One of the most reliable ways in which to gain visibility without spending tons of money is through search engines. When somebody searches for a product, service or solution, being visible in the top rankings of Google, Bing or elsewhere can deliver vital traffic and really put your brand on the map.

Unfortunately, the dynamic nature of search engines makes it increasingly difficult to compete for traffic and rankings – not only against your competitors, but against search engines themselves.

Today, we’ll look at some new ways you can maximize the effectiveness of your pages’ rankings, regardless of where they’re currently appearing in SERPs.

Optimize Your Multimedia

With more competitors than ever vying for the top spots in SERPs, you have to get a bit creative. One such way to ensure your website and pages are ranking as highly as possible is to optimize your multimedia for both image and video results.

Many SERPs will display images and videos at the very top of the SERP, giving you a unique opportunity to rank. By using image descriptions, tags and meta data to optimize your multimedia, your images could rank in this section. By pinging to Google these optimized images, you’ll gain SEO credibility via search engines – and you’ll likely get a few people who click through the images and onto your page(s).

Utilize Local Targeting

Search engines – due in large part to the explosion of mobile device usage – is amplifying the influence of local results in various SERPs. While not every SERP can be targeted with a local solution, many brands – even online-only ones – have found success in optimizing their content for specific markets.

By doing this, you’ll be able to feature prominently in local-oriented and mobile-exclusive search results, which tend to be the majority of search traffic now. Options such as Google My Business and Knowledge Graph can be utilized to maximize the chances of ranking prominently via local targeting.

Answer Questions

Many people are upset with how Google has increasingly been deploying elements such as Google Answer, Knowledge Graph and other elements in search results. These elements often provide answers to search engine users above any and all results, thereby eliminating the need for people to visit any of the sites in the search results.

If you want to improve rankings in the SERPs where these elements aren’t present, then you should also target the ones where they do appear. By answering questions and/or providing simple bits of information to various SERP queries on your site, you can increase the chances of being featured in these elements. If/once people click on the element to receive the answer, your page’s link will be visible – hopefully earning you more clicks from your new prominent position.

While good old-fashioned SEO still remains a viable and rewarding tactic, the playing field is changing. For those pinging to Google with the hopes of better rankings, you’ll need more than a consistent flow of content. By utilizing the strategies mentioned above, you can maximize the chances of being visible at the top of every targeted SERP and extract valuable traffic, sales or leads in the process.