How SEO and the Future of Search is Impacting Our Company’s Marketing

Published by Ashton Elder

Ashton has an M.S. in Marketing from Florida International University and has been working as a marketer for over five years. She is currently serving on the University of North Florida’s Department of Communications Professional Committee Board. Ashton has been a guest on several media and marketing panels throughout her career. She also holds a degree from the University of North Florida where she studied political science, journalism, and mass communications. Prior to working in marketing, she worked as a journalist for several news outlets and publications, including an internship at NPR where she produced several radio features. This site features a collection of her articles and radio features from her career in journalism. This site also features some of her insights and projects from her career in marketing. Ashton’s background in journalism has provided her with a solid foundation on which to build enhanced media and social media strategies to provide creative, innovative marketing solutions. Ashton also has first-hand experience with brand design and brand building. Ashton also works on an array of marketing projects from social media to email marketing and everything in between. View all posts by Ashton Elder

In a video interview about practical SEO with SEO scientist Brittney Muller, she discusses the importance of utilizing SEO data for marketers. Muller explains that SEO should be used in the strategy building phase of planning out content. She also explains that SEO data can be used in a variety of areas.

I have experienced this firsthand as the head of marketing at a real estate brokerage. We recently set the goal to take our brokerage YouTube channel to the next level and have made the effort to do this in a variety of ways. We have invested in better filming equipment, editing software and more efficient planning of the content we put out.

We are using SEO to plan the subject matter of our real estate expert tips videos. We pulled the topic of our video planned for February directly from the most popular search terms we found using Keywords Everywhere, an add on tool that helps in keyword research. We chose the topic “buying a house checklist” as a direct result of our keywords research. So SEO is directly impacting the content we’re producing at the planning level.

Muller also spoke about the future of search. She explained that at Google’s recent IO conference there was a discussion of a shift in focus from smart devices to helpful devices and that Google continues to put time and effort into voice search although it has not boomed the way experts previously thought.

I remember hearing Jennifer Radke, CEO of the National Institute for Social Media talk about voice search and smart home devices being the focus of the future in 2018 when I was on UNF’s State of Social Media panel. I have to echo what Muller expressed in her interview that smart home devices and voice search have yet to become what experts like Radke predicted.

Although we have attempted to incorporate voice search in our marketing efforts. Last year we partnered with Movement Mortgage in a class on Alexa flash briefings for real estate. Movement’s Southeast head of marketing, Cindy Bush, explained that some realtors have started claiming zip codes and other key terms on the Alexa devices. Although I have yet to see much growth or results from this area of marketing, SEO continues to show positive results in the popularity of our website and views on our YouTube channel and it will continue to be a powerful influence in our marketing strategy.