As the Internet continues to become a foundation for B2B and B2C commerce, the rapid growth of e-commerce and new technologies has become pertinent to understanding the structure of robust SEO strategies. And strong SEO approaches are necessary to excel in a competitive digital market.
The 2018 updates to Google’s search rankings demonstrate that their crawlers and data parsing algorithms are becoming much smarter — focusing on quality, speed, and security. For small businesses, staying up to date with the evolution of SEO practices and trends is often not feasible while simultaneously running other business operations.
Professional experience and expertise are crucial and, fortunately, options for marketing agencies are now abundant to help small businesses grow organically in a digital era.
SEO Marketing Agencies Understand and Are on Top Of All the New Trends
SEO marketing evolves in step with a changing e-commerce, social media, and web infrastructure landscape regularly. The mobile e-commerce market is poised to continue its meteoric trajectory, and cross-device SEO strategies will become more relevant as Generation Z, who spends ridiculous amounts of time on consuming mobile content, positions itself as the largest American consumer age group.
Although significant emphasis is placed on Google’s search engine, legitimate competition is emerging with the likes of Apple’s search engine and their optimization for driving web traffic on mobile devices in the U.S. Expanding past Google is often beyond in-house company initiatives, and is where professional SEO marketing agencies can provide a boon for your business.
SEO strategies rely heavily on Google’s ranking system, something SEO marketing agencies fully understand, but that could also be subject to change in 2019.
Search and social marketing agencies like TopHatRank can do the deep analysis and refinement of content, web traffic, conversion rate optimization, and research that small businesses simply don’t have time for. Offering services for small and large-scale enterprises, including SEO audits and a virtual “in-house” team, TopHatRank can help business owners focus on their native products and other important aspects of their operations.
Additionally, the convergence of e-commerce and social media is likely to accelerate in 2019. Concepts like Instagram Shop and Snapchat’s direct product advertising have a unique potential to redefine social media platforms as both platforms for sharing content and accessing products directly.
Roughly 93 percent of marketers already use major social media platforms, and 40 percent of e-commerce merchants use social media to generate sales. It seems inevitable that the two would eventually collide, and the companies that can extract the early advantages of their integration will stand to benefit the most.
Focusing on AI Trends
Another trend to look out for, which can provide enormous benefits for small operations, is the rise of AI tools. In many instances, small brands and e-commerce stores are run by a single individual or a select few. AI tools can help them automate many portions of content management and analysis that were previously time-consuming. According to a recent report on AI in e-commerce by Absolunet:
“AI will help retailers and merchants create more and better product content, improve SEO and merchandising.”
AI-based solutions can make the process of aggregating and filtering product content for optimizing SEO content much more manageable, with drastically reduced effort on the part of merchants. Products like Amazon AI can provide myriad benefits to merchants using AWS as their back-end, including machine learning algorithms that recommend products and consumer preferences — in real-time.
A Prime Example of a Winning Combination of a Small Business and SEO Marketing Agency From 2018
The recent 2019 Interactive Marketing Awards (IMAs) provide some compelling examples of sound SEO strategies that resulted from partnerships between marketing agencies and small businesses. In particular, TopHatRank and Mealthy — an electronic pressure cooker brand — won both the Best SEO Campaign and Best Low Budget Campaign among a slew of competitors, sponsors, and an expert panel of judges.
The kitchen product market is one of the most competitive e-commerce sectors that is flooded with major retail brands and smaller competitors. Mealthy, led by Tiana Dragos, was looking to gain an edge on their competition and tapped TopHatRank — a proven and successful SEO marketing agency — to improve its brand exposure. The results were profound, as the winning combination came away as one of the most decorated pairs in the entire registry of shortlist competitors.
TopHatRank’s SEO strategy helped propel Mealthy to a leading brand in the electric pressure cooking market, even with a restrictive budget allocated to its marketing campaign. They deploy comprehensive SEO strategies from e-commerce brand building to SEO auditing, allowing Mealthy to go from small competitor to established industry name.
For small businesses, Mealthy and TopHatRank’s success should serve as inspiration for just how influential an SEO marketing campaign can be in building small business brands.
SEO trends are continually evolving, and tapping professional agencies can help small business owners make meaningful strides in expanding their online brand amid a changing landscape.