SEO
SEO Tips to Support Online Growth
SEO is an ever changing beast. It is a job that is never complete as search engines aim to improve users experience and keep up to date with search behaviours and technology.
In this article, we will give you a brief overview of:
- The main changes that occur over the year
- New SEO tips and recommendations based on these
- Our predictions over the next year
But before we get into our SEO tips and predictions below is a table of the most significant SEO updates over the last couple of years. Some have been confirmed and explained. Some haven’t and probably never will. But, the common themes, as always are around user experience, trust, intent and quality.
Summary of the Google Algorithm Updates |
|
Month |
Update |
Jan 20 | Google confirmed a core update |
Oct 19 | BERT arrived |
Sept 19 | Google confirmed a core update concentrating on improving the quality of content in SERPs. Snippets were also reviewed. |
June 19 | Google confirmed a core update |
March 19 | Ranking shifs for keywords related to health and other sensitive topics to bring more trusted sources to the top of the rankings |
Nov 18 | Coined the “Halloween Update” an unconfirmed quality update |
Oct 18 | E-A-T update #2 |
So, what does this all mean?
Here are our top SEO tips to ensure that your business can be ‘discovered’ via search engines.
Welcoming BERT.
If you wonder what BERT stands for its Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Bet you are glad you asked?
We have covered in depth what BERT is and how it will have content writers rejoicing here. But in a nutshell it meant that:
“BERT models can…consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries.” Google
This does not mean that keyword research is dead. It actually means finding those niche, long-tailed phrases that are highly relevant to your content is even more important.
Have you been impacted by BERT:
- Check your stats
- Prevent further negative impact by revising the purpose of your blogs and the intent of each article
- Readability of content trumps keyword stuffing
E-A-T
E-A-T #2 has meant that sites that are actually an authority in industries such as health, legal, other regulated services and sensitive topics are shown above people that aren’t. For example, NHS will show up on page one over a blogger that may have personal experience with a health condition.
Mixed Content
Mixed content happens when there is both HTTP (insecure) and HTTPS (secure) content loads on the same web page. Last year we noticed having mixed content was starting to impact rankings, which had been spoken about before, but seemed to be enforced last year.
While not 100% confirmed, the stats don’t lie. And when clients came to us with ranking issues, this was often one area that needed resolving.
Customer is still king
While there are hundreds of ranking factors that need to be considered it still remains that:
- User experience (UX) on mobile-first
- Well written, valuable and easy to read content,
- Unique images,
- Speed,
- Security
Will support your online presence and growth.
With these changes in mind, our top SEO tips & predictions to help your website to get discovered in 2020 are:
- Review what you have
- Look at your marketing and content plan for the year and see if you are writing content that your customer would intend to see from you
- Invest in unique images – as we predict duplicate content will soon pick up on stock images
- Check your rich snippets to encourage engines to favour your website in SERPs
- Invest in writing content for voice search capabilities
- Less is more. Prioritise speed above over-engineered design and function
THESE ARE JUST A FEW SEO TIPS TO KEEP YOU IN THE GAME.
Are there any questions you want answering? Just get in touch or check out our SEO services.
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