SEO Is Always Evolving. Are you?

How has the vast search landscape changed in the last decade? Quite a bit. 

There are very few marketing channels that have evolved as rapidly and quickly as search engine optimization or SEO. You may remember the early years, when SEO was all about stuffing keywords and fine-tuning website code, all in the interest of ranking. Thanks to Google, that’s no longer the case. There are several new secrets to making sure your site is visited frequently.

For one, Google’s AI algorithm, named RankBrain, takes a bigger role in the ranking of search engine results pages or SERPs. What’s the secret to optimizing your pages? User experience, click-through rate, and time spent on a page will have an impact. Interesting, valued, and engaging content is also a factor in conversion.

With the advent of a number of online assistants, like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, Voice Search is becoming a larger influence. To ensure things work in your favor, pay attention to your keywords. Longer, natural sounding phrasing also goes a long way, phrases that are more frequently used in daily conversation. 

There is also another change on the SEO horizon. Four years from now, over 70 percent of those who access the internet will reach out on their mobile devices. You might want to check the effectiveness of your mobile site. Google has a free mobile-friendly test you can utilize. Make sure your URLs are crawler friendly. Also, any content that includes interacting, like clicking or swiping cannot be loaded by Googlebot.

You really want to rank higher? It’s all about quality content. That means familiarizing yourself with what Google affectionately calls the EAT principle. it includes three specific factors, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT). Especially relevant with those businesses that fall in the “your money, your life” category. Health care and finance top the list.

And finally, although long-form content will improve your SERPs, Featured Snippets are gaining prominence in Google rankings. They were introduced four years ago and like their name implies, they are brief. What is a Snippet? Say you’re doing a search, so you type a few words into Google. If you see a box appearing above your SERPs, that’s a Snippet. Score one of these and you have a place on the first page of results. It’s also an opportunity to redirect significant traffic from your competitors. A big win!

Another version of this article appeared in Maycreate’s Newsletter a year-and-a-half ago. Because this is a topic that can have such an impact on your business, we felt it was essential that we update the article and run it again. There have been a number of recent changes in SEO, and we wanted our clients and potential clients to know about them.

Keeping abreast of the changes and developments in the world of technology ensures we can build effective websites that engender positive results for our clients and their businesses. If you’d like to know more about our approach, contact John Wagoner, our brand strategist & account supervisor. You can reach John at: jwagoner@maycreate.com or call him at (423) 255-9961.