Ideal SEO Content Length

 

Your Audience is Smarter than a Goldfish - Act Accordingly

If you’ve been in the world of Marketing long enough, chances are you’ve heard someone say something along the lines of “Make your content short and bite sized! With all of the distractions that surround us nowadays, the average attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish!”

In fact, long form content has proven to be more engaging, more shareable, and better for SEO.

But alas, it’s not good enough these days to write 2,000 words and call it a day—and most content marketers don’t even come close to creating content that long.

That’s why we created this post.

There are a great deal of factors that go into defining quality long form content.

Today, you’ll learn everything there is to know about why search engines (and people!) love long form content.

You will also become an expert on the search signals and human preferences that help define quality, winning content beyond length.

Let’s get started!

The SEO Benefits of Long Form Content

Longer Content Produces Higher Search Rankings.

Simply put, studies show that longer content dominates page one of search rankings.

SerpIQ ran a study charting the top 10 results in search queries by content length.

While content length is clearly correlated with better search rankings, the factors that actually help Google rank pages are merely made possible by long form content.

If that sounds confusing, it’s because there are a lot of moving pieces involved in the SEO performance of content.

Let’s explore some of these factors:

Longer Content Earns More Backlinks

Research shows that long form content has a greater probability of earning quality backlinks, which contribute significantly to improving search rankings. 

So why does long form content get more backlinks?

For one, good long form content tends to be more useful and comprehensive than short content, and the more useful and comprehensive it is, the more value it provides.

Google understands that users do not want to search for bits and pieces of information, gleaning tidbits of knowledge from numerous pages.

They want everything they need in one place.

Long form content, which tends to be more comprehensive on a given topic, has a higher likelihood of providing the answers that users are searching for, without forcing them to perform a mini research project every time a piece of short content falls… well… short.

Similarly, longer content is more impressive and tends to stand out.

According to Brian Dean,

They'll always be space for "Top 7 Ways to..."-type posts. But insanely long list posts will forever stand out based on the volume factor. There's something inherently more shareable (and linkable) about a list of 100 items than a list of 10.

‍Moral of the story:

Anyone can write a piece of bite-sized content in a short period of time with minimal experience.

But when confronted with a detailed, step-by-step list of “16 actionable SEO tips you can implement today to avoid the most common SEO mistakes”, why would anyone click on or link to a list of 5 tips on the same topic without step-by-step instructions?

They wouldn’t. No matter how Goldfish-like their attention span—because they want the best content available.

Let’s back up for a second.

It’s clear that longer content tends to be more useful, more impressive, and more comprehensive than short content, causing it to earn more backlinks.

But where do the backlinks come from?

Quality backlinks are generated when Link Creators—people in your industry that have the ability to link to your content—deem your content (or a part of it) to be valuable to their audience, and link to it.

The key word there is “value.” Short, limited content often simply fails to provide enough value to entice link creators.

Just as you create content that adds value and helps your audience, link creators want to link to content that offers their audience a reinforcement of their ideas, comprehensive knowledge, or supplemental information.

It’s in a link creator’s best interest to link to the best, most comprehensive piece of content on a given topic.

Longer Content Gets More Social Shares

The correlation between social shares and content length is very similar to that between content length and backlinks.

This suggests that the average social media user values the same things as link creators:

They want to consume and share content that is both useful and comprehensive.

Both of those factors tend to involve a higher word count.

Google's RankBrain Rewards Long Form Content

Apart from backlinks and social shares, there are a variety of ways to understand why Google likes to reward long form content with good search positioning.

Based on Google’s RankBrain algorithm—a machine learning algorithm used to sort search results and better understand search queries—we can determine some notable ways in which long form content has an advantage over shorter content.

RankBrain is Google’s third most important ranking factor, so it has a massive impact on many aspects of search.

While RankBrain’s primary function is using Artificial Intelligence to help Google understand what people mean when they type in a particular search query, Google also uses it to measure an extremely important factor:

User satisfaction.

In other words, Google doesn’t just interpret queries and send people to a relevant SERP (search engine results page), it also determines whether or not the page’s users find hold content that satisfies them when they click on it.

Google uses a variety of metrics to analyze this, and they all just so happen to correlate with content length.

Let’s take a look.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is a measure of how much time users spend on your site.

It’s an important metric because it tells Google that your website (or a particular page on it) is worth spending time on—meaning it’s providing users with what they were searching for.

A short dwell time tells Google your page was either irrelevant to the search query or just plain bad.

It then adjusts search rankings for future searches accordingly.

Long dwell times correlate with....

You guessed it! Longer content.

Click Through Rate

Organic Click Through Rate (CTR) is a very important ranking signal within RankBrain.

CTR is a measure of how many clicks a page gets relative to how many impressions it receives (how many times it is seen in search on a SERP).

Google uses CTR data to understand whether a page appeals to users.

