SEO is one of the most effective marketing strategies to help a business grow. But getting into it and being on top of any search engine is a challenge for business owners and websites. With about 1 billion existing websites, trying to get on top is a tough competition. It requires knowledge, patience, and new ideas.
However, SEO doesn’t stay the same all the time, it evolves as human begins to advance in technology and become more innovative. That’s why we bring you ways you can implement new SEO practices for the coming year.
Apply these to grow your website’s traffic and gain customers.
Table of Contents
ZERO-CLICK AND FEATURED SNIPPETS
Now, searching online comes easier for users. By simply typing the keywords on the search engine, Google will immediately suggest the top answer to the user’s question. This now makes users spend fewer times clicking on other websites. But for SEO professionals and content creators, this posts a bigger problem.
Zero-click is when Google displays the users’ answers on top of the Google search. Together with the quick answer provided, Google also includes a featured snippet. The snippet shows a short description taken from SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
Being on Google’s front page doesn’t matter anymore. The main goal for SEO specialists and marketers is to be on top. This sounds intimidating, but there are ways to achieve the zero-click SERP goals.
INVEST ON INFLUENCERS
How can influencers be related to SEO ranking? In this digitalized era, influencers have become a key component in digital marketing and organic searches. Hence, companies invest in this form of marketing because this is where consumers’ habit have fallen into.
49% of buyers seek recommendations from influencers for their authentic reviews. This gives businesses ideas on how to increase their SEO or organic search.
When using a well-known influencer for your niche, it will allow you to generate more traffic and backlinks. Backlinking is important for websites because Google often uses this to rank a page.
VOICE SEARCH
As technology advances, people tend to go along with it. Now, humans shifted from typing the keyword to using voice search instead. This makes it faster and convenient.
It has been predicted that voice search will increase to 50% in 2020. Hence, SEO experts should deal with changing their SEO strategies for voice searches.
Voice search keyword differs from users that type their keyword. For users who type their keywords, usually, the search doesn’t make sense, only using a certain word pertaining to what they are looking for. Unlike, voice search, users of this form will search using statements that make sense or in a complete sentence. Therefore, keywords for voice searches must be patterned to how people say things instead of typing it on search bars.
MOBILE-FRIENDLY WEBSITES
More and more people opt for smartphones than computers or tablets. It’s easier to bring anywhere you go, and it’s far more convenient for users. Therefore, aiming to have a mobile-friendly website is a must to allow users to view your website online with their phone.
In 2020, smartphone users will increase to about 2.87 billion, and this only suggests that more and more SEO experts will have to target a mobile-friendly web page.
If you want to know if your website is mobile-friendly, you can do a quick mobile-friendly test by Google.
When aiming to have mobile-friendly content take the following into consideration:
- Content only contain 2 to 3 sentences per paragraph.
- The usage of bullets will make it easier for readers to be interested in your content.
- Use headers to introduce new topics.
Investing in a mobile-friendly content for your website is also one way your SEO ranking increases.
USING VIDEO MATTERS
Watching video is a trend that will still be going on for the coming year. But how can a video add to your SEO ranking? As people more likely shift to watching videos online, adding a video to your content helps boost your website’s ranking on Google.
How can this practice help your Google ranking?
Google often cares about quality content and its relevance to people’s keyword search. If your site contains different forms of media that are of good quality and content, Google is more likely to rank your page higher.
It doesn’t matter if people click on your page, what matters is that how long they stay on your page. Adding video to your content, allows people to stay longer on your site. This, in return, helps improve your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who view your website.
When your bounce rate improves, it informs search engines that your website is informative and has good quality, pushing you on top of the search.
It was mentioned earlier that backlinking is important to increase your authority. When your domain authority increases, the higher your search engine ranking would. With the use of videos, you are more likely to receive quality or organic traffic on your website or social media.
CONTENT IS STILL THE KEY FOR HIGH GOOGLE RANKING
As always, Content is king. This being said, if you want your website to rank higher, it important to deliver content that is helpful and easy to grasp. People nowadays tend to search for educational content. Hence, writing an informative and well-research blog post is a big help for your website to rank on top of Google search.
E.A.T MATTERS
You have produced quality content, and you have followed ways on how to increase your ranking on every search engine. But Google doesn’t only focus on the quality of your content. It also relies on the accuracy of it.
E.A.T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. This points to how accurate your content on your website is. Google implemented this since they wanted to provide safe search and information for its users, particularly in the field of finance and medicine.
THE LENGTH MATTER
It has been discussed earlier the importance of quality content. Now it’s time to know how long or how many words a website’s content should be.
Readers often search and click on one article, hoping to get all the information they need in there. If your article is less than 1000 words, users are more likely to exit from your page. This will result in a high bounce rate. The higher the bounce rate, the more negative its impact is on your ranking.
FASTER LOADING PAGE
You may not take this into consideration, but the loading speed of your website’s page matters. There are many factors that can affect the page speed of a site, but there are also ways to avoid a slow loading page.
A slow page speed not only affects your search engine ranking. E-commerce sites that have a slower rate to load lead to fewer sales too.
Check your page speed now, and make sure that the loading time must be less than three seconds. If your page takes longer than that, there are ways to fix this problem.
CONCLUSION
Relying on SEO is one of the ways marketing experts and businesses do to gain traffic and customers. But SEO constantly changes like other social media algorithms. Therefore, it is best to check from time to time the changes that occur to help grow your business and the services that you provide to your clients.
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