7 SEO Strategies to Build Your Brand and Drive Traffic

This Week

• Long Read: SEO Strategies for Growth

• Tool of the Week: SurferSEO

• Cheat: The Click is Dead, Long Live the Snippet

• Case Study: Figma’s audience expansion 

• News

• Folks to Follow

7 SEO Strategies to Build Brand and Drive Traffic

As Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and SGE continue to evolve, optimizing for zero-click results with rich, visually engaging content like videos, web stories, and podcasts is a must.

Here are the seven strategies you need to tackle today:

1. Conquer SERPs with Visual Prowess

2. Helpful Content is King (and Queen)

3. Engage & Experience

4. Get Personal

5. Go Multichannel

6. Localize & Personalize

7. Brand Mentions & Social Proof

For all the tips and tactics, read on at Medium.

Tool of the Week

Surfer SEO

What it does: Surfer SEO helps you conduct keyword research, write content, and optimize it for SEO. Its real-time suggestions for keyword usage, content structure, and competitor analysis help you identify quick-win tasks that will drive traffic.

Price: $69/month

G.2 Rating: 4.8

URL: https://surferseo.com/

The Click is Dead, Long Live the Snippet

How AI is Redefining SEO

Remember spending hours optimizing your content for the top spot in search results? Google's new "generative search experience" throws a wrench in that plan, using AI to deliver answers directly on the search page - no clicks needed. 

So, what does this mean for marketers?

It’s time to adapt.

This shift demands content optimized for AI, not just humans. Think engaging snippets that hook readers directly in the search results. Forget keyword stuffing and focus on clear, concise information that answers a user's question in seconds. Instead of relying solely on clicks, build brand awareness and trust through high-quality, informative content. 

By providing snippets that solve user problems and showcase your expertise, you'll still attract visitors and establish yourself as a thought leader.

I know this sounds like the end of SEO as we know it, but don’t panic! This isn't the end; it's an evolution.

Figma: Lessons in Audience Expansion

According to Contrary Research, a product offering one specific feature or “job-to-be-done” for the customer can only become so big. There are only so many users, and there is only so much budget for that one piece of functionality. 

Expansion comes from a broader product platform. For example, companies like GitLab, Datadog, and Atlassian have built expansive product suites targeting multiple roles within an organization.

Figma’s explosive growth (it's expected to gain a market share of $16.5 billion by 2025) and its near acquisition by Adobe make it an interesting case study for expansion and audience targeting.

When Figma launched in 2012, the company focused on visual design, prototyping, and collaborative editing; it was a product-design tool. But this audience (with only 500,000 users globally) didn’t satisfy investors who were more interested in a category like software development, where there were 26.9 million.

So Figma launched Dev Mode — a new workspace built for developers. 

In their launch materials, Figma said: “The easier it is for teams to design, document, find, and implement high-fidelity designs without losing sight of the work and each other along the way, the better the product outcomes.”

This new audience allowed Figma to serve developers better and increase revenue per customer as the platform became more valuable. It infiltrated organizations more deeply as it crossed into more departments, driving the growth flywheel. 

Looking at the Adobe side, its core business growth has slowed recently as new design tools, like Canva, water down the market. The acquisition of Figma would have allowed it to extend its cloud platform and satisfy consumer demand for web-based experiences.

“Figma’s best-in-class collaboration workflow platform has changed the landscape for design tools, moving the design world from individual contributors to collaboration-based team enablement,” said Sheila Mahoutchian, a senior analyst at Forrester. 

But now that the acquisition has fallen through, the question is, how much can Figma broaden its product suite and better serve new groups of users? With no new buyer on the horizon, they’ll have to justify the sources of their future growth.

News

• Navigating the marketing AI landscape of 2024: four trends. Read more.

• 7 ways marketers should be using generative AI now. Read more. 

• Generative AI use explodes for RevOps. Read more. 

• New AI marketing tool generates ad-ready images for Under Armour. Read more.

• 84% of searches on Google will be affected by AI generated results, says expert.

Folks to Follow

• Search Engine Land

• Andy Crestodina

• Search Engine Journal Show

• SEMRush Blog