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Over the years, Google and other search engines have become smarter.
This is in a bid to provide better results to search engine users.
Likewise, the ways people use search engines have changed.
What does this tell you as a business website owner? Some of the SEO strategies that worked a few years ago are now impotent.
Which is why you need to exploit current trends to dominate search results.
Showing up for the most important keywords in your business is difficult. But the benefits mean it’s worth all the effort.
Nevertheless, using the wrong strategies will usually lead to poor results.
What are trends you can exploit to get better search results? I’ll explain 5 of them in this post.
1. Mobile optimization
Over the years, mobile devices have increased in popularity. Added to that, it’s now the most popular tool to access the internet.
According to a study, 60% of Google searches are done on mobile. If you’re looking to attract search engine users, then your mobile website needs to be good.
The popularity of mobile devices was one of the main reasons that led Google to introduce mobile-first indexing. With mobile-first indexing, the mobile version of your website will be indexed before your desktop version.
If you have a poor mobile website, it means you’re presenting a poor version of your website to Google. There’s no way those pages are going to rank amidst the high competition for your business keywords.
How do you prepare your website for mobile optimization? The first step is to test how friendly your website is on mobile devices.
To do this, go the Google mobile-friendly test and enter your website address. Click on “Run Test.” This tool will analyze your website and show whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.
Furthermore, you can click on “View Details” at the top of the page to see possible issues with your website’s mobile-friendliness. When you take action based on the suggestions, it helps to improve your website for mobile visitors.
For some websites, they have a separate version for their mobile site. Usually, this could cause issues with mobile-friendliness. Some elements on your desktop site could also be missing on your mobile site.
The best solution to this is to use a mobile-responsive theme. This means your website will adapt to the screen of any device it’s being viewed on.
2. Voice search
This is a trend that has been growing in popularity over the past few years. One of the main contributors to this popularity is the increase in accuracy of voice transcription.
Companies like Google and Microsoft have built voice transcription systems that are as accurate as human beings with 5.1% error rate. This has led to more applications in voice search.
As early as 2016, voice search accounted for 1 in 5 Google searches on Android. Voice search has grown even more popular with the introduction of smartspeakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod.
How popular are smartspeakers? Research by Edison research shows that 1 in 6 American adult owns a smartspeaker. This equates to about 39 million Americans.
With smart speakers, owners can perform many functions in their homes like using search engines, regulating temperature, playing music, and other tasks. All these tasks are carried out using voice.
Voice search will only increase in popularity. In fact, OC&C Strategy Consultants reveal that voice retail will reach $40 billion in the U.S. by 2022 compared to $1.8 billion in 2017.
How do you take advantage of voice search?
Some ways to optimize your website for voice search are:
Target featured snippets
As search engines become smarter, they aim to improve the search experience. One way to achieve this is to use featured snippets. This is sometimes called the number 0 result.
The featured snippet provides a summary of an answer to a search user’s query. This is taken from a portion of a web page. A user can then click-through to that web page for more details. For voice searches through smartspeakers, the words in the featured snippets are read out.
To optimize your content, you need to think of questions users can ask that are answered in your content. Your website will have a better chance of showing up when it has both the question and the answer to the question.
Write conversational content
Most voice searches are conversational in nature. This is because people usually talk to their devices like a human.
Target long-tail keywords
Since voice search is easier than a typed search, it also tends to be longer. To get the best results from voice search, you need to target long-tail keywords that people are searching for.
3. Long-form detailed content
In the past, you can just stuff a post with keywords and get it to rank. You can also write short posts and enjoy great search performance. Not any more.
Today, your content will have the best chance to rank high when it’s long and has enough details about the topic you’re considering. Google search quality guidelines advise that a piece of content should be able to provide the right information to searchers about their queries.
A high-quality piece of content should also exhibit a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT). These are:
- Expertise of the author of the content.
- Authoritativeness of the author of the content and the website it appears.
- Trustworthiness of the author and the website it appears on.
To exhibit these characteristics, the author of a content will need to invest time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill in the creation of the content.
In a study of 1 million search results, Backlinko found that a page at the number 1 position has an average of 1,890 words.
In another study by Moz and BuzzSumo, they found that longer content tends to have more social shares and backlinks. These are factors that contribute positively to a page rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
4. Local SEO
If you run a local business, you want to attract search engine users who live in your locality. Many searches have local intent that you want to rank for to attract more customers.
