According to a 2015 report, 92% of consumers use emojis. Younger consumers increasingly prefer using emojis instead of written text to express their thoughts and feelings. As a result, emoji use has skyrocketed in online marketing. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all allow emoji searches on their search engines. Savvy marketers are using emojis in SEO to take advantage of this growing trend.

How to Incorporate Emojis into Your SEO Strategy

Local SEO and City Search: Entering an emoji into a search will simply return a list of images similar to the emoji. For example, if you search using the pizza emoji, Google returns images of pizza. But if you amend your search to include “near me” or a city, Google returns pizza restaurants. Some of the results include businesses that don’t use the pizza emoji anywhere on their website.

It would appear that Google translates emojis into basic text when users search with emojis, but there is some evidence that emoji searches provide a nuance that can be more useful. For example, searching with the bikini emoji in a given city returns businesses that sell bikinis, while searching with the text “bikini” returns some of the same businesses, but also businesses where the employees wear bikinis.

Branded Search: As of right now, a search containing an emoji and a common search phrase like “for sale” will only return results that contain that emoji within their website. If you were to search using the dog emoji and “for sale”, the results would be a mixture of social media postings, classified ads, and general results that contain the dog emoji.

Do People Use Emojis to Search?

Emoji searches are allowed, and search engines have begun to interpret emojis used in queries, but it is still unclear how many people are actually using emojis in their regular Internet searches. Traffic from emoji search results can currently be seen in Google Search Console, making it fairly easy to monitor current emoji usage in your business’s search traffic. Until there is more data, marketers can prepare by testing emoji use in online content to see its effect on page ranking and investigating what emoji searches businesses and clients may currently be ranking for.

Local SEO delivers search results that are customized to the current location of the searcher.  For example, if you Google “best coffee shop”, you will get results that are close to you geographically. This ensures that search results are relevant, and it also offers opportunities for small businesses looking to leverage SEO to bring customers into their brick and mortar stores.

We have arrived at a point where businesses can no longer ignore social media. In fact, some profiles on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram have even crossed over into the print medium. And it seems like nearly all ads now feature hashtags or accounts to follow too! So what does it mean? Well, in short, social media has transcended being just a platform for catching up with friends and meeting new people – it has become a place to do business!

Your website can help your business grow. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re getting your website in front of the right viewers – as many of them as possible. Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a huge topic of discussion online because it does just that.

While SEO is a very proactive, forward-thinking effort, it can still be applied to existing (and even outdated!) web content to help get your site garner more positive attention in search engine results pages. For example, think about your company blog. Even if you or your team isn’t updating as frequently as you should, what you already have can still be used to your benefit. You may be sitting on a gold mine! Today, we’re going to show you 8 ways you can use your existing blog posts (or any page, really) to improve your site’s SEO.

If you’ve followed our blog for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed that this year we’ve been focusing on showing you ways to learn about digital marketing and SEO (short for search engine optimization) to get the most out of your website. Even if you weren’t sure how each of the techniques we’ve discussed could positively improve your site’s performance, today’s topic is something that can help your business grow in ways you never imagined. Today we will discuss the importance of sharing your NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) information online to help with your local SEO. We’ll also show you how to get started!