Latest SEO trends: increase your traffic and rankings

For most businesses, sales and profits are among the top KPIs for business growth and success. Few organizations know that besides flawless customer service and experience, their website, SEO, and rankings have to be above and beyond.

Search engine optimization or SEO is an effective way to attract customers to any of your online platforms if done correctly. However, the terms, conditions, and regulations are constantly changing in the online sphere, particularly in SEO, and many companies encounter challenges in staying up to date with the latest changes. Statistics show that around 80% of users focus exclusively on organic results and ignore paid listings. Furthermore, Google accounts for an estimated 3.5 billion searches daily. While this is a vast number, only 0.78% of the people who search for something click on results from the second page. This means that the number 1 result in Google’s organic search results gets an average CTR of 31.7%.

In this detailed blog post, we will talk about some of the trends that mark this year and some of the tactics that you can use to increase your online traffic and rankings.

Core Web Vitals/ Google’s BERT

In May 2020, Google announced three fresh new metrics to measure user experience: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics are related to one thing: page speed. It includes parameters such as how fast a page loads, how soon it gets interactive, and how stable it is while loading. With Core Web Vitals, SEO practitioners will have to pay more attention to page performance. These metrics will help search engines decide how to order different pages when everything else is equal. For example, if there are two relevant pages with content, then the metrics mentioned above will decide which two should be ranked higher.

Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) uses Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to have a clear overview and understanding of searches. At the moment, it’s capable of “understanding” more than 70 languages, and, as a result, it allows Google’s bots to interpret a user’s intent of the search much better. What this means for websites is that the ones who have content-intent mismatches will be negatively impacted. No matter how detailed that content is, BERT will ignore that website if it does not satisfy user intent.

You can rank higher to focus on your content being BERT friendly and deliver the information that your users are looking for. Before doing any optimization, the essential part is researching your keywords in the search query and getting insights into the search’s intent to create appropriate, BERT-friendly content.

Voice Search

Intelligent assistants make our lives easier by helping us perform various tasks without much effort. How do they do that? By using voice. According to Google, 27% of the world’s population is already using voice search, either on smartphones or smart home devices.

In this case, SEO professionals will need to acknowledge that the voice search differs from text search because voice searches tend to be more specific, using long-tail keywords that closely match real conversations. Such users are at the consideration stage of the funnel and are more likely to convert than the rest. When people search or ask specific questions, they also expect to complete their sales funnel journey. Because more intelligent devices incorporate voice search technology, voice search is expected to impact SEO heavily in the years to come. 

EAT, Original, and Long-Form Content

Google has always emphasized the relevance and originality of the content in websites, which remains a top criterion in search rankings. It’s known to many individuals working in the industry that the number of clicks a webpage gets is directly linked to the content, which is why content managers need to focus on creating content that is original, authentic, and as close to the search intent as possible. Here content managers can write down exciting case studies, customer stories, company milestones, and much more. By doing so, Google will establish your content as authentic and trustworthy, which will turn into higher webpage rankings. However, great content is just a piece of the whole puzzle since quality only does not work. 

According to the EAT principle, brands are the future of SEO, so they need to encompass Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. At this point, the more popular your brand is, the higher you are going to rank on Google. What is vital to do here is to establish your brand’s reputation and build brand awareness to increase your brand search queries. Brand queries are a hidden ranking factor that will help you rank higher and establish yourself as a trusted brand on Google. By ranking higher, your SEO must be on point.

In addition to adhering to the EAT principle and having original content published on your website, you must not forget that length is also essential. According to a 2019 report, long pieces of content, namely 3000 or plus words, tend to get three times more traffic and four times more shares. Additionally, they get 3.5 times more backlinks than articles of an average length of 1200 words. We cannot stress it enough, but the length and quality of content are key to increasing your web page ranking, driving more traffic, and establishing yourself as a trusted source of information. Let’s break down into some specific aspects that you need to consider:

1. Break up your content into sections with H2 and H3 subheadings to make it easier to read, especially because your readers will browse from their mobile devices most of the time.
2. Ensure that you link to relevant and authoritative sources with a high authority score.
3. Make it easier for readers to share your content, either with a simple procedure or a quick click.

Influencer SEO

We are all familiar with the term influencer. It's that person that lives a glamorous lifestyle, with millions of followers who can promote a specific service or product to increase brand awareness or sales. Such influencers earn audiences' trust over the years, and if they support your brand, your ROI can be huge. Statistics show that 89% of marketers believe that the ROI derived from influencer marketing is comparable or even better, in some cases than other marketing efforts. Before deciding whether or not to use influencer marketing, you need to be picky and choose any influencers who supplement your SEO strategy. Below are some ways influencers impact your SEO.

Link Building

Backlinks are an essential ranking factor if done correctly. High-quality backlinks are one way where influencers can show their potential.

Brand Visibility and Engagement

When appealing to a particular audience, an influencer has the advantage of knowing what their audience likes and dislikes. This can help you craft content based on actual knowledge and have higher chances of appealing to specific audiences that influencers have access to. Additionally, influencers can get people to share your content, provoking the search engines to rank the mentioned web page higher in the SERPs. 

Social Media Traffic

Saving the best for last comes the traffic derived from social media. The number of new social media platforms with new features make people overshare on social media and constantly consume new types of content. When that is the case, why not share your idea, product, or service?

Conclusion

SEO is getting more complex by the day, so simply optimizing keywords and meta titles is not enough. As the list above shows, there are SEO trends that companies must follow to increase their ranking and traffic. Numerous other trends influence SEO optimization: AI, video marketing, image optimization, predictive search, and many others. While it’s becoming challenging to stay updated with the latest developments, tactics, and regulations from major industry players, companies must first understand some basic concepts surrounding their keywords, content, audience, and data before moving forward with any optimization process.

NNC Services provides SEO optimization tactics for companies and dedicated and related services to improve ranking and traffic. For more information, don’t hesitate to contact us!