In fact, Google estimates that about 4 in 5 consumers conduct local searches on search engines. Added to that, they act fast. 50% of those who perform local searches on their smartphones and 34% of tablet/computer users visit a store within a day of performing a local search.
To improve your rankings on local searches, you need to take the following steps:
Add your business details to local listings
These platforms give details about different types of local businesses. When search engines provide results for local searches and local map packs, they look at a business’ appearance on local directories to establish its credibility.
BrightLocal found that businesses that appear in the top 3 positions of local searches have an average of 85 local citations. Some local listings to appear are general listings, those in your city, and listings for your profession.
An important local listing to appear is Google My Business. This possesses details like name, address, and phone number (NAP) of your business. There are other details like images of your business, opening hours, reviews about your business, etc.
With a Google My Business page, you have a better chance of ranking in Google local map packs that show local businesses.
While adding your business to local listings, you should ensure that there’s a consistent NAP across all listings. With a consistent NAP, search engines are able to confirm your business’s existence in the location specified.
Having different business information on different platforms can cause a confusion for search engines. This will lead to a lower search rank rather than a higher rank.
Ask for reviews
This is one of the signals that show high engagement on your local directory pages. It’s also a way to attract more customers as reviews influence people’s decisions. Perhaps it’s no surprise that BrightLocal found that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
With online reviews, you can get better local search rankings and convert more website visitors to customers. Having said these, online reviews are not automatic. Customers don’t always drop online reviews even if you’ve provided great service to them. You need to tell them to do so.
After offering a great service to your customer, you can ask them to leave a review and rating on your local listing page. Below is an example of reviews on Dr. Shoshany’s Google My Business page. You can see that he even left replies to the reviews to give more explanation about his service.
5. Website speed
With the improvement in technology, visitors expect your website to load fast. However, more media content and codes are now added to web pages that make them heavy. This can make web pages slow.
And that’s bad news. Because visitors will bounce off your website if it becomes slow. A study shows that as many as 25% of visitors would have bounced off your website by the time it loads for more than 4 seconds.
One of the considerations Google’s Rankbrain uses to rank pages is their dwell time. The dwell time is the amount of time users spend on your page. The more time they spend, the more Google feels you’re providing value to the user.
But you won’t find dwell time on your Google analytics dashboard. One way to have an idea of dwell time is your time on site and bounce rate stats. When Google, or other search engines, see users bouncing off your site and back to the search results page, it’s a negative signal.
This would lead to a lower ranking on search engines. But what’s your website speed? Before you make improvements, you need to know your current website speed.
You can use tools like Pingdom, GT Metrix, Google mobile speed test. To use Pingdom, go to the tool and enter your website address. After this, select your server location. This should be the closest location to your ideal customers and website visitors. This way, you’ll be able to know your website speed for your ideal visitors.
After that, click on “Start Test.” This will show you your website’s load time, page size, number of requests, and other details about your website.
You can also check details about the analysis of your website. This will show you areas of your website you can improve to increase your website speed.
After getting to know your site speed, you can also take these steps to increase your site speed:
Compress your images and videos
Media content is one of the big contributors to a large and slow page. By reducing your images and videos size, you also reduce your page size and increase its speed. You can use compression tools for this.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
This network will host your media content for a faster website performance.
Use a fast Host
A slow host will also make your website slow. Hosting your website on a premium and fast host would increase its speed too.
Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)
The Google AMP helps to load mobile pages faster on Google search results page. An AMP page loads in less than 0.5 seconds on average. This reduces bounce rate.
Conclusion
To gain an advantage on your competitors and rank higher for important search terms, you need to exploit the right trends.
These trends would have a big impact on how high your website will rank. Are you prepared? Which trend do you want to exploit for your business? Tell us in the comments!
Samuel writes long-form guides to help businesses and entrepreneurs achieve better results from their marketing activities. He also writes for marketing and SaaS companies that want more leads and customers. Get in touch with him to discuss your content needs.
Thanks for sharing such an interesting piece of content with us. I have learned some of the new SEO techniques. I personally love the point where you have discussed optimizing voice and image optimization. Loved reading your blog post… 🙂
Glad you loved reading the post and gained some points from it
Quite an informative article you have shared here. Looking at the statistics, Voice-based sale will be the future!!
Freddy, that’s true. Voice search will become bigger as more people use smartspeakers and carry out more tasks using voice. Thanks for the comment!
Thank you for this information, I appreciate your effort, please keep us update.