For example:

If a page on your website receives 3,000 impressions in a given month but only gets clicked on 10 times, you’re in trouble.

Google will see that as a sign that your page does not adequately fulfil a users search query and will most likely move the page down in search rankings.

CTR is defined in part by relevance to what users are looking for, but is also strongly influenced by factors like effective meta-titles and meta-descriptions.

In other words:

Content with a quality title tag and description tag will often have a better CTR than un-optimized content.

Ok, but what does content length have to do with this?

As we discussed earlier on, users react more favorably to impressive, original content that exudes utility and stops them from ever needing to seek out a similar resource.

Title tags and description tags appear directly on SERPs, and they are meant to be representative of what’s inside the page while enticing people to click on the search result.

Therefore:

Having longer content—and emphasizing the utility, comprehensiveness and value of that content in the page’s title tags and description tags—will lead to higher CTR, better positioning in search rankings, and more eyes on your content.  

And more eyes on your great long form content means more shares, backlinks and instances of high dwell time.

See? It’s all connected!

The Opportunity for Content Marketers

While internet users (and Google), have made it abundantly clear that they prefer long form content, the Content Marketing world seems to be lagging painfully behind.

Only 18 percent of companies’ blog posts are 750 words or more. Not even close to the average length of content on the first page of Google.

So what’s the problem?

Perhaps it’s related to the fact that 60% of content marketers say their biggest marketing challenge is creating engaging content.

That sounds like a pretty phenomenal opportunity for content marketers who choose to capitalize on what they’ve learned in this post (hint hint):

Google awards long form content based on the value it provides to users.‍

The Catch: Your Content Actually Has to be Good

As we’ve discussed, content length is part of the solution, not all of it.

Content length enables many of the factors that help to define quality content in the eyes of users and search engines:

- Utility and value

- Comprehensiveness

- High dwell time

- Compelling title and description tags

By harnessing these essential elements of quality content, and including them in a long form piece, content marketers can increase social shares, earn more backlinks and improve their overall search rankings.

Ultimately, average consumers of content will only have the attention span of a goldfish if they keep being exposed to the short, limited content that they’re used to.

Wouldn’t anyone?

If you provide them with something different—something that answers their questions, solves their problems, and makes them feel compelled to link and share—you’ll be reaping countless rewards in the form of user engagement, better search rankings, and brand visibility.

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Why Your Website Needs SEO?

Today’s consumers rely on search engines to help them find everything from restaurant recommendations to B2B software providers.

This means that regardless of what your business offers, your target audience is likely searching for products or services like yours on search engines like Google.

And if you want to attract them to your site, you need search engine optimization.

But if you’ve spent much time researching your options with digital marketing, you’ve probably heard that before.

Once you’ve accepted this, though, the next logical question is how to do search engine optimization.

That’s why on this page, we’ll explain exactly what makes SEO so important, as well as a few search engine optimization techniques and search engine optimization tools you can use to increase your online visibility.

An Introduction to SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a strategy for improving your site’s rankings in search engine results.

It involves identifying which keywords and phrases your target audience uses when looking for products or services like yours, then working towards ranking well for those searches.

Of course, this is a simplified explanation — and you can check out our resource on “what is SEO” for a more in-depth look at search engine optimization.

Why Your Website Needs SEO?

Today, SEO is an essential part of any effective marketing strategy.

But to fully illustrate its importance, let’s go over a few of the reasons you should be optimizing your site.

It can help you build your brand

Although branding is often considered a more traditional marketing strategy, while SEO falls firmly into the digital category, the two involve similar steps.

Building a brand requires considering both what you provide, and what others say about it.

And when you look at the steps involved in optimizing a site, the factors are similar. You need to create content that’s in line with your audience’s needs and interests, then find ways to earn links to that content from other sites.

If you keep this relationship in mind as you develop your SEO strategy, you can select keywords and create content that’s in line with the image you want your brand to have.

Then, your online presence will reflect your ideal branding — and help you establish it with your target audience.

An optimized website earns more traffic

On the surface, the goal of SEO optimization is to improve your site’s rankings in search results.

But beyond that, the purpose of achieving high rankings is to attract more traffic — and ideally, to convert that traffic into customers and leads.

And in case you were wondering, it works.

For example, just take a look at the following organic traffic report from a Siege Media case study.

Over the course of one year, this brand new site’s traffic increased from zero to 100,000 visitors — entirely from SEO.

If you want to bring more users to your site, SEO is the best way to accomplish this goal.

SEO doesn’t require you to pay for ad space

One of the biggest advantages of SEO is that it doesn’t involve paying for ad space.

Consider how traditional ad campaigns operate.

You determine a location you want your brand to appear, whether that’s on a particular TV channel or radio station, or in the pages of a magazine or newspaper.

Then, you pay the company that owns that media for placement. You might pay for your ad to run for a certain length of time, or within a certain number of issues. As soon as that period is up, your ad stops appearing — and stops generating results for your business.

