Google’s constantly changing its search algorithms, which can significantly affect your search engine result page ranking. So, in this article, I’ll provide you with twelve SEO trends to help you dominate the search engine results pages as well as how to apply them to your site.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Core Web Vitals
The first tip is knowing what Core Web Vitals are. They are a set of factors that Google considers to be important in a webpage to create a great overall user experience. Some of the factors include:
- Largest Contentful Paint – It measures how long it takes for a page to load from a user’s perspective. You can check your site’s LCP score through Google PageSpeed Insights.
- First Input Delay – It measures how quickly users can interact with your page. This means doing things like clicking on a link, choosing an option from a menu, and so on. You can improve this by utilizing an AI heatmap.
- Cumulative Layout Shift – It measures how stable your page is as it loads. If the elements in your page move around as the page loads, then you need to optimize it, which you can do through the Google Search Console.
Using a drag-and-drop website builder should help you build a website with optimized content composition with ease.
Fulfill the Search Intent
It’s vital to fulfill users’ search intent and behavior because they’re changing all the time. This means that you should focus more on trying to understand what people are searching for. Don’t just analyze the keywords they used to find your content and the on-site search for all the pages they visit.
What you can do is try catering to your users’ needs instead of focusing on your products, company, and why your product is excellent. This means you should have:
- A fast-loading website that stabilizes and renders fast.
- Have easy navigation, so people won’t have to make a lot of effort to find the content they’re looking for.
- Make it easy for users to access your content, meaning no pop-up ads or needing to subscribe to your site first before reading content, unless you’re providing a special deal for an e-book, or running a similar promotion for growing your mailing list.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are summaries of answers to a search query. Search engines like Google display those snippets on the top of the search engine result pages, between the paid and organic results.
Although only 6.32% of websites utilize featured snippets, optimizing your content and web pages for featured snippets is important because it contributes to plenty of clicks above the number one spot.
So how can you try to score a featured snippet? Here are the simple steps:
- Do keyword research to find featured snippet opportunities. Keep in mind that different keywords might require different article structures to qualify for a featured snippet.
- Create Snippet Bait on your page – it’s a 40-60 word block that focuses on placing keywords in them to rank in SERPs.
- Create other content formats like paragraph snippets and table snippets to increase the chances of appearing as a featured snippet.
Mobile SEO
Ensuring that your website and its content perform well on mobile devices should be a priority because that’s where most of the queries are done, contributing to almost 60% of total searches.
When it comes to optimizing your site for mobile devices, it’s best to first think about the users. This means providing a simple and aesthetically pleasing design with easy navigation, all adding to creating an excellent user experience. That means it needs to adapt to the different kinds of screens easily, adjust its buttons, so they’re easily tappable, and similar changes.
With Google adopting a mobile-first approach when ranking websites, it’s crucial that besides the things mentioned above, your site should also display the content and images correctly on the mobile sites.
Long-Form Content
While high-quality content is still the main point to ranking high on search engine result pages, you should also consider its length alongside quality. While there are still arguments regarding the ideal length of a blog post, a recent study showed that the top ten articles’ average length is at least 2,000 words.
Take note that even though you’re creating long-form content, you should still comprehensively answer the users’ questions and the primary search intent’s problems.
A great benefit of creating long-form content is that it takes time. This tells Google that users are enjoying the content and taking their time going through it. In time, long-form content can help you establish authority and increase search engine rankings.
Voice Search
20% of mobile searches in 2019 are from voice searches, and it’s increasing every year. It’s more convenient to talk to your device instead of typing keywords into a search box. A study predicts that by 2022, 55% of households in the US will have smart speakers.
How does this translate to SEO? It means that we have to do the following to keep up:
- Optimize your content to match the SERPs featured snippets.
- Keep the reply to the voice search simple and easy to understand.
- Use natural language when coming up with keywords – basically, words that don’t sound odd when spoken aloud.
Visual Search
Nowadays, people can quickly scan things around their surroundings using apps like Google Lens. The app will identify almost anything you can because it already has over one billion objects in its database, and it’s still growing.
Visual search is helpful for various things, including but not limited to:
- Directions
- Translations
- Recipes
- Local business reviews
- Identifying landmarks
- Shopping
These could be the reasons that 62% of young customers want to use more visual search technology.
To optimize your site for visual search, we first need to know where Google Lens takes the images from. Here are some of the most common sources:
- Mobile-friendly pages.
- Content-rich pages.
- Optimized images.
Now you know which areas you need to optimize to appear on visual searches.
Video
Video media should be included in your digital marketing efforts and content writing because a site containing a video is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of the SERPs than a site with just plain texts.
Adding to that, around 62% of Google’s searches include a video in them. The reason could be that users find that watching a video is more straightforward to comprehend than reading a full-page article about a specific topic.
While, yes, writing is still essential, you should also create helpful videos to support your existing content. You can embed those videos into your site to get more traffic and include a short description of the video to help your content rank higher on SERPs.
Automation
Business Automation is becoming commonplace. Over the past few years, there are more and more SEO tools that you can use to automate your day-to-day activities of optimizing your site and content to remain relevant.
This means that you can focus more on creating more high-quality content without having to worry too much about SEO. All you need to do is pick an SEO automation tool and set up the parameters required to keep your site and content optimized.
Using Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are more specific compared to just keywords. It consists of more words and gets into a more specific topic.
Some fewer people and businesses focus on using long-tail keywords. But the fact is that 70% of online searchers use long-tail keywords, so if you include long-tail keywords in your blogging strategy, you’re already facing less competition and getting more traffic.
An excellent strategy to use is creating long-tail keywords that are compatible with voice search results. When you call out your phone’s digital assistant like “OK Google” or “Hey Siri,” you’re most likely to say questions or conversational phrases instead of just a keyword.
Interactive Content
Interactive content is any type of content that prompts users to take action through quizzes, games, assessments, calculators, and content. It’s becoming an SEO trend because 88% of marketers claim that it is an effective way to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Additionally, about 91% of business-to-business buyers prefer interactive content over static. 2021 is the year where marketers are constantly trying to innovate. This is a method that can make your content futuristic, eye-catching yet still benefiting the user.
Interactive content doesn’t need to be complicated. You can create simple quizzes like what PBS did and calculators like what the New York Times did. If you want to apply for online Seo Courses then these SEO business courses.
Influencer Collaborations and Backlinks
With online advertisements becoming very popular and easy to do, users might be overwhelmed by them. Hence, they will try to look for information they can trust. Usually, users will trust reviews made by influencers.
Working with an influencer – if done correctly – will significantly help you increase traffic and your online presence. That’s why over 17% of businesses spend over half of their marketing budget on influencers.
To get the most value out of working with influencers, try collaborating with ones who are already engaged with your target audience. That way, you will get traffic from their social media promotions and backlinks from their sites.
Conclusion
Now you know the twelve SEO trends. All that’s left to do is apply the tips and start using the SEO trends to gain a competitive advantage.
Good luck!
