As we launch into 2024, many museum marketing managers are likely asking themselves the question, “How can SEO help my museum in the next decade?” While we don’t have a clear window into the next 10 years and can only guess at some of the many potential technological changes and Google algorithm updates to come, we can make some predictions about what to expect based on certain growing trends that are.. .I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
What is SEO and why do museums care?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing content that is discovered through a search engine’s organic search results. For museums with limited budgets, having a website that appears in organic search results (instead of Google Advertising) is a cost-effective way to gain visibility for your museum and a great way to serve your audience.
After all, museums are subject matter experts. So when a member of the public has a query about art, science or history, it makes sense that a museum should be there with the answer. For many museums, being the top search result is in line with their educational missions.
SEO trends for museums
The following SEO trends will not only affect museums in 2024, but will help shape the future of search in the years to come.
Optimize for user intent
The most important thing for museums to consider when optimizing their websites for Google in 2024 is user intent. SEO is no longer simply about writing lots of content with dozens of keywords in the hope that Google will see you and rank your pages favorably. Google wants to know that your pages are what users really want.
So, before getting into the specific trends that extend from this, you should always remember that the user comes first, not the search engine. The more useful and engaging your content is, the better your long-term performance will be. This is good news for museums as trusted content experts.
Museums should not depend on click searches
With the newly developed ability for users to find answers to their questions directly on the Google search engine results page, people no longer need to click through to a specific web page for additional information, especially if their questions only require short answers of one or two sentences.
For example, once upon a time, finding a museum’s opening hours required visiting its website, but now Google provides that information in a feature snippet. This means fewer people click through to museum websites and more basic information is covered on the search results page.
Feature snippets are not limited to visitor information. For example, the image below shows the search result for “Sue the T Rex”. This is the most complete Tyrannosaursaurus Rex skeleton ever found and is a must see exhibit. The Field Museum in Chicago.
Although the museums page about Sue the T Rex ranks first in the search results, Google also includes a Wikipedia page about the dinosaur. This feature snippet certainly attracts clicks that would have previously gone to the museums page.
The relevance of the highlighted fragment
Featured snippets are unlikely to disappear as they provide search engine users with an efficient and convenient way to find the answers they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. Museum marketers may see this as a drawback because this feature keeps the actual search results that require clicks near the top of the page, requiring users to scroll down to view them.
While it’s true that featured snippets have been around since 2013, they’ve gone through some changes that keep them prominent in search results. Snippets can include more than just snippets of text, as they’ve been developed to include translations, calculations, dictionary definitions and price tables, among other bite-sized media.
How to get your museum featured in featured snippets
Featured snippets are selected and displayed by Google by scanning web search listings through an automated process. The system decides which fragment would be most useful based on the query and highlights the most relevant one it can find. Snippets are much more likely to appear to users who enter questions as queries.
Museums cannot automatically tell Google that any text on a web page is intended for fragments. Instead, the best way to appear in snippets is to find the most frequently asked questions among your museum audience and provide concise, concise answers that Google’s algorithm can favor.
What about rich snippets?
Rich snippets are another type of snippet to be aware of; think of them as companions to highlights. Rich snippets do not appear as high in search results as featured snippets and are used to display additional information and relevant links below a specific search result.
Some rich snippet content may include additional links to a website, pricing charts, product reviews, recipe ingredients and metrics, details about a specific song or album, and many other types of information.
You can optimize your museum website for rich snippets, as opposed to featured snippets. You can do this by including all the relevant information in your web pages’ metadata and schema code, which will help tell Google what the page is about in specific details that it can include in these small, rich snippets.
If your website is built with WordPress, there is connectors to help you structure your data for rich snippets and manage your museum SEO.
How BERT is changing the game
Another big development to watch out for that will influence both featured and rich snippets, among other results for search queries, will be something called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT).
Google introduced BERT as a new neural network-based method for pre-training natural language processing. Simply put, this algorithm update helps maximize the relevance of search results based on the search intent behind each query.
The “bidirectional” element means that BERT looks at a search query for context by scanning sentences both left-to-right and right-to-left to maximize accuracy, while other natural language processing pre-trained systems have only looked at the language in one direction, from left to right, to determine intent.
As a result, BERT allows Google to more effectively decide which search results are most relevant based on user queries. If you want your museum website to attract BERT, you’d do well to do a few Google searches when searching for topics to find content, and look for some FAQs that have answers to the highlights.
Mobile-first indexing
More and more people are relying on mobile devices to search, and it will only continue to do so for the next decade. Google’s emphasis on mobile indexing is nothing new: in 2016, they announced that they would focus on indexing for mobile search first, and in July 2019 they completed the rollout.
Mobile indexing means that museum websites should always be optimized for mobile. If your website is mobile-friendly and well-optimized, you’ll have a much better chance of attracting mobile users when they search. A mobile-optimized website will also prevent people from leaving due to poor content visibility or navigability on your website using a smartphone, tablet or other mobile platform.
So it’s not just about SEO for your museum, it’s about serving your audience better.
Museums that embrace the ubiquity of voice search
Another big change we’ve seen recently that will only get bigger as the decade goes on is voice search. Millions of users already use devices like Google Home, Amazon Echo or Alexa and Siri to make searches easier than ever, and we can only expect this number to increase.
Voice search will provide users with results based on their searches in the form of questions, which you can try to optimize by doing what you would for featured and rich snippets: just answer some of those questions that people are likely to ask using search by voice. with relevant answers that Google will likely favor.
This seems particularly relevant for museums, which as content experts are in a good position to answer these types of queries. These inquiries are likely to be about your collections or the subjects you cover and less likely to be about opening times or exhibition tickets.
Ultimately, the most important step to take when optimizing the SEO of your museum websites for the future is to have a good understanding of your audience’s needs and, through them, their language. The more you appeal to what they’re looking for and how they’re looking for it, whether it’s in the form of a vague search phrase or a specific question via voice search, the better chance you have of staying ahead of your competition. .
SEO for museums
As content experts, museums are well-placed to provide the kind of high-quality content that Google values. Museums should see providing SEO-friendly content not only as a good marketing exercise, but also as another avenue to fulfill our educational missions. All SEO needs is a little museum work to create the right content and structure it properly. Then the search engines will do the rest.
Does your museum prioritize SEO? How has your museums approach to search engine optimization changed over the past few years?
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