In the dynamic world of SEO, brands must stay on top of system changes and industry trends to keep marketing content in place and on pace.
Brands must stay on top of marketing trends, but SEO is a whole different beast as key changes can happen instantaneously, not organically, through algorithm updates by Google. A flip of the switch can leave your website optimization in the dark.
In our last post, we focused on search engine writing tactics to give your website the best chance of being found during web searches, but what if that connection literally changes overnight and your SEO content suddenly is not maximizing the opportunity to rank in results pages?
SEO trends are a content topic that has to be constantly updated “because there isn’t another industry which is as dynamic as SEO,” according to Stan Ventures. The SEO experts offered the following top SEO trends (and more) to keep in mind when optimizing your website content relevance and resulting traffic.
Blogger Outreach & Influencer Marketing
With “the sun setting upon personal blogs” as most struggle to find their true audience, brands may have to reassess their influencer marketing strategy. Most bloggers will shift to reputable sites within their specific niche to publish content so that it gets the desired levels of engagement and traffic. As Google moves more towards being an entity-based search engine, i.e., mapping each author (an entity) to a particular niche (another entity), SV asserts that “authors and brands must ensure that they have enough digital evidence to prove their credibility and experience in a niche.”
Experiential Differential
Speaking of experience, SEO rankings eat it up. Actually, it’s the new addition to Google’s EAT acronym: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. From online stores to product review sites, Google uses the EAT criteria to understand how accurate, honest, safe and reliable the content is so that its search results will appropriately weight the content and sites for online searchers to be able to make the best, most informed decisions.
Are you experienced? Google will be measuring that. “If I’m reviewing a Stock Market app, in addition to checking my experience in the stock market, Google will now check within the content if I’ve actually used the app,” writes SV’s Dileep Thekkethil.
“Passage Indexing”
Google’s new algorithm called Passage Indexing, in effect, combines the best of “keep it simple” and in-depth, long-form content, which we covered last time. It will now use the natural language processing feature while indexing web pages and try to understand the meaning of each passage within the page, SV reports. That means that short paragraphs or excerpts from a bigger content effort can stand on their own, i.e., stand out in search results, no matter how many sections down the info might be in your long-form piece. Tactically, to benefit the most from this algorithm, brands should commit to highly structured content, including sections that each focus on a subtopic.
“If creativity is intelligence having fun, as Einstein said, then SEO is like the scientific side of the content equation, the power and discipline that ensure a brand’s originality and expressiveness reach the biggest audience,” said Tori Alexis, one of infinitee’s Brand Managers. “Combining the art and science in your marketing content platform is smart — and can be fun, too. We’re here to help with innovative, creative, highly-engaging and high-impact marketing strategies.”
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