The SEO landscape is rapidly changing, and several factors, such as new technologies and marketing strategies, drive its constant growth. Search engines keep updating and evolving their search algorithm to enhance user experience. Therefore, adopting the latest SEO trends increases a website’s ranking or visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
This article explores the future of SEO and what it promises, new SEO trends, and SEO best practices. Most importantly. We will examine how you can align your marketing strategy with the latest SEO techniques.
The Latest SEO Trends to Look Out For
These emerging SEO trends can help drive more traffic to your site and improve its ranking on search engines. Take a look:
1. Mobile SEO or Mobile-first Indexing
Today, smartphones are just as powerful, if not more powerful, than computers. Smartphones are fast, convenient, and easily accessible; reasons why many people worldwide use smartphones to browse or access the internet.
Google, the most popular search engine, took note of the shift, and in 2019 it adopted a new website ranking method called mobile-first indexing. This means all websites searched on Google will be ranked according to their mobile versions.
With this in mind, you’ll need to optimize your website to offer an exceptional user experience on mobile devices if you want it to rank well on Google. A responsive website design that adapts the website’s content depending on mobile screen size can help you achieve that. The website’s content should be easily viewable on a smaller mobile screen.
2. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)
In 2022, Google added EEATT, initially called EATS EO trend. Google ranks the website’s experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness against similar websites on the SERP.
Content will rank higher on the SERP if the author or content creator demonstrates real-life expertise and experience in the topic of discussion. Google will also evaluate the website’s authority and trustworthiness in the content. For instance, if you post an article about vehicle servicing on a food or recipe website, it will rank poorly as it needs more authority. You only need to discuss food and recipe-related articles on such a website to rank highly.
3. User Experience (UX) Optimization
UX optimization is a new SEO trend that improves a website’s usability. Google evaluates factors such as site speed, design, and ease of navigation to rank your website. Your website must load pages and content quickly to rank favorably in Google’s SERP. You can achieve this by choosing a web hosting company with the least downtime.
You can also upgrade your subscription to a package that offers more bandwidth to increase your website’s loading speed and responsiveness. More bandwidth allows your site to transfer more data from the server to the user. Additionally, you should use a user-centric approach when designing the website. The content should also be visually appealing, and navigating to other pages within the site should be seamless.
4. Voice Search Optimization
With the emergence of voice recognition technologies such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant, voice search is becoming a popular way to browse the internet. It is a fast and convenient way to search the web “hands-free” by manually eliminating the need to type a query on a keyboard manually. Voice search optimization allows users to multitask such that they can browse through the internet while performing other tasks.
The need to optimize your website for voice search queries is essential to help your content reach people that use this feature. It also helps your website stay relevant in this changing industry. You need to use longer keyword phrases and incorporate FAQ questions on your website to increase the chance of your site appearing on the voice search results.
5. Video Optimization
Video optimization is the future of SEO. Adding videos to your blog site or website helps improve user engagement and contributes to the overall user experience. Videos increase users’ time on your site, improving your search rankings. Use relevant keywords in the video titles, descriptions, and closed captions (subtitles) to reach a wider audience.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI provides many SEO website optimization applications. You can use AI to brainstorm future blog, article, and video ideas based on popular keyword searches in your field. You can fully leverage these AI tools to create original, high-quality content for your site and help you speed up your workflow process.
Nowadays, website hosting services provide AI tools that provide automated SEO services. These tools scan your site and identify areas that need SEO optimization. That said, avoid using pure auto-generated content on your site because it often lacks originality and people-centeredness that makes the content relatable.
7. Image Search Optimization
Always use relevant images in your content to improve your rankings for image searches. You can include keywords and other relevant information in the content of your image captions. Images make blog posts visually appealing and significantly improve user experience. They also help readers visualize the information. Thumbnail images on videos can help increase user engagement.
What are some of the Best SEO Practices?
- Creating user-centric content, not search engines or AI-generated content.
- Creating content in your relevant field or topic of expertise.
- Use established content creators who have experience in the topic to leverage their depth of knowledge.
- Focus on producing quality content rather than quantity.
- Justify the length of the content; keep the length of content reasonable. It shouldn’t be too short or too long.
- Avoid clickbait titles for blog articles and clickbait thumbnails for videos.
- Use authoritative references and links such as government websites and well-known organizations such as the UN, WHO, Forbes, etc.
- Research keywords, top-ranked content, and user engagement for more insight into the market trends
The Takeaway
The future of SEO is constantly evolving with emerging market trends, new technology, and ever-changing search engine algorithms. Therefore, monitoring these new trends and optimizing your site accordingly is imperative to remain relevant and successful.
