One thing that every SEO professional should know is that they can never rest on their laurels. Updates to Google’s algorithms and the importance of specific SEO factors change rapidly. This means what worked just 6 months ago, might not work today.
As a result of these shifting priorities for Google, and with each passing year, there are new SEO trends that web site owners and those who work within the SEO industry need to be aware of. Here are 3 which are currently, ‘hot topics’.
Structuring Website Data
You should already know that quality content has been one of the main on-page ranking factors spoken about for many years. it is still as important today as it was last year and the year before.
However, the content on your web pages is not the only thing that Google’s spiders read when they crawl your website. They also read the data that exists underneath the visible page. Plus, it is not just Google who reads your website’s data.
For example, social media sites like Facebook, and affiliate networks such as Amazon, also make use of website data for functions that they perform in relation to it.
When each one of them calls at your website, the easier it is for them to navigate the data within it the better. As for Google, the clearer a picture they have from a website’s data regarding what it is about, the more chance they will know what to rank it for.
Even if the content on a website is not optimized 100%, if the data is structured logically, such as inner linking, then Google will better understand what is there.
Expertise – Authoritativeness – Trustworthiness
Thankfully that mouthful of long words has the acronym E-A-T, and that is appropriate because if your website has none of them, it will be starved of traffic from the search engines.
Google move towards wanting all the content it ranks to be from trusted sources which also provide quality content, versus those with negative content and fake news, shows no sign of abating.
Google knows that today’s internet users are more aware of what is legitimate and what is not, especially when it comes to information online.
For that reason, Google is striving to make sure any website they rank highly, is authoritative on the subject searched for, and the information presented on it is accurate.
This means that elements of your website like branding, user experience, and customer reviews need to be given even greater focus within your SEO strategy, and this includes ensuring any content you publish is factually correct.
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers
Do not panic there is an acronym for that too…BERT. BERT has been mentioned as the name of a Google update, in the same way, Penguin or Panda was, but it is not. BERT is actually a language model that Google has developed, and it is designed as an NLP technique.
In practical terms, it means that when SEO teams or website owners are researching for keywords that they plan to use in content, their focus needs to change somewhat. Instead of simply looking at the data a keyword research tool might give them, they also need to take account of the user of the content.
As BERT starts playing a bigger role in Google’s algorithms, it will no longer be enough to simply think of what search terms might be inputted in Google’s search bar.
Instead, the user’s intention, online path or end goal needs to be considered. For search engine optimization purposes, a greater emphasis in communicating with and understanding customers’ needs and intentions will need to be adopted.