleshoot a problem when Google can tell you exactly what to do? 

For retail, this has been the biggest challenge and the biggest benefit. 

Retail pages that rank highly enough on Google reap the benefits of being first-to-mind. They also need to work hard to stay updated and active, otherwise other pages will elbow their way in. Balancing that popularity could – and is – a full time job in itself. 

The Problem with Google

The fundamental problem with Google is that it filters our information. Whatever is most attractive to Google is what you get. 

Some might consider that biased. 

It’s really just inevitable. 

Google made it easier for us to find the information we’re looking for. To be able to do that, there has to be a ranking system in place. Without those metrics, the web is just a library with no index, and you’re armed with a pencil, a notebook, and half an hour to find your way around. 

But Google is also a human product. It isn’t infallible. False and fraudulent claims are common. Your page could just get lost in the mire, drowned out by louder pages offering semi-realistic goals. Now that Google had introduced its fact check feature, this is a rarer occurrence, but it’s still something to keep in mind. Some pages are just louder than others. 

Getting Around with Google

You need to learn to game the system. 

That means SEO. It means keeping your page on Google updated. It means working with Google updates, not against them. It means voice search. It means search, in general. 

Google is an excellent tool for any business to use. Whether or not you’re using it well enough to get the results you want is what you need to think about. 

Here’s five tips to help you figure out if what you’re doing works: 

1. Use Google Analytics. They’re available for free to everyone, and they’re the best non-secret secret about ranking well on Google. People tend to forget they exist, which is a shame: used properly, Google Analytics can increase your conversion rates substantially. 
2. Register with Google My Business. Especially important if you’re starting a new business, Google My Business can help make sure that people can find your business by adding a location pin. It integrates with Google Maps, making it easier for your consumers to find you when they’re on the cusp of making a purchase decision. 
3. Optimise your site’s speed. Google ranks by popularity. Part of that popularity is determined by site speed. Using a speedy hosting service and minimising the amount of HTTPS requests on your website will help your site load faster, which means people won’t click out of that website before it’s finished loading. Considering 29% of mobile users will switch to another site if it loads slowly, it’s beneficial to have a quick-loading site for more than one reason.
4. Use keywords. Research what keywords are relevant to your business. Make sure those keywords feature in headings, page titles, and URLs. People who are looking for something will use specific keywords for a reason; use that reason. 
5. Stay updated with Google. Maybe it’s overkill, but if you know what’s going to happen, you can stay ahead of the curve. Google updates their policies and algorithms often enough that you can definitely count on at least one throwing you a curveball. The way to mitigate it is to monitor Google – closely. And often.

Recently there’s been discussions about cutting down Google’s monopoly on information. 

It’s unlikely to go forward. 

Google, as a business is too big and too entrenched in day to day life to actually fail, but it could change rapidly to avoid the criticism levelled at it by companies, governments, and the population. When that happens, much like the death of the cookie, the way we look up information will change too. 

Stay aware. 

Or, if you’re busy, hire a watchdog to stay aware for you. 

That works too. 

The post How Google Changed The Way We Do Things appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Local SEO is the process of optimising your brand’s presence on search engines to get more attention from those who are geographically close. You might wonder, what’s the difference between Local SEO in Malta and just, regular SEO? Malta is so small, Local SEO is just regular SEO, right? Wrong. The difference lies in the way the efforts manifest themselves on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

For example, I’m writing this blog in Swieqi. The below are the results from a “restaurants near me” search I just did on my laptop. (That search term gets around 500 searches per month in Malta, by the way.)

You’ll undoubtedly notice that the majority of the space isn’t taken up by the standard search results – the two at the very bottom. Rather, the page is dominated by the section above, called the Google Snack Pack. It takes your exact location, then finds the top 3 local business listings most relevant to your query, and displays their info to you, along with a helpful map to show their exact locations. 

On mobile, it’s a similar story.

And that’s important. Around 40% of all search results in Malta over the last 12 months have originated from mobile devices.

These Snack Pack results pop up every single time there’s a “near me” search, and also whenever there’s a Service in Location search, such as “plumber in Birkirkara”, “coffee shop in Sliema”, or even simply “supermarket malta”. Don’t ignore it – a study has shown that these results claim 33% of all SERP clicks.

