Keeping abreast of SEO trends can help maintain your brand’s online visibility, from optimization to changes in Google algorithms. However, after ensuring that your business has utilized basic SEO like Google listing, use of keywords and anchor links, you shouldn’t rest as yet. To maintain a competitive brand using SEO this year, you need to embrace key emerging trends including optimizing your content for user search, plan markup and make your site easy to browse on mobile. Here are four important things you need to do to succeed in SEO this year:
Make it Easy for Users to Search Content on Mobile Devices
More and more people are searching the internet using mobile devices as opposed to desktop computers. In 2015, rate of mobile commerce growth was three times more compared to e-commerce. Though mobile searches do not result to online purchases immediately, they do play a key role in informing purchase decisions. According to Deloitte, the impact of searches done on mobile devices on offline purchases is about $970 billion. In a world that increasingly shifting to mobile searches, speed is of essence.
About 50% of online visitors abandon sites that take three or more seconds to load. Having noted this, Google is now forcing site owners to enhance their site loading speed. Using Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP), a leaner mobile web version, you can do away with additional web page information and enhance your loading speed. Due to the importance attached to speed by online visitors, Google is now ranking sites that adopt AMP highly on searches once it detects mobile searches whole those that don’t are pushed down the search results irrespective of their relevance.
Have your data markup structured
As a search engine, Google ranks sites that are crawler friendly highly compared to those that are not. Being crawler friendly is particularly critical in featuring on Google search facilities such as Quick Answers that are highly dependent on machine learning. Actually, machine learning has become the third most critical ranking factor for Google. In 2016, this search engine’s search results reached over 40% as a result of utilizing Quick Answers, more growth is expected in 2017. By structuring your data markup, you make it easy for Google crawlers to find information from your site with ease.
With data markup, the items on your website and their properties will be described easily. For instance, for a blog that focuses on food plus recipes, structured data should describe recipes and their properties such as photos, ingredient summaries and their ranking by users. During site indexing, Google can only go this far. Unstructured data causes Google to find any relevant text from your site and display it using a small, boring blurb on search results. When you structure your site’s data markup, your visitors get to know whether you website can provide them with the details or information they are looking for and will click it accordingly.
Maximize the Intent of Searchers
Boosting your New Haven SEO expertise to maximize on user intent is important and is not really new. Actually, many brands are yet to integrate search intent in their SEO approach. Search intent is intended to provide internet searchers with immediate clarifications or answers bring them to a destination that is already predetermined and help them to complete a task or purchase. This means that as you generate content for a site, you need to visualize how every user will get to a specified page. For instance, see how your visitors arrive to a page when their search is either transactional or informational? With the two end goals varying, you need to know and understand why the visitor is landing on your site in order to provide the details they need by leading them to a preferred outcome. Not doing this exposes you to the risk of having your visitors bounce off to your site.
Develop Epic Content
Previous content marketing approaches emphasized on breaking content to small bite-sized pieces. However, this has changed over the recent years because online consumers are increasingly avoiding fluffy content written in different words. Current internet users want to read epic content where topics are covered comprehensively in long pieces. As both kinds of content flood internet spaces, people are ignoring the length of content and are opting to focus more on getting more information within the spaces available. This means that readers are more attracted to dense content as long as it provides valuable information to them. Based on this emerging need, New Haven SEO expert focus on developing epic content that attracts inbound links in 2017 to stay on top of search engines.
With SEO, no single approach can make a site rank highly on search engines. However, investing time to include these four strategies can help maintain your brand’s competitiveness in 2017.
