If you’re a business owner or a marketing professional, you’ve probably heard of the term “SEO” numerous times. But what is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing technique that aims to increase both the quality and quantity of exposure to your business and website traffic through organic search engine results.
SEO is important for businesses of all sizes. It allows your business’ website to appear in search engine results when someone is looking for something that you have a solution for. Moreover, it increases your website’s visibility on the search engine results page (SERP), which will lead to more organic, or non-paid, traffic to your website.
SEO techniques are constantly changing. As a business owner or marketing manager of a larger organization, it’s important to keep an eye on SEO strategies and trends to anticipate how you can plan and implement your marketing campaigns.
In this blog, we’re going to explain the latest SEO trends and ways that you can implement them into your marketing strategy.
E.A.T. Principle
Google’s algorithm is continuously getting better at understanding the intent of the searcher. The algorithm ranks the content that focuses on the E.A.T. principle higher. E.A.T. stands for:
• Expertise: The page needs to have quality content that is written by a writer who is an expert of the topic discussed
• Authority: The website needs to be relevant and have some authority on the subject
• Trustworthiness: The website needs to have outbound links that point to it from other trustworthy websites
Google tends to remove search results that are out-of-context. Aim to create content that specifically answers the searcher’s inquiry.
Mobile-Friendly Websites
One of the most important things you should do when creating your website is to ensure that there is a mobile-friendly version of the site. Mobile-friendliness matters when it comes to SEO. The algorithm for search engines like Bing and Google recognizes when a user is searching on a mobile device. In this case, businesses that have mobile-friendly websites will outrank non-mobile-friendly websites. If your business targets traffic from mobile users, then mobile-friendliness is critical for your SEO performance.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets, commonly referred to as “position zero”, appear above the first organic search result. To be included in a featured snippet and drive more traffic to your website, you must provide clear answers to commonly asked questions from customers. Google determines whether featured snippets should be boosted to the top based on their quality. Does your website have quality content?
Voice Search
Voice searches are becoming more popular among those with smart devices. Voice searches can be done through a smartphone, smart TVs, or even home voice assistants like an Amazon Alexa or Google Home. By optimizing your website for voice search, you can generate more organic traffic. Since voice searches are done through a conversational tone, you can mimic that same language throughout your content to optimize for voice search.
Visual Content
Studies show that people would rather watch videos online on platforms such as YouTube than television. Internet users, especially Millennials and Gen Z, prefer to obtain information through videos, either for educational purposes or entertainment. Your business should pay attention to this and implement visual content when appropriate. A quality video can attract a large audience if it is done well. You don’t need a fancy studio set up to create this. All you need is a phone with good camera quality and an editing app – it’s that simple! You can boost SEO through visual content by using relevant keywords in the description and headline of your video.
User Interface
If your website fails to load quickly or has a complex user interface, it will greatly affect SEO, no matter how good your content is. Internet users leave a website if it does not load within a few seconds. This impacts the bounce rate, therefore affecting your SEO performance. In fact, statistics show that a one-second delay in page load time can result in a loss of up to 7% for your business – that one-second delay can prevent customers from finding your awesome business!
User Experience
User experience, also known as UX, is another SEO trend to focus on. Your website should be easy to navigate and understand for the user. Try to avoid using verbiage that is foreign or too technical for your audience. Try to put yourself in your customer’s position. If you were viewing your own website for the first time, would you understand the content quickly? If not, your audience is most likely to bounce from your website and return to the search engine results page. High bounce rates will negatively affect your SEO ranking.
