Dominating your Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is a complicated skill. Google’s algorithm has nearly 200 different components that come into play, and if that doesn’t make it tricky enough, they are only consistent for a couple of months before Google chooses to shake things up again and completely change their algorithm to try and improve their search results. With this, trends are constantly changing, some falling by the wayside and being completely forgotten while others are gaining momentum. Here are some trends to keep an eye on…
Relevance. Getting Google to notice you is hard enough when you have great content, so it is nearly impossible to get Google to notice you when you have not so great content. Latent Semantic Indexing is one of the many tools Google uses to determine if your content is relevant or not by looking at the billions of pages and terms used and then determining if those pages/terms are related and comprehensive. So what can you do? When creating your content make sure that it is related to what you want your website to show up for without keyword stuffing. I know it sounds like a lot of upfront work but once it is done, your SEO rankings will have a much greater chance of being higher.
Backlinks. As one of the biggest trust signals for search engines, backlinks (even linkless ones) are getting more and more important. Google can very easily access your websites mentions and brand by tracking these links and using them for authorization towards your relevance – see the connections here 🙂 – So, what can you do about it? First, be sure to leave your website link whenever you visit another page, for instance leave a review and at the end, add your website URL. Also, guest blog on other businesses websites on a topic that is relevant to you both, and again add in your URL. You can always download a web monitoring app that will find any mentions of your brand or products so you know where you are linked to.
Website Speed. This has always played a huge part of SEO and that is not changing anytime soon. Not only does it help your ranking improve but it will also decrease your ranking if it is not up to Googles speed. What do you do? You enter your site on a Website Auditor and get the accurate speed of your website and if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds, follow any of the recommendations that the auditor gives you to increase the speed. This is extremely important.
Voice Search. It has been said that nearly 55% of teens and 40% of adults use voice search verses typing anything in the search bar. What does this mean? That your keywords need to be extremely relevant – here we go again. It’s important to note that common voice searchers use a more normal lingo instead of the odd keyword lingo. What can you do you about it? Make sure your keywords are precisely chosen to compliment both the voice and search bar searchers.
SEO is an ever changing task and therefore, it is recommended that you have a marketing firm (like us!) perform your SEO for you, to make sure it is being done correctly and that you are ranking as high as you possibly can! If you have any questions or want to have us take over your SEO, reach out and let us know!