Does your business need Local SEO in Malta?

If you sell absolutely anything in a physical shop, or provide a service in a moderately competitive local market, then absolutely, yes. If your business relies on B2B leads, especially in a growing remote-working market, then local SEO might not be as important. 

Local SEO is absolutely essential during touristic high seasons too. Statistics show us that more searches happen on desktop overall, but you can be sure that the overwhelming majority of tourists aren’t lugging their laptop around to search for restaurants.

What can you do to get started?

The quickest way to get up and running would obviously be to secure the services of SEO specialists with knowledge of the local market. That said, here are 3 things you can do right now that will start giving you results relatively quickly.

Get yourself onto Google My Business

This is probably the most important step you can take to get started with local SEO. The direct benefits of having a well-optimised Google My Business account fair outweigh the effort required to create it. The most obvious gains being visibility on the snack pack results, along with visibility on Google Maps. If someone searches for your brand name directly, a Knowledge panel will show up on the SERP with the exact information you provide on your My Business account.

It will even allow Google to confidently provide specific information about your business, for even more ease of use for the searcher.

Setting up your brand’s profile on Google My Business is a relatively simple process. Get it done today.

Understand what people are searching for

Having a comprehensive list of search terms that your business would be relevant for is important. These search terms will allow you to make basic optimisations to your website to give you the best possible chance to appear in common search results. 

The most basic way to get an idea of what people search for in your industry is to take a look at Google’s auto-complete suggestions.

Another way of quickly building basic keywords is to brainstorm all possible Services in Location terms we mentioned earlier.

Here’s an easy tool to get you started if you don’t know where to begin.

With these keywords in hand, take a good hard look at all of your brand’s online touchpoints. Are most of the search terms covered in the content of your website? Do the service categories you chose on Google My Business adequately represent all the search possibilities?

Get your online presence in sync

Many businesses in Malta have a few or all of the following:

• Website
• Facebook Page
• Instagram Page
• LinkedIn Page
• Business listings (yellow, findit, etc.)
• Google My Business
• TripAdvisor (or industry equivalent)
• Official business directories

All of these platforms contain basic information about the business such as name, contact details, location, website, etc. The more of these ‘citations’ as they’re known, the more confidently Google will serve that information on the SERP. If you have multiple citations that contradict each other, that’s going to do more harm than good. Every once in a while, make sure you audit every possible presence your business has online to make sure all the information is still relevant.

Is there more?

Yes. A lot more.

But by completing these first 3 steps, you already give your business a fighting chance. If your particular industry is relatively saturated, these efforts are probably not enough. 

You’ll likely need to restructure your website to take advantage of the benefits of technical and On-Page SEO. Your current website might not be mobile-friendly. Your business might benefit from creating excellent content that might build traffic to your site. Building backlinks from high-authority sites is what you might need to get over the hump.

All that said, these first 3 steps are essential. If you want to take your Local SEO efforts to the next level, you know where to find us.

The post Local SEO in Malta: 3 Essential Steps to Get Started appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

SEO, one of the most fundamental aspects of modern marketing, has been around since 1994.

A lot has happened in the years since then. 

The internet has gotten faster, websites smarter, search engines more like AI than algorithms. The techniques historically used for SEO in 2000 are not viable in 2021, when search engines have become so complicated that there are entire courses taught on how to capitalise on search engine optimisation, and IT professionals who freelance as SEO experts. 

Most of the advice given is sound. You should use keywords. You should write content at length, ideally at more length than your competition, but only if you have enough to talk about. The easiest way to a search engine’s heart is through its algorithm. 

But there’s one thing we struggle to agree with, the advice that sneaks into every SEO blog as an underlying mantra: you should write for SEO. 

Respectfully: no. 

You should write for people. 

What’s the difference?

Writing for SEO is writing for a machine. 

Writing for people is writing for people. 

When you write for SEO, you’re writing to play to the strengths of an algorithm: how many keywords, how much length, when should you break for a paragraph, how often should you repeat your keyword length. Done carefully, SEO writing turns out a little bland, but serviceable. 

Done poorly, SEO writing is difficult to read at best, and completely unintelligible at worst. 

