Stand out and give people a reason to visit your site

Gerry says: “As content production and other aspects of digital marketing are becoming rapidly easier, you’ve really got to stand out. You’ve got to be a bit different.

In 2024, with huge amounts of content everywhere (and AI generating, regenerating, rewriting, and producing more of it), you’ve got to give people a reason to visit your site and do something with your product or service.”

How do you deliver a reason to visit and engage with the site?

“Every single website is different. One of the things we’re trying to do at Mirador Local is get more and more people to visit our site – not necessarily just customers, but potential customers too. We’re building out some tools and other elements on the website.

For example, it’s not enough to just say that you need schema on the website. You could be integrating a schema builder or a QR code generator when you’re talking about QR codes. If you can create a service that is a little bit more special than just a block of text on your website then, and get people to visit you, there’s a much greater chance that they’ll engage with you in the future. That is what’s missing from a huge amount of the marketing that’s happening at the moment.”

If you look at the SERP and the search engine appears to be looking for a particular type of result, do you still try and be different?

“I spent about a year building out the organic strategy for an international supermarket, Oda. I quickly realised that there are phrases and terms that you can’t rank for. For the query ‘nasi goreng’, you can’t rank unless it’s a recipe. All of the results are recipes, so you have to make sure that your website features recipes.

There are several occasions where you look at all the search results and they’re all fairly similar because of how Google is interpreting the intent. You used to be able to put in FAQ schema to signal that you were going into more depth. In the past, I’ve spoken about microphones, the value of a microphone, what you need from it, and whether or not it’s the right microphone for you. Adding that bit of value to the page will differentiate you.

Understand how everybody else is doing it and then understand what else you can add to show that your page is providing more. Even if somebody visits one or two results and then comes back to yours, that is a sign to Google that yours is definitely the better result.

People start to develop a brand preference as well. As soon as they start to see one good result amongst all the others, they’ll tend to click on that result again in the future. For example, Amazon has great reviews. I often search for the Amazon page of a product, even if I’m buying it from somewhere else, because I’m going to look at the reviews on Amazon.”

How do you measure the impact of trying to stand out?

“At the moment, Google Analytics and other tools are increasingly more challenging to use. I often look at click-through rate in Google Search Console and try to figure out why this particular result is way lower or higher than the results of all of the other pages, and whether the conversion rate on the back of that is happening.

When I was working at Oda, we were ranking for one of the most competitive keywords with huge amounts of search volume, but nobody was clicking into it because there was a Local Pack above us. We couldn’t compete in that; we were an online supermarket. I looked at the SERPs and considered how to rewrite the titles and the descriptions, and we managed to improve the click-through rate considerably. Understanding how the SERP looks is critical.

I am struggling a lot with interpreting all of the data in Google Analytics 4 at the moment. I miss the old Google Analytics data, where it was really clean and simple.”

Are there any trends for page titles or meta descriptions that might encourage a greater click-through rate?

“Google has stopped rewriting title tags as much as they used to – if you have good title tags. At one point, all of the title tags on a lot of websites were being heavily rewritten by Google, but that is happening less often at the moment.

I have played around with a lot of title tags. When I was working with Oda, we would make sure that the brand was included to encourage people to recognise the product. Again, SERP analysis is critical. If you look at all the different SERPs, you can quickly tell which title tag is going to perform better based on how users would look at it and click through on it.

If I’m looking at a particular product, I’ll Google that product in 20 different ways. I will add supplementary keywords like ‘reviews’ to see why our listing is underperforming in comparison with anybody else’s. Quite quickly, you will start to see what you need. You can see what people are looking for, and how people are searching for it.

You can also look at the data to see who’s getting the greater click-through rate. It’s not just about title tags and descriptions; it’s also the images and things like that which are being pulled into the page. Product images are often being pulled in, and that is so important. Make sure that you have a product image, and you have all of the extra bits and pieces to make sure it’s truly showing up in the search results.”

If you’re changing the style or content on a page, should you be split testing to determine what gets the most user retention?

