Improve Google Rankings: JCU Welcomes Head of SEO for Agentur Emilian
Getting on top of Google Search
On November 30, 2020, Jan Buckard, Head of SEO for Agentur Emilian, an online marketing agency from Berlin, Germany, gave a lecture on how to get on top of Google’s search results as part of Professor Thomas Aichner’ s E-Marketing class at John Cabot University.
“Google has become our daily companion. Anyone looking for a service provider no longer looks in the phone book. Ranking at the top of Google’s search results with your website is, therefore, more important than ever,” said Buckard.
Buckard studied Economics and Management at Libera Università di Bolzano (Italy) and worked as head of sales in online marketing for several years. Currently, he is managing Agentur Emilian together with his wife Alexandra Buckard, who is the company’s CEO.
The speaker discussed how to reach the top of Google search results, providing insights regarding On-page Optimization (content), Off-page Optimization (links), UX Signals, and page speed. When it comes to optimizing search results for a marketing agency, one must consider Google Ads, Google My Business, and organic search results. According to Buckard, it is essential for local companies that are interested in local SEO to get, claim, and optimize a Google My Business listing by filling out relevant information like opening hours, address, phone number, services, description, etc. Having a correct NAP (name, address, and phone number) for all listings across the internet is crucial for local SEO.
Since there are more than 200 ranking factors that can be used for search engine optimization, Buckard focused on three very important factors: content, link building, and UX Signals. Links are important indicators for search engines to determine a ranking. With an increasing number of high-quality links pointing to a website, rankings are likely to increase and the site will get more traffic.
Having a good user experience is key for SEO. If users don’t find what they are looking for on a website, they will click on another search result and the website’s ranking drops. Yet, the more people click on a website (high click-through-rate), the more the ranking is boosted.
To conclude the talk, the speaker covered more SEO Basics: sitemap, robots txt, indexing a page, etc. The sitemap is a file that provides relevant information about website pages and how these pages are related to each other. For websites with thousands of pages, having a sitemap could help search engines develop a more complete understanding of the pages’ structure.
Therefore, if marketing agencies want to get on top of Google search results, they should provide customers with a website that covers what they are looking for (search intent), loads fast (page speed), and embed high-quality links from authority pages.
Professor Thomas Aichner will teach ‘Market and Marketing Research’ and ‘Integrated Marketing Communications’ in Spring 2021.