So why was it ever done?

It’s important to look at SEO writing in context. 

At the start of writing for SEO, a lot less was known about how search engine optimisation worked, and the algorithms powering those search engines weren’t as powerful as they are now.

Also keep in mind that most of the SEO advice you got was from people who worked very hard on figuring out correlation between what they saw on pages that ranked. But we all know that correlation and causation are two very different things.

The internet then went on to have a boom of rapidfire escalation and improvement that scientists are still trying to charter. The same internet that was around in the 2000s bears no similarities to what we’re using now. 

Ultimately, writing for SEO was not bad advice at the start of learning how to write for SEO. Now that we know better, and the search engines have advanced greatly, the definition of writing for SEO has changed. 

You can, of course, still use the old rules: stuff your content full of keywords to rank, formulate your sentences to make it easier for Google, structure your content around the idea that the search engine will do the work for you.

We have a different idea. 

You should write for people. 

Why write for people?

Your content isn’t going to be read by the search engine. 

It’s going to be read by your audience, most of whom is made up of humans, that (we assume) are not an algorithm. Please disregard if they are. 

When you write for people, you’re writing content that is readable, easy to understand, and fun. Content that will get shared. Content that will get linked back to you. Content that people will talk about with their friends. 

Great content and typical SEO rules don’t really go together, and even Google has started to understand that and to adapt that to their search engine algorithm. 

Think about it this way: if you’re going to read a long blog post – 5000 words, at a minimum a 15 minute investment – do you want it to be repetitive, dry, and a little bland?

Or do you want it to be fun?

Do you want that blog to make you think?

Do you want to share that blog with others, get their opinions on it, talk about it with your coworkers?

We like content that reads like music. It’s what we try to write ourselves, and what we look for in other blogs, and what we like reading. 

That is content that is written for people. 

So, what do I do?

Okay, so you still need to rank, and your page still needs visitors. 

There’s a middle ground there. 

Write your content for people. Make it as fun as you like, make it the kind of blog people share, make writing it the most enjoyable exercise you can make it to be. 

But plan it with SEO in mind. 

Top five tips for writing for people, planning for SEO

It sounds hard, on paper: writing for people while also writing for a machine while also making sure to make it sound like you’re writing for people. And it is hard, but there’s a few ways you can make it easier on yourself. 

1. Think about search intent. When you’re Googling the answer to a question – for example, which coffee shop stocks a particular brand of coffee – you’re going to phrase it in a particular way. That needs to be the backbone of whatever you’re writing. 
2. Write your content first. Put the keywords in later. Your content is what’s going to keep people on the page, so it needs to be what takes priority. On your second round of edits, go through it again, see where you can work in a keyword or two which will add value to your piece. 
3. Answer a question. Looping back into the first point about search intent, any good piece of content will have an answer in it, whether or not it’s the answer the buyer is looking for. An answer will keep people coming back, will keep people reading, will keep them interested. 
4. Add visuals. Visuals are important. Visuals break up text on the page, and make it seem manageable, so if you’re writing at length, giving your reader a break to absorb the information helps. It also makes the blog post seem far shorter. 
5. Check what Google is doing. Google is in the process of updating and improving all of its services. To write blogs that take advantage of current SEO practice, you need to know what Google is doing with its SEO algorithms. 

There’s more to think about when it comes to SEO, but it’s technicalities, little things that can be fixed in post or in editing. 

What matters is how you write. 

Write for people, and people will read. 

Write for a machine, and the machine will have a field day – but that’s not going to keep your audience on your page. 

Unless your audience is robots. 

Then you should definitely write for robots. 

The post Why Writing for SEO in 2021 Is Bad SEO Advice appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Deciding whether or not to invest time, effort, and money into something that doesn’t seem like a sure thing is not easy. As soon as you Google the word SEO, you’re just inundated with guides, tips, best practices, and lots of other information. Looks like you either need to hire an expert (whose opinion you can’t trust if they can benefit from the result of said opinion), or take the plunge yourself. The former will likely be quite expensive financially, the latter expensive in effort and time.

So this piece is for those who are on the fence – unsure whether SEO for their website would be worth it or not, but aren’t willing to spend too much time or money to find out. We’re outlining a few simple(ish) steps you can take to see whether working on SEO will bring real value.