“Split testing can be difficult because you need a certain amount of volume. In e-commerce, you will often find that one product will have a much higher click-through rate, more traffic, etc., than anything else. In organic, it’s a massive challenge to get the results that you need through split testing. You can’t just split-test 2 products; you need 50-100 because so many external factors come into it.

Usually, you would measure over time by comparing the before and after. Update the title tag, have a look at it, and see whether the click-through rate has improved. Do you see an improvement? If you add ‘2024’ to a search result, does that improve the traffic by making it look more recent? Will ‘The Best Guide to Podcasting 2024’ perform better than ‘The Best Guide to Podcasting’?”

How do you stand out in the world of the singular AI result?

“AI is going to be constantly changing so giving any viewpoint is challenging at the moment. The Search Generative Experience – and all of the different ways Google rewrites the SERPs to give you the answer at the top instead of 10 blue links – is a challenge; not to get the answer at the top, but to make sure the answer at the top is what you need it to be.

There is a question about how much we should start blocking the AI robots from indexing the core content that you want people to come into. At the moment, you can change your robots.txt file to block AI from crawling certain pages – like the guide pages. They’ll still appear in the normal results, but you might not want AI to pull from this content because want it in a different place.

AI is constantly changing, and it’s almost the prisoner’s dilemma. If you do it and someone else doesn’t, will you lose to the person who doesn’t do it? If you don’t do it and someone else does, you might lose out then too.

In short, you need to make sure that you’re fully pushing the brand and pushing a reason to engage further with you as a service/product, rather than just a listing of an example.”

Would you recommend blocking AI at the moment?

“If you’ve got the unique content on a particular topic (like the guide to something or a lot of information about a particular site) and you don’t want Google pulling that information out and putting it at the top, then maybe it’s something you should consider. However, if everybody’s got the same content and you block AI from using yours, then all you’re doing is letting somebody else fill the gap.

That’s why it’s the prisoner’s dilemma. I don’t have a straight answer for what the best strategy will be yet. As digital marketers and SEO strategists, we need to ask ourselves whether we want our content to be repurposed and pushed out at the top of Google search results. The question is, will there be attribution in the right way or will Google just take it and rewrite it without attribution? If that’s the case, we would be losing any value from letting Google index the content in the first place.”

Is an SEO’s job nowadays more about standing out on the platform that the user prefers, rather than on their own website?

“I completely agree with that. I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to market on TikTok and other platforms.

TikTok is a very strange thing. As a gentleman in his early 40s, I don’t spend a lot of time on it, but I see how much it is being used. People will say, ‘Have you seen this restaurant?’ and they’ll send me a TikTok link. I do follow a coffee guy on TikTok who recommends certain scales, coffee machines, and various other things. Even though I don’t use it often, my buying habits have been heavily influenced by who I follow on TikTok and other platforms. I love traveling and I will look at different places on TikTok or Instagram before I choose a destination.

Increasingly, people are putting out short promotional pieces on TikTok for digital PR services. I 100% believe that you should market where people will be able to consume it. The way in which you do that is dependent on your audience and your niche.

I like coffee and TikTok is giving me more and more coffee information. If you’re a coffee brand and you’re not making coffee content on TikTok, you’re missing a huge opportunity. It is a challenge for a lot of B2B or SaaS companies but, if you can do a great podcast, cut it up, and get shorts out of it, put those on YouTube or TikTok. I’ve seen some great examples of that recently.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop obsessing over one thing, like page speed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m working with somebody to improve page speed at the moment, but once it gets good enough (and you get the green lines in Google Search Console), you can’t keep maximising it to the nth degree and keep seeing returns on investment.

There’s a special line which SEOs need to understand, and that’s ‘good enough’. When it’s good enough, the return on investment significantly decreases as you strive to get to ‘perfect’. We’re perfectionists, but that can be a killer to the commercial value of our work. If you’ve got a website with 20,000 pages, you don’t need to fix every single broken link from a blog post 10 years ago.

Be happy with ‘good enough’ and understand where the commercial value lies.”

Gerry White is VP of Growth at Mirador Local, and you can find him over at MiradorLocal.com.