The last year created a seismic shift in the world, impacting consumer behavior and the way businesses operate.
Now, as the world reopens, companies can breathe a sigh of relief and begin planning for a future that resembles a sense of normalcy. However, some changes must be accounted for, specifically when it comes to marketing their products and services.
Today, we’ll briefly touch upon a trend impacting the future of search and SEO in each of the following industries:
- Healthcare
- Higher Ed
- Hospitality
- Insurance
- SaaS
Healthcare
Few industries have been as impacted by the pandemic as the healthcare space. For starters, telemedicine utilization became a mainstay that changed how patients and healthcare providers interacted.
Within this space, user experience matters deeply both in terms of SEO and as an aspect of a patient’s care delivery. In fact, Google has recently signaled that the Core Web Vitals—key metrics that measure user experience—will have an even greater impact on a healthcare provider’s search rankings.
To that end, it’s paramount that healthcare providers focus on:
- Having the largest contentful paint (LCP) that’s 2.5 seconds or less
- Having a first input delay (FID) that’s below 100 ms
- Having a cumulative layout shift (CLS) that’s below .1
Higher Ed
In the world of higher education marketing, local SEO was already an important aspect of reaching would-be students. But seeing as regional and international travel will likely be restricted in the near term, the local market may be one of your best avenues for recruitment.
So, how can you take advantage of this?
One way is by utilizing paid ad campaigns that use geo-locations and target ideal student demographics.
Hospitality
A significant amount of a hotel’s information on Google maps is automatically drawn from the business Google My Business page. That means the more information Google has to work with, the better.
But optimizing your Google My Business listing doesn’t just let you rank higher in search. It also helps you convince potential guests to schedule a stay, especially if your listing contains all of the information a person needs to make a booking, including:
- Location
- Rates
- Amenities
- Photos of rooms and the grounds
- Direct booking
- Ratings
Additionally, users that search for a hotel through Google Maps can filter their search by certain criteria. But if you don’t have that information included in your listing, you miss out on an opportunity to appear in filtered searches.
Insurance
In the world of insurance, content marketing is one of the best ways you can drive traffic and provide relevant, accurate, and useful information about insurance.
And when it comes to this marketing medium, video has become the king of content.
Modern users prefer video not simply for entertainment purposes, but as an informational source. And the numbers back this. A Wyzowl study found that 88% of marketers say video produced significant ROI with 95% of marketers planning to increase or maintain their video spend the next year.
Going into 2022, insurance companies have the opportunity to leverage video marketing on Google. And as Socialnomics notes, YouTube is the optimal place for insurance providers to focus their marketing and SEO efforts:
YouTube in particular is the juggernaut in video marketing. It’s the leading streaming platform and is officially the second largest website/search engine in the world. What could be better than having your content appear on both YouTube and Google search results?
SaaS
In 2019, Google responded to an SEO trend for SaaS that is still ongoing. Put simply, there was a lot of saturation amongst all SaaS categories. Additionally, Google reclassified the user’s intent when searching for a technology vertical. Instead of it being purely informational, Google believes that the user is in a shopping mindset.
According to Forbes, this has changed how the search results page unfolds: “Instead of showing results of a bunch of individual software companies, it believes showing roundups and review aggregates to be more influential in making a purchase decision… to maximize the exposure of many different options, Google likely wants to represent as many as it can.”
So, how can you take advantage of this? We suggest you take the following actions:
- Focus on blog content over product/homepage content since that now has a larger impact on rankings
- For blog content, focus on educational content or product reviews
- Build content clusters around key topic pillars
Semgeeks, Helping You React More Effectively
The marketing and SEO world is in constant flux. Therefore, you must always have a finger on the pulse. Or, work with marketing experts that are savvy to the current market trends.
Are you searching for an SEO partner? You’ve come to the right place. Here at Semgeeks, we’re an NJ SEO company versed in all matters SEO and digital marketing.
When you partner with us, we identify the trends that are creating lift in our medium, then keep one pace ahead of them.
Sources
Google Web Dev. Web Vitals. https://web.dev/learn-web-vitals/
Wyzowl. Video Marketing Statistics 2021. https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/
Socialnomics. 5 Tips to Capitalize on the SEO Trends of 2021. https://socialnomics.net/2021/04/08/5-tips-to-capitalize-on-the-seo-trends-of-2021/
Forbes. This Google Trend Is Changing The SaaS SEO Landscape. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2019/11/26/this-google-trend-is-changing-the-saas-seo-landscape/?sh=13f7dfe561c8
