This is a guest post by CJ Xia, an expert in life science SEO.
- Schema mark up: Reviews
- Schema mark up: FAQs
- Schema mark up: attributes/ecommerce
- Organic feature: Featured snippet bait
- User engagement: mass produce video contents
- User engagement: tablize and listize
Could your business benefit from attracting more search traffic? Here are 6 high impact SEO tactics you can assign to your developer right now and positively impact your website’s SEO in as soon as the next 12 hours.
Before we begin I would first clarify a few things: this article is intended for those who already know about search engine optimization (SEO). You can expect to benefit from this article the most if you already have a website that is drawing at some traffic from search engines. Whether you have 100 visitors a month, or 1 million a month, this list will help your site. Now let’s jump in.
Tactic 1: add review snippet
Show ratings on your search results—the benefit is self-evident. Who wouldn’t want to show stellar ratings on their search results?
According to this study it increases click through rate by up to 35%. https://cxl.com/research-study/review-stars-google-help-click-rate-study/
How to implement:
Through vanilla HTML code: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/review-snippet. It is quite simple, and I recommend to go with the JSON-LD method.
Through WP plugin: If you use WordPress or other popular CMS, there should be lots of ready to use solutions in their extension market places. Search for “WordPress review snippet” or something along that line and choose the plugin with, you guessed it, the best reviews.
Tactic 2: add FAQs snippet
Maybe you have already noticed, Google has a feature where they show you Q&As under the search results.
To your potential customers, having this chunk of questions and answers below your search result shows that your website has authority on the subject matter. This result seeing a higher clickthrough rate for your result.
According to this study, the click through rate for some pages increase as much as 50% after implementing the FAQs snippet. https://www.titangrowth.com/blog/5-ways-faq-schema-markup-can-amplify-your-seo-720/
How to implement:
Using vanilla HTML: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/faqpage
Again I recommend the JSON-LD method. There are also plenty of plugins for WordPress, Magento, Drupal if you want an out of the box solution.
Tactic 3: add custom attributes for products
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”– Nelson Mandela
When it comes to resonating with your audience, few things work better than addressing that one question they have on top of their minds when they encounter your search result. The question is different for each product/service. For example, in recombinant proteins, whether the protein has bioreactivity is important. Showing an attribute stating that your protein is “bio reactive” in your search results will grab the readers’ attention immediately.
This is what custom attributes look like:
To set this up, one must go through the Google Merchant Center. Here is how to do it: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/9037535?hl=en
Tactic 4. Featured snippet bait
Ranking #1 on Google is no longer the name of the game. Google sometimes shows up to a full page of stuff before they even begin to display the first “traditional” search result. Stuff like Google shopping, Google map (business listing), featured snippet, Google images etc, all cut in queue before the text-based “organic results”.
Featured snippet is the new “position 0”.
And you can increase the chance of Google choosing your webpages to show as the featured snippet for a search query. The rule of thumb is this: include a paragraph between 70-120 words long that addresses a relevant “what is” or “how to” question on your webpage. Here is an extensive article about this matter:
Tactic 5: mass produce video contents
One of the main ranking factor for Google is how well your visitors engage with your webpage. One of the best ways to improve visitor engagement is hosting a video on your webpage.
However, videos are expensive to make, and your team is stretched to the brims already and cannot take on a video project now.
Well videos does not have to be expensive. For very competitive consumer products, yes. However in biotech and life science industry a lot of products and services are so niche the competitors do not have videos at all. Thus having a video, even if it is a mediocre one, can still gain you a big advantage (and who’s to say you can only make mediocre videos? With this tip you can make great videos).
The secrete sauce we use for our clients is: narakeet.com.
This website can turn a PPT to a voice over video, for free (free up to 10 videos, and the paid plans are dirt cheap). The voice over is quite well done, and with British accent as default.
Thus the scope of this page enrichment tactic can be very small:
- have a person (in house or contractor) summarize your webpage into a short PPT
- type out the script as if you are walking the reader through your page
- use narakeet.com to create a video out of the PPT
- host the video on your webpage.
Reusing contents is one of the best ways of content marketing. If you already have contents your audience love, why not upgrade them to videos?
Tactic 6: tablize and listize
Those aren’t words!
Well, I meant turning contents into table or list format.
Why?
People love tables and lists. We have reviewed hundreds of user sessions recorded by inspectlet.com, and one thing stands out: people would scroll through a page quickly, but as soon they see
- a table
- a list
- an infographic
They stop, mouse over it, click around a bit (many people read “out loud” with their mouse clicks… yes you know who I am talking about).
So ask yourself: do any of my pages have big paragraphs? If so, can I turn them into tables, lists, or better yet, infographics?
If you can, do it, for this will improve your user engagement, which in turn will improve your search rankings. Clarity is good for business, and you should do this just for clarity’s sake, but the added SEO benefit sweetens the deal further.
If you have some SEO tips and tricks you would like to share with us, or if you need help in improving your website SEO, please contact us.