Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to generate organic traffic to websites seeking to create online sales. However SEO keeps changing, making it hard for websites and businesses to live up to their potential unless SEO is implemented correctly. There are 3.5 billion searches conducted daily, and very few searchers will click on page two of the results. So it becomes very important to ensure your website ranks on the first page of a search engine.
Core Web Vitals
Google announced its three new metrics in May 2020, known as Core Web Vitals. The main purposes of the unique metrics are to measure user experience, including visual stability, loading experience, and interactivity. These are three metrics that relate to how well the page is perceived to work.
How stable is your page while loading, and how fast does it get interactive? Google is using the Core Web as one of the main factors to rank sites in 2021. To ensure your website ranks high, you need to increase your page load speed. Reduce or eliminate elements that may detract your page from high performance.
Optimize for Voice Search
Using voice search is on the rise, with 27% of the population globally using their mobile phone for voice research, According to Google. With 25% of American adults owning smart speakers with the number expected to grow in the coming times. Voice search is one of the critical things that should be optimized for SEO.
When someone is doing a voice search, they are talking into an audio device. With voice search the speaker is using regular speech which can be longer than a search typed into an engine by hand. Most people use voice search to ask for directions, call someone, check places like a pizza restaurant or dictate texts, to mention a few.
You can optimize your site for voice search by adding keywords like ‘near me” and other voice-friendly terms. Optimize schema markup and adding FAQ.
Google BERT
Google Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was released in 2019 to understand searcher intent better. It uses machine learning (ML) and natural language (NL), which works with more than 70 languages.
Google Bert updates the search engine bots to be more conversational. It works by filtering sites that offer valuable and relevant information by understanding the searcher’s question as a human would. If your content is not searcher intended, it becomes unfriendly to Google Bert and that particular content keyword will not rank high in SEO.
Unique Content
Google has emphasized and continues to emphasize the importance of unique content. Generating original unique content for your website can help you rank higher in a google search. This makes it essential for SEO. Suppose your content is similar to another that already exists online. Google will rank the original content higher and lower yours.
To raise your rank in search engine listings, you need a higher number of clicks from users than competitors. When you create unique and authentic content with user intent in mind, your webpage will attract more users than copied content. The more unique, updated, and genuine content, the more authoritative your site is on the subject to google and the audience.
Keep SEO Trends in Mind
SEO is rapidly evolving; marketing pros and business owners need to adapt to the changes fast. You can do this by keeping track of what’s trending for SEO and what practices are outdated. Above are currently trending SEO practices that you need to implement without forgetting Artificial Intelligence (AI), Social media, Video Marketing, and website’s trustworthiness.
Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, a leading PR agency.