You won’t get very far with the search engine results pages (SERPs) without proper search engine optimization (SEO). This is one of the most effective ways to make sure your customers find your business and buy products and services from you. While this is easy to do, you must remember that it does continually evolve. For this reason, you’ll need a good working knowledge base and an eye on the new things that are happening. With this in mind, here are some of the things experts believe will happen this year.
Voice Search
Voice search will change the way we create and search for content. Instead of creating content for specific keywords it’ll have a more conversational tone that directly answers your customers’ questions. This is something that search engines will take note of.
Link-Worthy, Useful Content
Engagement will play a bigger role in your overall success in SEO. As such, your content needs to be link-worthy, user-driven content that answers relevant questions. It also needs to provide useful information. This content will help you achieve measurable results within organic search results.
Secure Links (SSL)
Google introduced secured website certificates (SSL) a few years ago. These impact your website’s rankings. In fact, their Chrome browser recently started flagging sites that don’t start with HTTPS as a potentially “dangerous” site. Fortunately, this is an easy, inexpensive fix that will give your SEO rankings a boost.
Video SEO
In 2017 Cisco conducted a study in which they predicted that by 2021 video would account for more than 82% of all online traffic from consumers. If this holds true, video content will far surpass all the other types of content. This is something you can see by the fact that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. Herein lies a huge opportunity to get your brand in front of your prospects simply by optimizing your video content.
SEO-Rich, Long-Form Content
In 2018 online business owners started writing more long-form content – containing 1,500 or more words. This content does better in the SERPs because it draws more organic traffic. According to some studies, visitors will also stay on these pages longer. These pages also receive more back links and social shares. As such, you’ll want to hire high-quality writers to focus on evergreen topics for your website.
The Power of Social Media
Although most people already realize that social media is a powerful tool, many people still don’t realize just how powerful it truly is. Search engines, like Google, are placing an increasing amount of importance on content engagements across these platforms – including likes, retweets, shares, and social clicks. This is why it’s important that you have an online marketing strategy that incorporates the use of posting engaging content on social media.
Site Speed
Google has now officially announced that your site’s speed has a direct impact on its SEO. Users want fast results. This also helps your website have higher conversions. While this is something that many people have thought about for a while now, it’s finally here.
Mobile Renaissance
Changing from a desktop-based to a mobile-based Google index is imminent. Websites need to get ready by incorporating responsive design and making sure that their content is well aligned both on mobile and on desktop sites. Google has made an official announcement in this regard. According to them, page speed is used in ranking websites in mobile results. For this reason, AMP technology is more appealing.
Progressive Web Apps have a lot of support from iPhones today. This also impacts mobile design trends.
Keeping up with all these changes is a challenge – one that most companies simply don’t have time for. This is why it’s advisable to hire an experienced SEO firm like Affordable SEO Company. With over 20 years of experience, you can trust them to help your website improve in the SERPs.