Now, consider the various pages that appear in search engine results.

The top two listings in this screenshot are pay-per-click, or PPC, ads, as denoted by the small “Ad” tag.

Much like traditional ad campaigns, earning one of these spots involving ongoing costs.

Of course, if you’re familiar with PPC, you know that advertisers only pay when a user clicks an ad and visits their site. This certainly gives it an edge over traditional methods.

Still, every visitor involves a cost — and the minute an advertiser pauses their campaign, they stop showing up.

But the sites appearing in the organic results, directly below those ads, aren’t paying a cent for those rankings.

While they likely invested a significant amount of time and money into creating the pages that are ranking in those spots, they appear on page one because Google’s algorithm thinks they provide value to users.

As a result, they’re earning traffic without spending a cent.

It helps your target audience find your site

SEO can help your business get in front of your target audience as they’re actively searching for information.

And considering how common it is for consumers to use search engines to find information about products and services, this is a huge opportunity.

In fact, 62% of consumers turn to search engines first when they want to learn more about a new business, product, or service — and 41% use them when they’re ready to buy.

This means that if you want your business to be part of a user’s online research process, it needs to show up in search results for keywords related to the products or services you offer.

Plus, according to that same survey, 48% of consumers prefer to visit a business’s official website to learn more about them.

So having a strong online presence will not only help you reach your marketing goals but will also enable your target audience to research and buy in a way that works for them.

It boosts your credibility and authority

The Internet has drastically changed what the sales process looks like for many businesses.

That’s because today, consumers have access to a wealth of helpful resources that can help them learn about their options before they speak with a sales representative.

And with SEO optimization, you can become part of that learning process.

That’s especially true if you combine your SEO efforts with content marketing. When you create informative, valuable content, you have the opportunity to build trust and credibility with potential customers early in the research phase.

Here’s a general overview of how this works:

First, a user finds your site by searching for information related to your industry and seeing one of your resources in the search results.

Then, they read that resource. If they like it, they might share it with their friends and subscribe to your email list.

This is where the process slows down a bit.

That user might return to your site several times and read your email content regularly over the next few months without taking action.

And if you’re used to the traditional sales process, this can be frustrating.

But with each piece of content they read, you’re establishing your brand as a credible, authoritative source of information.

Then, when they’re finally ready to make a purchase or speak with a sales representative, they’ll know exactly which company to turn to — and be extremely comfortable doing so after all of the helpful information you’ve already provided for free.

It can help you stay ahead of your competitors

As you optimize your site, you’re not just working to improve where your site ranks on results pages.

You’re also moving above your competitors.

Just consider that the first result on any given results page gets an average of 20.5% of the clicks. From there, the second result gets 13.32%, and the third gets 13.14%.

This means that as you move up in search results, you’ll earn a larger percentage of the clicks for your target keywords — and your competitors will earn less.

It improves user experience

Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the best possible results for their users.

As a result, many of their algorithm updates focus on making sure that they’re directing users to sites that not only provide relevant content, but also a great user experience.

That’s why today, technical factors like mobile-friendliness, usability, and site speed play a much bigger role in rankings than ever before.

While this means that optimizing your site might require a bit more professional help, it also means that you’ll be continuously improving the user experience your site provides.

And when you consider the impact that user experience has on conversions, this can have a significant impact on your sales and revenue in the long run.

It’s easy to measure

Finally, one of the biggest advantages of SEO is that you can measure virtually every aspect of your results.

Unlike traditional methods, which often rely on looking for correlations between ad campaigns and sales, it’s easy to see the return you’re getting from your SEO investment.

You can use tools like Google Analytics to monitor your traffic, referral sources, conversions, and any other metric that matters to your business.

This way, you can accurately evaluate what’s working — and what isn’t — and be confident that you’re allocating your marketing budget to the strategies that have the biggest impact on your most important goals.

Source: https://www.crazyegg.com/

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10 Important 2020 SEO Trends You Need to Know

It’s time to take our annual look at what’s ahead for SEO professionals in 2020.

What SEO strategies and tactics will work and help you dominate in the SERPs and earn more revenue in 2020?

This is the question we ask every year here at Search Engine Journal.

Here are the top 10 trends you need to know in 2020, according to the experts.

Trend #1: BERT & User-Focused Optimization

In 2019, the launch of Google’s new BERT algorithm got a lot of attention. Naturally, every SEO professional wants to learn how to optimize for BERT.

Well, rather than focusing on how to optimize for that specific algorithm, take a page from Kelly Stanze, Search Strategist, Hallmark, who will be focusing on user-focused optimization and the technical delivery of content.

In short, that means reassessing user access points to search and aligning content with that.

“Look at the mechanics of how something is crawled, indexed, and served in a variety of different search settings,” Stanze said. “With users having more options than ever in how they search for things, it’ll be even more important for SEOs to bear in mind the fundamentals of clean architecture and content delivery.”

