Every entrepreneur should already be familiar with the concept of SEO. Optimizing websites for search crawlers has become a crucial part of marketing for businesses both online and offline. It’s especially important if much of your business is done through online channels. Marketing trends are constantly evolving and it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to keep up with all the different SEO strategies being applied to modern business websites. To get a good idea of what you need to check out to prepare for next year, here are a couple of the most important trends coming up.
Quality over quantity
Ask any SEO expert and they’ll tell you that content is the single most important thing for your marketing strategy. When it comes to what that content should look like, opinions are divided. Some will advocate for spreading your content far and wide across many different websites and blogs. This strategy isn’t without its benefits. You’re able to reach a large number of websites and create a ton of useful links for your own.
On the other hand, this strategy also dilutes the quality of your content. Search engines are adapting to an increased amount of content and they’re curating it by quality. You need to show users that your content is top tier so that they’ll keep coming back to it. Search engines will recognize this and rank your page higher.
Website speed and UX
User experience is one of the most important metrics for SEO. It has a direct impact on the traffic of your website and how users perceive it. It’s also something that search engines account for when scouring websites.
Website speed is a big part of UX optimization and it’s something that every website should focus on improving. Google’s crawlers value website speed highly, which is why so many pages are optimizing for fast loading times this year.
Voice searches
While once a pretty niche part of SEO, voice searches have become an integral part of any SEO strategy. With the rise of smartphones, voice searches have stopped being considered a novelty. Now they’re considered just as important as any other form of search.
Optimizing for voice searches is a little bit harder than regular keywords. Searches aren’t treated the same way by search engines. They don’t lead to search pages, but rather the search engine prioritizes the top answer and displays it immediately.
Keywords tend to be shorter and more colloquial, to better match the way people talk, as it’s pretty different compared to the way they type into their phones.
Structured data
Data takes many forms on your website. When search engine crawlers scour your website for relevant information, they take every little bit of readable data into consideration.
To make it easier for search engine crawlers, your website features structured data in various different forms. Information that’s located alongside the metadata is a good example. It’s there to make crawling quicker and more efficient. Including more of it in your metadata and meta descriptions is a good way to get more attention from search crawlers.
Video content
Videos are becoming an increasingly popular form of content. Unlike written content and sponsored blog posts, users are much more likely to sit through an entire video and watch it all the way to the end. This gives digital marketers more opportunities to make use of clever strategies and product mentions.
Search engines are being adapted to work on finding videos through metadata and meta descriptions. They are quickly placing more value on high-traffic videos and properly optimized websites that can host them. You should strive to increase the number of videos you utilize in your marketing strategy and work on making your website more attractive for crawlers in this area.
Content length
While it’s true that content quality is more important than quantity, the individual length of a piece of marketing content is crucial as well. You can look at the length of a blog post and see it as a kind of quality. People want to be invested in the content that they’re consuming.
Longer pieces of quality content get far more views than their shorter counterparts. However, the difficulty comes from creating adequate content which will stimulate users long enough and keep them occupied and engaged. This is not easily accomplished by the average website owner. Instead, they often employ writing experts from digital marketing strategists like GWM to achieve better rankings. Creating ideal content that attracts search crawlers requires quite a bit of experience and knowledge.
Search engine snippets
Getting to the top of the search pages is a priority for websites. But what if you could get your page featured above the first result? This is Google’s “featured snippet” in a nutshell. It lets websites with exact answers get to the very top of search results.
Optimizing for featured snippets is going to be a crucial part of digital marketing strategies going forward. Have your content provide concise and direct answers to user’s queries and you’ll find that your pages will be getting a lot more traffic.
Influencers
The impact of influencer marketing is an often-underestimated part of digital marketing. Influencers have an enormous amount of power when it comes to brand creation. They’re able to exert their influence over countless fans of your brand and encourage their viewers to try out new products and services.
By reaching out to influencers and having them link to your website and its products, you can very quickly reach a much wider audience and signal that your brand is even more attractive to consumers.
Conclusion
If the past couple of years are any indicator of things to come, digital marketing is going to continue to flourish more than ever before. SEO strategies are constantly evolving to meet this expansive demand as businesses scramble to get their websites to the top of search results. Because of this, it’s important that you and your businesses remain on top of the latest and most effective tactics that will help your website stay relevant.
