6 Important SEO Trends This Year
Search engine optimisation is very broad, and forever evolving. When we look at the major search engines, we see announcements of new algorithms, which seems to occur almost every month, nowadays. As a result, SEO people are forced to adapt, to evolve, to stay on top of things, to remain competitive in this landscape. As an expert in SEO, you can never stop learning, as new trends set in, year in, year out. You’re objective is to rank the highest in the search engines, so you want the best strategies to do it.
Staying current can be rather difficult, especially when it comes to Google trends. That is where this article comes into the equation as it contains a list of the latest trends for this year, and hopefully for several years to follow.
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Zero Click Queries
Zero-click queries or searches has been something that has been around for as long as the search engines. But it’s only been recent, in the past 24 months, that the major search engines, like Google, started to take notice.
Basically, the search engines want to be able to provide the end user with an answer to their query, without the user having to click away. This works, by the search engine scanning the various websites within their search engine, then presenting the information the end user is looking for, within the search query itself. This way, users are able to find answers to their queries without having to make a click (zero clicks).
In order for the site owner to better take advantage of these features, search engines like Google, have developed various technologies, like snippets, which you can easily integrate into your site. This is one of the biggest, and likely most significant trends this year, which is probably why you should consider integrating snippets into your site, as this is bound to help you rank better in the search engines.
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Long-Form Content
Another trend that is growing quite considerably now, as it helps your site outrank its competitors, is the creation of longer-form content. This reason why this is a good choice, is because it appeals to the E-A-T guidelines for Google’s search engine.
Over the past year, blogs that contain posts with around 2,000 words have been given a significant boost, especially over its 1,000 counterpart. So we can expect this trend, desire for long-form content to continue for the next year to follow. And as more webmasters invest more time in creating larger content, we will likely witness this trend grow, maybe to 2,500+ words, depending on the blog and its topic.
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BERT Algorithm
If getting to the top of the major search engines, such as Google, is in your to-do list for this year, then this is probably a trend you should put a great deal of attention into. Google has always prioritised quality, relevant and useful content for the user. However, in order to provide this content, Google must constantly add updates, refinements and additions to their algorithm, so that it can better understand or interpret the intent of the web searcher.
Not so long ago, Google introduced BERT (which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Algorithm. The main purpose of this algorithm is to help the Google search engine better interpret the intentions of the users search query, which in turn, will enable the engine list more relevant search results, ones that hopefully solve whatever problem the user has.
As a result, as someone who specialises in Search engine optimization, its best that you’re content focuses on answering the various queries an end user might make. You may not be able to get your site to rank at the top of the search engines for more generic, broad search terms, but you may find things much easier, when targeting specific search terms or intents.
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Website Protection
As technology continues to evolve, the various options for website protection must also expand. When rating all the various elements of a website, Google considers protection to be one of the most important. Google has decided to put a greater emphasis on website safety, by expanding their algorithm to give more importance to it. Google understands that end users will stop visiting a website if it has insecurity issues. So they’ve positioned their search engine to note such behaviour and demote such sites in their SERPS.
When it comes to web security, one of the simpler things that you can do is use a SSL certificate. Most web hosting companies come with SSL as standard, so this shouldn’t be too difficult.
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SEO Scalability
If you want to be one step ahead of your competition, then you need to consider scalability, nowadays.
So how do you do this?
Well, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a list of all the processes, tasks and workflows that you carry out regularly.
Then you’ll need to determine which of these things can be automated or handled with the use of a specific tool.
Next, you should setup a monitoring system, one that will allow you to keep track of any changes in your search engines rankings, especially for your most important keywords. You also want to note fluctuating rankings, URL changes, content alterations, double listings, and more.
For any tasks you carry out regularly, that cannot be automated, you should setup standard operating procedures (SoPs) so that there’s a consistency to how these things are done. You don’t want your work force tackling the same activates in different way.
- User-Experience
If you look at the major search engines, from their point of view, one thing you will notice is that their primary objective is to have the users utilise the resources that they provide. Google for example, want you to make your site more accessible, which they do, by providing you with the tools to do so.
Google would classify a website or web page as irrelevant, if a user visited your website, but left almost as quickly as they arrived. The end result, is that site, potentially losing its rankings. For this reason, its best you focused on providing a user-friendly experience, by prioritising the following:
- Ensuring your website has the best navigation system.
- You want to implement socials into the site.
- Make sure the website loads as fast as possible.
- The website should have an appealing theme, one that draws people to it, rather than away from it.
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.
