If you’ve been keeping up with SEO (search engine optimization) trends for your website in any way, then you already know how much it’s evolved in just the last decade.
The SEO you knew even a few years ago has changed dramatically. A lot of this is due to search engines like Google and Bing constantly updating their ranking algorithms to penalize sites that participate in spammy SEO practices and allow for more fairness in helping deserving businesses rank higher.
So what’s ahead for the rest of this year and beyond in SEO? Here are four major SEO topics that you need to pin to your bulletin board at the office and keep in mind as you are looking for ways to keep up with these ever-changing search engine algorithms.
1. Voice Search
As Forbes recently noted, there isn’t any more sign of fast SEO evolution than optimizing for voice search. This is truly the future of SEO over the next couple of years and into the coming decade.
What makes this so dramatic in change is you have to start using more conversational keywords to help your search engine rankings.
Thinking of keywords this way is a bigger challenge and one likely requiring an SEO expert to start. The main thing to think about here is creating content that helps answer a question. When people do a voice search, they’re going to ask a question and expect to find content answering their question quickly.
One way to prepare for this is to think of what questions consumers might ask about your own products. Using phrases they’d commonly use in a voice search should become a new practice when creating content.
2. More Analytics to Measure SEO
Analytics are everywhere now in helping companies see more granular data on what’s going on internally. For your marketing efforts, this is essential so you see what you’re doing right or wrong.
Using metrics is going to become a standard into the indefinite future, and it’s one way to check how effective your SEO is.
You can start to prepare for this now by using Google Analytics and connecting Google Search Console. The latter gives you a page devoted to SEO metrics directly through the Google analytics program.
While you can get a lot of other platforms to measure SEO, Google Analytics is free and reliable.
3. More Optimized Video Content
No doubt you know how popular video is in all levels of marketing. It’s going to continue being one of the dominant forms of marketing content to improve SEO.
With new studies saying video will account for over 82% of all online traffic by 2021, you can see what you need to focus on. Text won’t go away completely, though creating videos with proper SEO optimization will become the norm.
Prepare for this by learning how to include video transcripts. Search engine bots can find these easier to help your rank.
Also, your title and video meta description need special attention with specific keywords. Research the keywords associated with your video to see which ones get the most searches.
4. Longer Content Is Back In
All those long-read blogs you and other companies wrote in years past went out of fashion for a while. With some people wanting quickie reads to gain information, long-form content seemed gone forever in helping SEO.
Now things are changing. More companies are going back to the long-post formats of 1500-2000 words or more.
The reason this is a new wave of SEO is because you can place so much SEO-rich content in a longer blog form. Long articles receive more organic traffic and they have a better chance at social media shares.
Plus, they receive more backlinks, an important element of SEO success.
Take some time to craft long-form pieces so readers spend more time on your site. However, make it truly valuable content. It pays off in the end, even if you have to hire a writer to create these blogs.
The trends for SEO are always changing, and we like to keep up with them. If your company wants to assess where you are with your SEO, contact our team for a free site audit to assess your SEO and a 15-minute discovery call.