While traditional marketing still has a role to play in business, the majority of firms today focus the lion’s share of their outreach efforts online. It’s cheaper, more productive, and provides them with more targeted reach. It blows things like TV and radio advertising out of the water.
The problem with digital marketing (and search engine optimization in particular) is that it is always in flux. One minute, you have a winning strategy – the next, you’re running out of gas.
Google is very much the search engine market leader. Where it leads, others typically follow. Keeping up to date with its changes and adapting the way you do SEO is a constant game of cat-and-mouse.
For some businesses, Google’s changes seem to hit like a bolt out of the blue. But when you understand the company’s motivations, it’s actually quite easy to predict what it’s going to do next. The search giant is continually looking for opportunities to make its services more relevant to users. And so it is taking its algorithm in that direction. The systems the company uses aren’t yet sophisticated enough to read and actually understand the content of pages. But Google makes clever use of proxies, meaning that it uses indirect methods to establish website quality.
In this post, we’re going to look at some of the SEO trends you need to know if you want your business to thrive over the coming twelve months.
Page Experience Will Become A Leading Factor
Google hasn’t yet rolled out its new page experience algorithm across the world, but it will do so in a few months. And when it does, it will lead to profound changes in the way that regular firms operate their businesses.
The company says that the new page experience algorithm will attempt to measure “user delight” when interacting with a web page. So it will track things like whether your site has annoying pop-ups and how fast page elements load. See here to find out more about this.
Ultimately, you want users to have a pleasant experience when interacting with your pages. Relevance is no longer the sole judge of where you appear in results.
Get To The Point
Google also wants users to be able to discover relevant information fast. In 2016, it introduced the first for several “semantic” algorithms, designed to understand, interpret, and provide answers to user-created questions. For instance, when somebody types in a query into the search bar, Google spits back a response.
Businesses, therefore, need to focus on providing fast answers to common user questions. Don’t spend ages waffling on about issues. Just give a couple of sentences that directly respond to user queries related to your enterprise.
The more valuable information you can provide, the more traffic you’ll attract. And the more you do that, the less money you’ll have to spend on PPC or any other paid form of advertising.
Trends in SEO are changing all the time. Keeping up with them puts you at a distinct advantage.