Let’s get started

The whole point of this exercise is to see whether your particular website is primed for a boost in organic traffic with some SEO effort. To do this, we’ll be taking a look at a few pieces of existing content on your website, then spending some time lightly optimising these pages to see whether they benefit from SEO. Before we get started though, make sure you have access to:

• Google Analytics (or equivalent)
• Your website’s backend

If you don’t have these on hand, get in touch with your web admins, or speak to us and we’ll do it for you.

Look for a few pages that already have some traffic

First off, find a page on your site that already draws a little bit of traffic. Take a look at your analytics tools over the past few months, and take note of any particular pages that are already popular, have valuable content, and (if you have the data available), drive conversions.

Ideally, the pages you choose are ones with some informational content, rather than pure conversion (a blog post, for example).

Choose target keyphrase/keyword for each

Essentially, a target (or focus) keyphrase is the search term that people type into Google that you’d like your content to rank for. You’ll need to choose a keyphrase for the page you’ve chosen, so we can optimise the page for it. So how do you find the right one?

As an example, if your page provides information about interior design trends, you should start with the main subject. In this case, interior design (obviously). Then, use a free keyword research tool, such as this one from ahrefs.com. From there, you can see what search terms are most popular and relevant to the topic. You even get a difficulty score, which will tell you how much effort you’ll need to be able to rank for that keyphrase.

In this case Volume represents how many searches are happening with that keyphrase per month, and KD or Keyword Difficulty represents how difficult it will be to rank on the first page of search results for that keyphrase.

The aim here is to find a keyphrase for the page you’ve chosen that:

• Is relevant to the content you already have. Ideally, your content solves a problem or pain point that is revealed by the search term itself.
• Is not extremely competitive. The more competitive the keyphrase is, the more difficult it will be to rank. Look for a low KD (Keyword Difficulty) score.
• Has a decent amount of search volume. “Decent” depends on the potential size of the target audience and the value of a single lead.

You should spend a little bit of time on this bit of the process. Choosing the right keyphrase is probably the most vital part of the exercise – it will feature heavily in the next step.

Optimise those pages with these best practices

Get your chosen keyphrase, and make sure it features in the following places on the page:

• URL
• Page title
• Meta description
• H1 & H2 header tags
• Image alt tags
• Body content
• Image file names

Tip: Don’t flood the page too much. Spamming the keyphrase will set off alarms with the Google algorithm, and this exercise will have done more harm than good. Don’t forget, you’re writing for humans, and humans don’t like too much repetition (unless it’s from Daft Punk).

If you’re not sure what those listed things are, here’s a complete glossary of SEO-related terms. CTRL-F is your friend.

Build internal & external links

Having a healthy number of internal and a couple of external links usually make a page more useful to whoever is browsing it. If you have content on other pages that would be relevant to anyone who used the focus keyphrase, make sure you link to it appropriately. The same goes for external links – look for content outside your website that would be genuinely useful to include in your content.

Post on social

If you already have relatively active social media pages, make sure the page you’re doing this exercise on has been shared recently on all the platforms you use. When the Google algorithm finds a valid link to a particular page, it deems that page slightly more valuable – especially if coming from a high-authority website. If you create sufficiently great content, you might be able to get other websites to link to your page.

Wait a week or two

This is the most frustrating bit – SEO takes a bit of time to start showing results because you need to wait for Google to scan your website. That typically happens once every few days, so it’s probably best to set yourself a reminder for about 10 days in the future to check the results. 

Did it work?

Take a look at the organic traffic received from search engines – has it increased? If you search the focus keyphrase yourself, did your website’s result jump up? If you answer yes to any of those two questions, you know there’s potential for more value to be gained from SEO. 

What’s next?

Do it again. Find more pages that could benefit from the entire process. At some point though, you may find yourself up against a keyphrase with too much competition. Or you might struggle to figure out how to target a very particular user intent. Or you might need someone to take on the task of writing engaging content. The structure of the website itself could also be holding you back. 

That’s where a lot more of the technical stuff comes in, and you’re probably best off getting in touch with an experienced expert. Especially if you’re seeing valuable results coming in from the effort you’ve put in.