With the incorporation of BERT this year into the ranking and featured snippets algorithm, Google has taken a huge leap forward into making search really about intent matching rather pure string matching, according to Eli Schwartz, Growth Consultant and Advisor.

“Content will truly have to be written to user intent rather than just strings that a user might search,” Schwartz said. “Keyword research tools may even become less relevant with the primary dataset for content creation coming from suggested queries. In 2020, the really smart SEOs will get up from their desks to talk to customers so they can find out what their audience really wants from them.”

Frédéric Dubut, Senior Program Manager, Bing, echoed that, noting that keyword research, at least as we know it, is going to become obsolete.

“There’s no sign of [natural language processing] NLP and deep learning research slowing down anytime soon, and you can expect search engines to shift even further from keywords to intent in 2020,” Dubut said. “Both practitioners and tooling providers will need to shift their efforts towards ‘intent research’ and fulfilling user needs.”

As Jenn Mathews, Senior SEO Manager, Groupon, points out, Google is continually updating to optimize search results based on user intent rather than a focus on content/page to keyword matching.

“SEOs need to understand the nuance of what this means with their content as well as have a firm grasp on Google’s past updates leading to this trend.”

We’ve all wanted to focus on intent for the last several years, and better understand what the journey of our customers looks like, said Duane Forrester, VP, Industry Insights, Yext. Now it’s become such an important part of the landscape, it’s integral to the survival and growth for most online businesses.

“If you focus on the customer’s intent, you’ll clearly understand where you fit on that path,” Forrester said. “By providing the best answers for questions on that path, you can more reliably capture and convert customers.”

What does this mean for you?

Focus on how our users talk about their issues, problems, and needs at each aspect of the buyer’s journey much more, according to Keith Goode, Sr. SEO Strategist, IBM.

“Additionally, we’re going to have to extend our efforts far beyond the purchase in that journey to include content that addresses needs after the sale – support, opportunities to advocate, community-building and staying relevant for future purchases,” Goode added.

Always focus on your customers, said Sam Hollingsworth, Director of Search, Elevation Ten Thousand

“Too many brands forget or fail to realize what it takes to attract and impress potential customers. They want real value,” Hollingsworth said. “Just like in a brick-and-mortar establishment, customers want to know that you’re on their side, that they can trust you, and that you are a reliable partner in what is going to be a long-term – hopefully lifelong – relationship.”

Carolyn Lyden, Lead SEO/Owner, Search Hermit, hopes 2020 brings a change where we get back to the qualitative, human side of search.

“So many marketers market their products and services having never spoken one-on-one to their target audiences,” Lyden said.

Without talking to our customers and understanding why they are behaving the way they are, we are limiting our ability to create a smart and holistic strategy, according to Sarah Gurbach, Senior Account Manager, Search and Audience Insights, Seer Interactive.

“So, in 2020, I recommend you go and sit down with your customers,” Gurbach said. “Talk to them, ask them to tell you about their journey to purchase, how they used search, what they thought of your site. Use that data in every decision you make.”

User-focused optimization can only truly be done by integrating SEO into a holistic marketing strategy. Ryan Jones, SEO Group Director, Publicis Sapient, said this will be the biggest trend in 2020.

“Now, more than ever, companies are going to have to stop treating SEO as a condiment that they just add on to their digital strategy, and instead treat it as a key ingredient of their business plan,” Jones said. “SEOs are going to have to grow their skillsets to understand the full marketing and digital stack. It’s going to be less about fixing SEO issues and more about fixing marketing and business issues.”

Trend #2: High-Quality, Optimized Content

Anna Crowe, Assistant Editor, Search Engine Journal, said there is one thing that has been and will continue to be the lifeblood of SEO:

Content.

“Content affects everything in SEO,” Crowe said. “From your site structure and internal linking strategy to the types of links you build.”

To succeed in 2020, you will have to write something that is relevant and valuable, said Tony Wright, CEO, WrightIMC.

“This means that SEOs need to learn how to write or hire people who know how to write,” Wright said. “Google’s editorial discretion isn’t perfect yet – there will still be content that ranks that shouldn’t. But the day is coming when the best content will win.”

Make it your goal to have the best content on the web for your topic, or at least an important subset of your topic, said Eric Enge, General Manager, Perficient Digital. By doing so, you will be future-Google-proofing your business.

“This allows you to compete effectively for long-tail searches (which still remains about 70% of all search queries), will help build your site authority and demand for your content, and can be done in a directly ROI positive way,” Enge said. “In addition, this type of approach to content is exactly what Google is looking for to satisfy user needs and represents the type of market investment that Google will likely never make, because Google is about doing things with massively scalable algorithms.”

Jesse McDonald, Global SEO Strategist, IBM, and Jessica Levenson, SEO & Content Strategy Consultant, both said 2020 is the time to move away from the obsession with keywords. Stop targeting individual keywords, chasing pageviews, and “spraying and praying” with content.

