In spite of being the largest and most visited website on the Internet, Google doesn’t seem to be fully complacent and has no plans of letting its competitors take the lead. Still heavily invested in being the most prominent search engine, Google is the perfect role model for every website trying to elevate their status and presence. Not being self-assured and keeping up with the fast-changing digital marketing landscape is, after all, the starting block for a successful search engine optimisation.
That being said, staying on top of your game when it comes to SEO is a tough gig. Google’s nonstop upgrading makes it so. Even the slightest decline in efforts could cost your website several spots on search engine ranking. One minute you are on top and the next you are nowhere to be found. That’s how tough the race you’ve signed up for is the moment you launched your first campaign. The best way to survive or better yet thrive in the SEO race is to keep your strategy conformed to the latest updates in Google algorithms. Here are some of the latest SEO trends that you should embrace this year onwards.
Shorter Page Loading Time
SEO is all about possessing as many or all of the ranking factors programmed in the newest algorithms as possible. The more ranking factors your campaigns hold, the bigger the chance they will rank. One particular ranking factor that has significantly shook dormant and smug websites and digital marketers is page loading time. It has always been a ranking factor for desktop pages and even tagged as one of the top SEO trends for 2019, but recently it has been coded for mobile webpages as well.
Having a mobile-friendly website isn’t enough anymore. You have to make sure that each of your website’s pages loads fast, too. And search engine ranking aside, short page loading time is key to visitor retention. No visitor would want to wait longer than five seconds for a certain page they tried visiting to load. Every second added to the waiting time pushes visitors further away from your reach until your website’s ranking plummets into oblivion.
Organic Branding
Brand is a complex aspect that can be defined in various contexts. This is why it is also very difficult to come up with a program that can successfully detect and analyse its presence. Today’s highly sophisticated search engine algorithms, however, are officially capable of recognising brand as a ranking signal. Once only sensitive to linked brand mentions, they can now detect even unlinked brand mentions and factor them in the overall ranking of a website.
Therefore, you don’t have to fully rely on linked backlinks to catch crawlers’ attention towards your brand. You can do this by investing in linkless backlinks, too. If anything, too many linked backlinks may do your ranking more harm than good as they are likely to be viewed as black hat these days. So the next time someone asks you to identify the SEO trends that will matter most in 2019, don’t forget to mention organic branding.
Microformat for Better Business Introduction
Visitors who are interested in your products and services will obviously want to get to know you more. They will look for more information about your business, and there’s no place better to find that than on your website. A reverse process takes place when Google crawlers rank your website. For them to be interested in your website, you have to make sure to provide as many information about it as possible. This is why microformatting is highly encouraged.
This is an approach to semantic markup that uses HTML/XHTML tags supported for other purposes to convey additional metadata. It allows Google crawlers to automatically process information such as contact information and geographic coordinates and present them to the end-users. Whether you are marketing your own website or another’s, make sure your campaigns have this feature in their metadata.
Long-Tailed Keywords Evolving to Support Voice Searches
Until a few years ago, most of the keywords used and optimised by websites are considerably short, and there’s a simple explanation to that. Most end-users don’t want to type in long phrases when they make a search. They use short ones that only contain key words, hence the term. By the middle of 2020, over 50 per cent of searches are estimated to be by voice. Compared to screen-based searches, voice searches usually consist of more than a few words, as this is what most people find apt in conversations. This new trend greatly affects keyword structure and optimisation. Long keywords will soon be the new norm in SEO so you better get your keyword mapping reconfigured soon.
To Google Search and Beyond
Despite Google’s insurmountable dominance, there was a time when its security had been shaken. That was when social media came into existence. The rate by which social media sites like Facebook and Twitter gained popularity would scare even the most established websites. And just as we though social media was the last to come mano a mano against the search engine giant in terms of reach, global e-commerce websites like Amazon joined the party. These major channels offer advertisers and resellers great marketing opportunities. If your business involves selling items and merchandise, it would be wise to go beyond search engines and try optimising your website in e-commerce sites. After all, that’s where the majority of your audience normally go to when they are looking for products like the ones you are selling.
Trends change very quickly thanks to Google algo’s high volatility. By the time you finish integrating these new ideas into your SEO strategy, new trends will have come out. Even so, the changes you made will remain relevant for quite a while so your investment will not be in vain. If you are a provider of digital marketing services but you always find yourself one step behind your competitors, it’s high time you do some upgrading on your services. Enlisting the service of a white label SEO provider such as White Label Club can be the game-changer decision you’ve been looking to make all these years.