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.

Source.

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.

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.