McDonald said to focus more on topics.

“The goal of switching the mentality to more of a topic-focus is to create content that addresses an entire conversation holistically as opposed to just worrying about the single keyword a page should be targeting,” McDonald said.

Levenson said to adopt a deliberate and methodically organized cluster of content that delivers comprehensive and intuitive topical experiences while meeting business objectives.

“Know what answers the user needs next,” Levenson said. “Boiled down:

Understand who your audience is and how they search.
Understand the intent behind the questions they are asking or problems they need to solve.
Give them solutions or answers in the formats they prefer via on-point, quality, and authoritative content.
Execute in this fashion for every stage of their journey to create a satisfactory topical experience that serves their needs again and again.
Iterate because just because you do it well once doesn’t mean intent won’t change or someone else won’t do something better.”
Another thing to watch out for, according to Aja Frost, Head of Content SEO, HubSpot: content cannibalization.

“I’d recommend auditing all of your content for overlapping rankings and merging, redirecting, and archiving as needed so every page ranks for a unique set of keywords,” Frost said. “If your website covers the same topics again and again, even if you’re covering these topics from different angles, your pages are going to knock each other out of the results.”

In 2020, it’s time to take a hard look at the quality of your content – and optimizing that content for users rather than search engines, said Michelle Robbins, VP Product & Innovation, Aimclear.

“In a way, the key to staying successful in search marketing 2020 is the same as it ever was – put out good content, with consistent brand messaging, in all your channels,” Robbins said. “As the search engines become ever more adapted to natural language understanding, the best-written content – in all forms – will win the day.”

And in the world of international SEO, the time is now to invest in good localization of content, said Motoko Hunt, President, AJPR.

“Many global websites have poorly translated content that hasn’t been edited for the local tongue,” Hunt said. “It’s not the placement of the keywords, it’s about how well your content is written for the local audience.

Trend #3: E-A-T & Your Unfair Advantage

In 2020, Google will continue to look at the overall reputation and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of a given company and the individuals who publish content on behalf of that company, said Lily Ray, SEO Director, Path Interactive.

“Companies that struggle with a poor reputation, customer service issues or other trust issues will have a harder time competing,” Ray said. “These trust issues not only manifest themselves as reviews and feedback about your brand, but they also take the form of technical or security issues on your site.”

Ray expects that it will become increasingly difficult to receive organic visibility for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) queries without the proper expertise and credentials to write on those topics.

Trustworthiness will be super important for publishers in 2020, said Grace Kindred, Junior Technical SEO Analyst, News UK.

“There will be a strong focus on quality content and fighting against fake news,” Kindred said. “It will be more important than ever to focus on the trust value of authors (verifying authors and showing their authority for particular subjects) and sites as a whole.”

According to Loren Baker, Founder, Search Engine Journal, opening up nofollow as a hint was an attempt by Google to better understand the sources of news stories, the sources, and references in large papers and academic study.

“Match that with the credentials of the author (which can be defined by structured data markup) and any fact-checking oriented schema, and we have an easier way for Google to weigh authority and trustworthiness of a piece of content, whether a news or publishing story,” Baker said.

Put simply: The offline is coming online, said Jason Barnard, Owner, Kalicube.pro. Every business needs to find its unfair advantage.

“With entity-based search, the Knowledge Graph and the rise of E-A-T, our capacity to create an accurate and convincing online representation of our offline world will become a major differentiating factor,” Barnard said. “All those offline events, conferences, awards, partnerships, etc. that Google cannot see suddenly take on enormous importance. Pull them online and push them to Google to feed its need for understanding and credibility.”

Alexis Sanders, SEO Senior Manager, Merkle, shared a few ways to have a digitally-based competitive advantage:

Supply chain excellence (e.g., delivering within 2-days (or less) with relevant status updates).
Customer service (e.g., ability to answer the user’s question with minimal friction).
Digital charisma / branding (e.g., Having users seek you out, because they want to do business with you? Do most of your reviews look more like love letters?).
User experience (e.g., is your experience more convenient / useful / simple?).
Price.
Niche products.

Trend #4: UX & Technical SEO

The biggest trend that smart SEO professionals should focus on in 2020 for greater success is UX – user experience, according to Brock Murray, Co-founder, seoplus+.

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“This includes the overall experience from the initial interaction in the SERPs, to the overall landing page experience, and even the experience after they leave your site (think remarketing, drip campaigns, personalization for returning users),” Murray said. “Think about how you can help your users have the best possible experience while truly pondering what value you can provide to them during their visit. ”

Technical SEO is a key piece of the UX discussion, according to Goode.

“While I believe Google will do a lot to compensate for our site’s own poor technical foundations (e.g., canonical corrections, hreflang corrections, etc.), it’s going to become increasingly more important for SEOs to focus on shoring up their technical foundations,” Goode said. ”I don’t think it’s accidental that Martin Splitt spends as much time as he does promoting good technical best practices from Google’s perspective. We should consider that a signal in and of itself.”

