Modern SEO Trends You Can’t Afford To Ignore

Image from Wikimedia

We’re already a quarter of the way through 2016. That was fast, wasn’t it?! With the new year, experts are predicting a number of trends to take hold of business. SEO isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, and there are a few trends which are expected to dominate the year ahead of us. I think it’s safe to assume you want your business to be in-step with all the competition! Here, I’ve put together a guide on some of the biggest SEO trends you need to be tapping into. Integrate these with your marketing strategy, and you’ll find carrying your brand forward so much easier.

One of the fastest-growing trends is the significance of social media content. From here on, content from Facebook, Twitter and all the others are going to be a lot more prominent on SERPs. The majority of modern marketers are already using social media to bolster SEO campaigns. This is only expected to grow, and the whole practice of SEO is going to change with it. In the coming months, your competitors are going to be doing everything possible to bump their tweets and posts higher on SERPs. Whether you love or loathe social media, you’ll need to jump on board if you want your marketing to be successful. More and more social content is being indexed by popular search engines. As this happens, the line between ‘web’ and ‘social’ content is going to become increasingly blurred. To keep up, you need to start organising and optimising your social content to make your business as visible as possible. For big brands, social media pages are among the highest-ranking links on search result pages.  Social media pages are also expected to help crawlers find out which websites are credible in the future.

In the near future, videos are expected to have an equal or greater impact than they do now. As you know already, videos are a fantastic way to entertain your customers, and keep them engaged. What you may not have known is that using enough videos can improve your SERPs ranking significantly. These days, videos make up a large part of all Google searches. Furthermore, Google’s been focussing their indexing process more on blended results and searches. By including engaging videos as part of your content, you can make your company rise through results page rankings. Already, video content has much higher organic ranks compared to your standard text-based results. Their click rate is also a lot better, as you can imagine. The only way for your brand to appear in blended search results is by uploading your videos to YouTube, or using video SEO techniques. The latter is still a fairly new science though, so YouTube is your safest bet. This way, it’ll be much easier for Google to find and index your video content. Then, they’ll dangle it in front of your target audience’s eyes when they enter those magic words!

Image from Pixabay

Another trend, which we’re already seeing a lot of in marketing, is mobile optimisation. A lot of your audience aren’t restricted to desktops and laptops anymore. A huge proportion of consumers are using mobile devices as their primary method for browsing the web. This is reflected in Google’s algorithm update in 2015, which made it easier to find mobile-optimised sites. If your website and other content isn’t mobile-friendly, then start fixing that immediately! Countless businesses took steps to become more mobile-friendly in 2015. This has set a standard which every other firm now has to live up to. Mobile optimisation is the norm, not the exception these days. Make sure you change your SEO strategy accordingly! Mobile optimisation is a pretty big subject, but once you understand a few fundamentals it all falls into place. Make sure every last pixel on your site; from navigation to fonts to your logo design, is optimised for use on mobile devices.

If you have a search bar on your company website, then a voice search function is an absolute must. A few years ago, when voice functions first started being introduced, the whole thing felt a bit like a gimmick. In this primitive phase, you’d tell your phone to shuffle an album, and it would order Chinese food to your home. This technology has developed pretty quickly, and now people are using it to find anything and everything. Almost every mobile device on the market has its own voice search function. I’m sure you’re aware of Cortana, Google Now, and Siri. As voice search becomes a bigger and bigger part of browsing, you’re going to be seeing a much bigger emphasis on it in various SEO guides. The main difference here is the search terms being entered. With traditional, text-based searching, most of us would use a few vaguely connected keywords. “Fishing shop Sussex” or “cheap motorcycle parts” for instance. Voice searches, on the other hand, are completely different. These are almost always in the form of a question, and contain long-tail keywords which wouldn’t appear in text searches. Try to include queries in your content. Go through the words who, what, when, where, why and how, thinking of anything your target market would be asking a voice search program. Writing content in a more natural voice can also be a big help.

Another noticeable pattern is content aggregation getting bigger and bigger. Wikipedia, Google Maps, news and social media sites all make up a large proportion of Google search results. This chunk of the web is only growing, which shows how many consumers look for a lot of information on a subject in one place. If you weren’t already aware, content aggregation is a way of listing content from high-authority sources. The content which is gathered up and presented typically fits into a set of criteria geared towards a specific target audience. Doing some aggregation of your own can be highly beneficial to your overall marketing efforts. For starters, you’ll be able to fit far more keywords into your company’s content. With an association with well-known, established sites, you’ll improve the authority of your site. So, content aggregation doesn’t stop at improving your company’s ranking on SERPs. It also kindles a better sense of trust for your brand.

Image from Pixabay

In the future, native mobile apps are expected to become more of a business essential too. Just think of the amount of time you spend on your phone every day. How much of that time is taken up by apps? A lot, right? Even if you don’t use company apps that much, your target audience is likely to love them. Many techie consumers seem to prefer apps to any website. If it makes sense for your company to have a mobile app, then make sure you get one out there and have it optimised. There are a lot of companies already benefiting from having their apps near the top of search results pages. If you’re looking for proof, get your phone out and search for ‘eBay’. You’ll see a link to download the company’s app almost immediately. Although apps are a big part of modern life, a lot of smaller businesses are still neglecting to launch their own. Get yours out on the market, and you may be seizing a fantastic advantage.

Finally, SEO is going to become much more centred on location in the immediate future. What marketers are calling “local SEO” is something which has only been around since 2014, and is growing at a steady rate. To make sure you’re not cutting your firm out of any business, you need to make sure Google knows where your business is based. This way, your online presence will have a way improved chance of being seen by an audience who’s right on your doorstep. As you can imagine, this is more of a big deal for B2C companies. Still, even commercial suppliers and dealers can benefit from localising their SEO drive. Having keywords specific to a physical outlet of your business will prove to be a huge help from here on. When a company mentions your town or city specifically, I’m sure you find the brand instantly more trustworthy. This is common in almost every consumer. Through this, crafting your online content around a geographic location can help you engage with more customers. It will also carry the one universal result of SEO; higher rankings! To see this in action for yourself, search for a common business in Google. Unless you’ve set your privacy settings to the max, the closest business will come up first.

So, there you have it. Make sure your marketing team is well-versed in these modern SEO trends, and very little can go wrong. To begin, expand your social media presence, include more videos in all your online content, and optimise it for mobile devices. Other trends are still important, but can wait a little longer. After catching on with these trends, make sure you keep on top of SEO news and adjust to coming updates. Execute it all correctly, and your conversion rate will skyrocket!