15 Feb
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways for attracting potential customers to your website. SEO is constantly evolving, and staying on top of the latest updates can be a challenge. Top-ranking SEO performance requires attention to many metrics, including traffic, backlinks, and social shares.
Let’s look at top SEO trends for your ecommerce store.
1. Voice search
According to research more than half of smartphone users nowadays are engaging with voice search technology. Most of the voice search queries are long-tail and very specific. Users look for specific answers to their queries when they use voice search. And such users are at the consideration stage of the funnel and are more likely to convert than the rest of the users.
Since voice search optimization is still growing as more people are opting for it with the passing time, it is expected to continue trending in future as well. So this can be a necessity in terms of SEO.
Bullet lists increase your chances of ranking for voice queries, and most voice queries are local. Hence, optimize your website for local SEO.
2. Featured snippets
A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a search query. Google displays it at the top of the SERP result, above paid and organic ads. These snippets aren’t just useful for the searchers but also beneficial for websites. However, you can’t be able to select the content that is shown in the featured snippet for any given search; it’s the Google algorithm bots that do the job.
The exact method of getting your web page in the featured snippet isn’t clear. Marketers and SEO experts use a few strategies that might be helpful. For example, to get in the featured results, you need to answer a specific question, and answering in bullet points (well-structured content) would be better. You can use the Google search function “people also ask” for inspiration.
3. More marketers will leverage influencers for SEO
Influencers are the ones with millions of followers, and these followers may become your customers if you can get your business in front of them. Working with an influencer helps you generate traffic, increase your online visibility and amplify your content reach.
Influencers earn the trust of your potential audience over years and if they come forward to support your brand, the ROI can be enormous. Be specific while choosing influencers. Not every influencer can help your brand. You need to choose the ones who have the right audience means the audience you want to target. The backlinks you gain from influencer sites also show authority to Google and enhance your SEO.
Here is how influencer marketing impacts SEO:
Link building
Backlinks are an important ranking factor. But not all kinds of backlinks can work. You need high-quality backlinks. And that’s where influencers can help. With an influencer or influencers by your side, you increase the chances of getting natural high-quality backlinks for your website.
Brand visibility & engagement
Influencers know what their audience likes or dislikes, so when they create content around your brand, their audience relates to it. And that content is unique, valuable, and helpful.
Search engines have a soft corner for viral content. And when an influencer shares a post that has all the share-worthy traits, the content gets shared by a plethora of people which provokes the search engines to rank the mentioned web page higher in the SERPs.
Social media traffic
This goes without saying that viral content always helps generate tons of social media engagement and referral traffic.
4. BERT is here to stay
BERT means (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) it enables anyone to train their own question answering system. It works in more than 70 languages and for almost every query in Google English.
With Google’s BERT update, the Google search engine bots have become much more “conversational,” so now, Google’s algorithm can now interpret the intent of the searcher. In simple words, Now Google can understand things like the human brain.
SEO marketers who apply BERT models increase their chances of ranking on the first page for featured snippets in Google SERP. BERT will have the most impact on conversational queries where prepositions like “to” and “for” matter to the meaning of the search query.
5. People will want digital experiences
Page load speed is an important ranking factor. Great content means nothing if your web page doesn’t load quickly or you have a complex user interface. Successful businesses understand that building a long-term relationship with customers hinges on customer experience, and customer experience invariably affects search ranking because only users who have a good user experience will spend time on your website.
Focus your user experience on helping customers find the information they need. Make it easy for visitors to proceed to the next step. To provide the best user experience, you’ll need to wear the visitor’s shoes to identify roadblocks that cause poor experiences. Do not use complex words they do not understand. Lack of clarity in your messaging also increases the bounce rate and negatively impacts your site’s SEO.
6. Video will be the new king of content
Google loves video hence embed videos on your website to get more traffic. Remember to optimize your video but how to optimize that video content for search engines? Start with optimizing your video channel name and description. Though the description shouldn’t be overloaded with keywords but provide a user-friendly description of what your channel is all about.
However, even keywords are important. For example, if you’re optimizing your videos for YouTube, you can use YouTube’s autocomplete feature. Start typing your video’s topic and then some suggestions will pop-up in the search field. The suggestions are the related keywords that you can use for optimizing the video for reaching the right set of audience.
7. Content length will determine search rankings
Only high-quality content can help you beat the competition to page 1 ranking. But you will also have to consider quantity alongside quality. There’s a lot of arguments around the ideal length of a blog post. Research shows that the average length of the top 10 results is at least 2,000 words. That’s because web pages with long-form, high-quality content enjoy more visibility.
However, your content must comprehensively answer the question the user asked as well as questions related to the main search query. Lengthy articles increase dwell time, which tells Google that users enjoy your content. You build authority and Google increases your ranking for the search query.
8. Mobile search will continue to take over
87% of internet users are on mobile phones and 40% of transactions occur on mobile. You can’t get far on search engine results if you haven’t optimized for mobile.
To make sure your page is user-friendly, you have to ensure that Google can crawl your URLs, so make sure you don’t have a “disallow directive” in place. Also, beware that Googlebot won’t load content requiring user interactions, like clicking or swiping. You have to make sure Google can see this so-called lazy-loaded content. Finally, ensure you use the same meta robots tags on the desktop and mobile sites.
Conclusion
With SEO’s current trends, you have to think about everything from voice control to video SEO. Metrics are constantly changing, and it’s critical to stay on top of your place in the rankings. The right SEO tools can help you get the information you need to guide a smart SEO strategy.
Invest in SEO as a long-term strategy for lead generation and stay on top of the latest SEO trends to avoid getting left behind.