When we talk about technical SEO and UX, you have to talk about site speed and page speed.

Dan Taylor, SEO Account Director, SALT.agency, noted that Google has reinvigorated discussions and focus around site speed, with the new Chrome “slow warning badges”, and the speed reports in Google Search Console.

“This for many will reignite conversations with developers and in some cases lead to systems requiring almost complete redesigns of page templates and reengineering of how assets are loaded,” Taylor said.

Going further in the technical realm, Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant & Founder, Orainti, expects to see a further shift to a more technical SEO ecosystem, fueled by more JavaScript frameworks usage, PWAs, and a need for SEO automation for bigger websites.

“This already started since a few years ago but has become far more obvious this year,” Solis said. “In 2020, it will only get bigger with the popularization of JS frameworks, app first businesses that will also more strongly shift to the web due to the benefits of PWAs, and the need for SEO task automation for bigger sites where machine learning with Python can provide a solution.”

Trend #5: Mobile SEO

Surprised to see mobile SEO as an important 2020 trend? Don’t be. As Wright put it:

“Almost every prospect coming into our shop has a mobile site that is a mess,” Wright said. “To survive in 2020, you need to implement 2017 tactics and fix your mobile.”

What’s that mean?

“Build sites for mobile-first, then make them compatible for desktop,” Kindred said. “That way those sites don’t have to be optimized for speed after launch.

Kris Jones, Founder / CEO, LSEO.com, said if you don’t have a mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized website, you need to take action immediately. You can’t wait any longer.

“All of your online reporting must reflect insights into your mobile performance as a priority,” Jones said. “Instead of visualizing a person sitting at a desktop computer you have to realize that most of the time people will find your website via a mobile device.”

But mobile SEO doesn’t stop there. Study the mobile SERPs.

“SEOs need to be looking at real, mobile search results, to know what they are up against, what kind of traffic they can expect, and what kind of optimization will actually be successful at impacting the bottom line,” said Cindy Krum, CEO, MobileMoxie

Trend #6: Structured Data

We know high-quality content will be important in 2020. However, algorithms still don’t fully understand context.

So we need to give search engines “hints” to better understand and deliver results, based on a searcher’s intent, said Jeremy Knauff, CEO, Spartan Media.

“This means structuring the data in a way that helps search engines to better understand not only what is on a page, but also how each element relates to other elements on the page, and how that page relates to other pages within the website,” Knauff said.

Ultimately, you want to be understood, found by your customers through any channel and be well-positioned to take advantage of future features from Google and other structured data consumers like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and AI Chatbots, said Martha van Berkel, CEO, Schema App.

“Done right, structured data becomes your marketing data layer,” van Berkel said. “It will allow you to publish your content for any machine/search engine/voice assistant/chatbot with context to provide service to your customers across any surface and at any moment of interaction.

“Smart SEOs will start leveraging their structured data to enhance their analytics so that they can gauge what part of their content is driving results and use this data to influence content strategy, marketing strategy, product features and more, across their companies,” she added.

Also, don’t assume that because you marked up all the most common data in early 2019, you are good, said Shelly Fagin, SEO, Highly Searched / Brand Ambassador, SEMrush.

“New types of markup are continuously being added or improved upon,” Fagin said. “I also expect to see a lot more manual penalties related to poor implementations of structured data. Don’t automatically trust some plugin you’ve installed to structure your data correctly.”

Trend #7: Entity & Knowledge Graph Optimization

The search of the future increasingly is about real-world objects, said Bill Slawski, Director of SEO Research, Go Fish Digital.

“Google is finding ways to include entity related information in search results through things such as augmentation queries,” Slawski said. “You can optimize entities that your site is about by doing things such as optimizing those for Google’s Knowledge Graph and making sure that they appear in Knowledge Panels.”

As pointed out by Greg Gifford, VP of Search, SearchLab Chicago, local search is the forefront of entity-based search, so everyone should pay attention to what’s happening in this space.

“Local SEO has been entity-based for years – you’ve always been able to rank local businesses even if they don’t have a website,” Gifford said. “Google is tracking real-world visits already and recently received a patent for using ‘quality visits’ as a ranking signal.”

Dixon Jones, Founder, DHJ Ventures, said you need to tie large amounts of your cornerstone content to definite entities, which Google either recognizes or doesn’t. Writing around semantically close entities helps to better answer user journeys not just through better content, but also content that Google can see will be a good result.

“I think in 2020, internal linking will come to the fore, but again based around things, not strings,” Jones said. “Understanding the unique knowledge graph our web presence makes will empower us to be able to link those concepts together better within the content under our control, to the benefit of users and crawlers alike.”

Want your brand or business be seen as an entity? Here’s some advice from Alina Benny, SEO & Content Lead, Nextiva:

“If you publish original industry reports, compile new expert advice, and are among one of the dominant voices in the market, Google will start seeing you as an entity,” Benny said. “It’s these entity-related signals that are going to help you keep ranking.”

