Here are the latest trends to look out for when conducting your future SEO plan:
1) Inbound Links Vs. Brand Mentions:
Inbound links used to be highly important, they are also called ‘backlinks’ and they are incoming links to a website or webpage, it’s important because it tells you who’s coming to your website and where they’re coming from and they are a major factor in SEO and having one in a high ranked and trusted webpage tells the search engine that someone trusted has faith in you.
However, these days brand mentions are also taken into account; brand mentions are when another webpage mentions your company without the use of hyperlinks.
2) Content, Content and More Content:
With technology advancing and smarter algorithms are being developed and updated constantly, content will always be king; if you really want to survive and rank for relevant search terms you must provide the most relevant content to the searcher.
3) Conversational Keyword Phrases:
In 2013, Google introduced the Hummingbird Update which is Google’s new search algorithm, effective since 2013.
This update made the search algorithm understand more conversational phrases rather than just individual words.
4) Mobile Optimization and User Behavior:
Everything must be optimized for the mobile, it’s not even an option now; with more people going mobile, this is a surefire way to success and why is that?
Because this goes beyond just having a responsive website alone, your website should be able to be accessible and readable on a mobile and tablet device , it should also be optimized accordingly for each.
To access a website on your mobile device you used to have to zoom in and out, scroll up, down, left and right, honestly it was such a hassle , but now this is something that is 100% necessary; content and images should be lighter instead readjusting to the browser.
5) Social Media Interaction:
Finally, social media integration; Google search algorithms have become so intelligent that us mere humans need to keep up with its intelligence.
If you want to succeed you need to have a strong presence and strategy that allows for people to find and share your content.
It’s extremely important also to know your target audience and customize the content according to them.
There was a theory that SEO might be over by next year, but it’s not a question of it being dead as much as algorithms are growing smarter at a much faster rate than we are so.
Search Engine Marketing may just be another branch of Marketing we need to watch for.
We hope we imparted some wisdom
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