The post Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out. appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Choosing a domain name

If you already have a domain name, this section might not be very useful to you. Then again, knowing the gist of why a domain helps SEO won’t hurt. If you’re still trying to choose the best domain name for your business or project, don’t give up.
It’s becoming very difficult to find the URL you want that is not registered yet. I’ve found that the best domain ends with a .com but there are successful websites nowadays that end with every possibility you might think of.
Contrary to popular belief, the keywords that you’re aiming for don’t really have to be in the domain name, so you can feel free to choose a name which is not directly related to your subject matter.
After all, it’s all about the way you run your site, and in terms of SEO it doesn’t make much of a difference if the content of your website is relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
It is also good to know that some sources say that having your website registered for at least a year helps. As your domain ages it gets more attention from Google.
The length of your URL is another factor that should be given some attention, as it is suggested that the length of the URL will be better if it’s 8 letters or less.

Choosing the best keywords

Now that you have chosen a domain name, you can start researching the best keywords for your website. By best I mean the ideal set of words to use in your site’s content to make it more appealing to search engines.
This helps search engines get to know your website better, and consequently show it as in results which match your target users’ searches.
Start off by finding what keywords your competitors use and what people are more likely to search for when looking for sites like yours.
Next, gather the top 10 keywords and start including them in the text of your website. Remember to add some of your main keywords to some article headlines to make them more prominent.
But don’t overdo it and duplicate a lot of content just to stuff different keywords in. Google will realise that you’re trying to cheat and won’t be very willing to show your content to those searching for it.

Get your content to work for you

Now that you know what keywords are best to use on your website, it’s time to getting them to work for you. The best way to start is to add them to title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions and in H1 tags.
Contrary to popular perception, content length doesn’t really matter as long as it’s original content. So don’t lose sleep over whether the text on your pages is is 500, 1000 or 2000 words long, even though quite a few sources say that the ideal is to have around 1500 words per page. It’s better to have less content that makes sense in the context of your site than to have a lot of content that’s rubbish just for the sake of it.
Other factors that might need some attention include page speed and image optimisation, finding and fixing broken links, grammar and spelling, HTML errors, W3C validation, and designing a user-friendly layout.

Bringing your website to life

User experience is another vital factor that determines how much traffic you can get to your website. You cannot just have a website designed and leave it there doing nothing. It’s best to update it regularly to show Google that it’s still active and might be useful to users. It’s also important to have a contact us page that is clear and easy to understand and use, maybe with a form and a map so users can easily find you and get in touch if they need to.
Google also promotes mobile-friendly websites on searches originating from mobile devices. Having a mobile version of your site (or a responsive website that adapts itself automatically to mobile devices) will therefore increase your chances of winning traffic from mobile searches.
Other relevant technical factors include the presence of a sitemap, using Google Analytics & Webmaster tools to improve performance, easy navigation, and including terms of use and privacy policy pages.
The presence of reviews, testimonials and comments on your website help perception too, but this all depends on the nature of your business.nIf you’re working on a link building (and/or guest posting) exercise to improve your chances of being ranked higher on search engines you have to ensure that you’re only getting links from high quality sites that are relevant to your industry.

Engaging users through social media

Your presence on different social media is considered to be as important as having a website. There are a lot of platforms to choose from to engage users, but you have to decide on which are the best ones for your business.
For example, it doesn’t make sense to use LinkedIn if your target audience aren’t business people. Google gives a lot of attention to businesses that have a significant amount of tweets, number of Facebook likes and shares on Facebook, Pinterest pins and other mentions and interactions.
A lot of hype was made about whether or not Google+ ultimately makes any difference or not for SEO. Lately, Google released an announcement saying they are going to split Google+ into different sections so that it will make much more sense to get some SEO relevance from it.
As you may have noticed this topic is broader than expected and might be quite a lot to handle. If you decide that you need some extra advice, we’ll be glad to help you along with the process.
As you go along be careful you don’t opt for shortcuts to optimise your website as Google will penalise your website and it might be difficult to earn its trust back.
Remember that SEO might take a lot of time to eventually work and get you to the top of results, so roll your sleeves and start working on it now.

The post What's all this fuss about SEO? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.