Trend #8: Link Building & Brand Building

Want to acquire top-tier links in 2020? Shannon McGuirk, Head of PR and Content, Aira Digital, said it’s time to move link building from the dark ages into a consumer-first approach for 2020.

That means focusing on three types of journalistic writing:

Planned editorial: Topics that are covered by journalists every single year at a given point (e.g., Black Friday, Valentine’s Day).
Planned reactive editorial: Features written by journalists on a topic that ties to a seasonal event or theme that we know is being covered due to time frame, but we don’t know the exact story until editors or journalists write it on the morning of their editorial meeting.
Reactive editorial: Features written in the here and now that are unplanned and can’t be predicted and are dictated due to a news story breaking.
Carrie Rose, Co-founder / Creative Director, Rise at Seven, said link building will be more about brand building in 2020.

“The responsibility will fall on SEOs to build links and media placements that drive traffic and push brand, not just links that help with search rankings,” Rose said. “Now our link building activity has to be on-brand, or there’s a realistic chance that there won’t be any brand-building activity at all.”

Building a brand people trust and want to do business with is essential, according to Casie Gillette, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, KoMarketing.

“Customers are getting smarter and they expect more when it comes to marketing,” Gillette said. “The more they trust you, the more they are willing to share your content (links), talk about you (value), and buy your products (revenue).”

Trend #9: Focus on Visibility, Not Just Blue Links

Zero-click searches have been a big reality in 2019. On-SERP SEO will only continue to grow in importance in 2020.

Thus, adapting to zero-click searches will be key, according to Cyrus Shepard, Founder, Zyppy.

“More and more brand marketing is happening on Google itself, and not necessarily on your website,” Shepard said. “Smart marketers will need to learn how to adapt and take advantage of this by getting more strategic about the information shown in search snippets.

Shepard said this includes basic tactics to increase actual clicks over impressions, such as featured snippet optimization, using newer schemas (e.g., FAQ and HowTo), image targeting, and favicon optimization.

But it’s more than just zero-click searches we need to plan for in 2020. We need to optimize for much more than blue links, Krum said.

“Ranking number 1 under a Knowledge Graph, Found on the Web or a Featured Snippet is different than ranking number 1 without those things,” Krum said. “Similarly, even if you are not in Position 1, ranking just below a People Also Ask result or Interesting Finds will not get as much traffic, because those things look better and thus, drive more clicks in the search result.

“Further, I think we will continue to see more localization in search results, with more Map Packs, News and Events ranking and taking clicks from traditional organic rankings,” she added.

Trend #10: Programming

In 2020, you should tap into programming languages like Python and R to eliminate your most time-consuming and redundant tasks, according to Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist, Moz.

SEO automation will free you up to harness the power of marketing fundamentals:

Branding.
Creating great customer experiences.
Storytelling.
Speaking your customer’s language.
Listening to your target market & providing thoughtful/timely responses.
Providing easy to consume content (in the way in which your users want it).
Being human.
As Paul Shapiro, Head of SEO, Catalyst, put it: Programming makes SEOs better SEOs. And we’re starting to really see increased adoption.

“There are real advantages to moving beyond Excel for analysis. It permits a more sophisticated analysis of your own data, as well as the ability to:

Incorporate other data sources for insights.
Apply machine learning to solve complex problems.
Make decisions that normally would be difficult and require human input (for which there is limited time to provide human input).”

Want More SEO Trends & Insights for 2020?

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/

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Reasons Why Guest Posting Is An Advantage

Writing is a passion for many (like yours truly!). It’s a hobby that crosses back and forth from the personal zone to the realms of professionalism. The trend of micro blogging is as old as Web 2.0. Writers with an opinion to share, find it a very convenient and hassle free to voice them.

As time has elapsed and blog posts have gained popularity through their various topics and discussions (read comments), Savvy marketers saw this as a great opportunity and jumped aboard the bandwagon. At the same time search engines had changed their algorithms in a manner wherein importance was given to updates. Thus, staying in the news was a useful way of ranking on the SERPs. What better way, than to write meaningful subject matter that readers find relevant enough to share with their fellow peers.

Bloggers as well as small business enterprises who had some web presence found it to their advantage to allow other bloggers to write about subject matter that catered to their niche audiences. For bloggers it was a welcome respite when they allowed other writers to voice an opinion with a different perspective on the same topic. This enabled the readers a 360 degree perspective thus leading to further discussion and shares.

A cycle of sharing and writing was created which in the internet terms means quality link juice that search engines take into consideration thus contributing to it figuring still higher on SERPs. And so the cycle continues.

What is Guest Posting?

