It is now widely considered that creating great content is the best way of attracting Google’s attention and getting your business noticed. That’s because of the many changes the search engine has made to its algorithm in recent years with various updates designed to improve its’ user experience.
These days, the oracle that is Google wants to serve its users with the best possible answers to their specific questions. They want up-to-date, relevant, valuable and unique content to be at the fingertips of enquirers within a flash of them clicking on the magnifying glass.
What this means to marketers today is that whereas before, getting a good SEO ranking was all about technical SEO with things such as meta tags and titling, now the balance has shifted in favor of great content.
Here are some of the changes to good SEO practices that you need to address with your marketing strategy in 2018:
Increased Features on Search Engine Results Pages
You have almost certainly noticed that the way the first page of Google rankings has changed completely. There are now fewer AdWords places at the top and more images, links, social media mentions, a short answer box and of course, videos to distract the user from your positioning on the page.
Structure Rich Snippets Carefully
A Rich Snippet is a term that describes structured data markup that can be added to existing HTML. This allows search engines to get a faster and better understanding of what content is contained on each page of your website. You have to think about how you structure your data because it determines how the information is displayed in the search results.
Page Speed
We live in a society that demands instant gratification on all levels, especially when searching for information on the internet. We want answers and we want them now!
If your website is too slow in loading, visitors to it will lose interest very quickly because it fails to deliver on the promise of solving their problem. You may well have reached the top spot on the SERPs but you won’t have achieved anything.
Make Your Great Content Responsive
With the introduction of accelerated mobile pages or AMP to the SEO world, it’s never been so important to have a responsive website that scales according to the screen size of the visitor’s device. AMPs are created to be really plain and image-free so that the focus is on the content itself. More people today are searching the internet with their smartphones and AMPs have been created to respond to this rising trend.
Voice Search is More Real than Ever
Another reason Google has been tweaking its algorithm more than ever is because people are now using voice search on their smartphones rather than typing in their queries using a laptop or tablet. What this means is that people are using natural phrasing and speech rather than just typing in a few relevant keywords. This is the principal reason the heat is on to create great content with plenty of contextual relevance expressed in a conversational tone in order to score highly in rankings.