Simply put, Guest posting means writing articles or blog posts for other websites. There are innumerable websites that require authentic and originally written posts on topics which are relevant to their website. At the same time the guest writer might have a website that has some relevance to the blogging site, thus allowing for a mutual benefit. Blogging site permits for back links in the author’s bio to ensure that the writer is an authentic one and at the same time the links ensure that the guest blogger can take advantage of the traffic that the blogging site attracts.

For instance an e-commerce website that offers high end kitchen appliances would love blog posts on categories such as cooking using their appliances, recipes for diet conscious persons, baking, restaurants that offer different cuisine, recipes as per the season etc. This will help the site to attract potential customers who are searching for the keywords listed within the topic.

Advantages Of Guest Posting

A detailed discussion on how guest posts are advantageous for the guest bloggers and the blog site is presented here:

1. Establish Authority

Quality of blog posts is of great importance for making a website popular and relevant. By encouraging well written and authoritative blog posts and articles, a website stands to establish itself as an authority on the subject. The search bots love sites that have authentic information to offer. The guest blogger benefits from posting on sites that promote authentic articles by way of exposure to the readers of a niche category who are genuinely looking for information. Thus the guest blogger establishes His/Her authority as a quality writer.

2. More Link Juice

A website is of no use if it does not earn a single dime. It’s a fact that no one can afford to ignore. Hosting a website entails utilizing resources – time, efforts as well as money. Why waste the efforts? By guest posting you will earn not only money, but will also figure on the higher pages of the search engine results.

How? Well, one of the many criteria for search engines is the quality of links that point towards a website. These are called off page links. The more links you have from relevant websites that point towards your site, the greater your chances are in making it to the the top ten or so list on the search results page. By guest posting on websites that are related to or are similar to your website you are increasing the level of ranking via quality back links.

3. Improves Writing Skills

There are great writers and then there are Great Writers. No one is perfect in writing great stuff from the go. Great writers have one thing in common. They practiced to arrive at their masterpiece. Write and blog about topics that really interest you and have a genuine readership. By combining these magical ingredients, you will certainly succeed in creating a niche readership. Blogging sites are always on the lookout for genuine and authoritatively written articles. Your writing skills will ensure them legitimate traffic thus improving their rankings and traffic conversion ratio. Hence, practice and practice even more.

4. Social Networking Benefits

In the Web 2.0 age, it is only logical to link your content and become part of the ‘inner circle’. Guest posts are shared by readers and discussed about on a variety of social networking sites and forums. This allows a writer to understand different perspectives on the same subject thus adding to his/her knowledge base which in turn makes him/her a better writer.

5. Website Financer

Though making only money is frowned upon by the blogging community, it is beneficial if you are paid for writing authentic guest blogs, directly or indirectly. Writing guest blogs should be mutually beneficial. As mentioned earlier, hosting site costs money. An e-commerce blog is based on the profitability module; it makes no sense for it to not earn money! Of course, by encouraging guest blogging a site offers a quality value added service to its audiences. But if the audiences do not convert, the website might as well shut down and save upon the resources or put them to more profitable uses.

For the guest blogger, writing for websites that are based on profitability would mean earning a steady income to run the site he/she hosts. It also attracts potential customers if it is a site that offers complementary products to the blogging site it has guest posted on. E.g. A guest blogger whose site caters to servicing of electronic items would benefit by writing about How to Keep Your Air Conditioners in Working Order during Summer and posting it on an e-commerce site that sells air conditioners!

6. Branding

Guest Posting is a great way of building your own brand name. You have the idea. You have the content. You just have no way of telling others about it. Guest posting will ensure that you share your ideas with readers who are genuinely interested in the information you have to offer. Your niche writing establishes you as a brand. Many websites publish the author’s picture to lend authenticity to the posts. Thus you have the guest blogger as a brand by itself!

7. Encourages Reciprocal Writing

A community of writers is born due to guest blogging. A guest blogger more or less gives another blogger a break by writing on his/her blog! It helps to offer a different perspective to the bloggers site. And a long term relation is established which in future would mean that the blogger would be more than happy to offer you his/her guest post.

8. Awareness

For people, who feel sour at the mention of ‘money’, we have a reason to make you smile – guest blogging is also not about only making money. It is also about making readers aware about various issues that affect them in real life. Many web revolutions have been spawned due to heartfelt write ups written by bloggers only with the intention of creating awareness.

Guest posting is an excellent means of communicating with the right people for the right reasons. Its advantages cannot be ignored by a writer/blogger. It offers budding writers an opportunity to express themselves via guest blogs which otherwise they would not have a chance to do so. It encourages good writers to voice their opinions on various subject matters to kick start a healthy discussion. Authority writers cannot ignore guest posting as it allows them a chance to increase their brand awareness and reaching out to the ever growing community of internet users.

Divya has written various guest articles on various topics such as social media optimization, logo designing, web design, website content writing to name a few under the tutelage of a website marketing company that has been offering internet marketing services for the past six years.

Source: https://www.brandingpersonality.com/

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How SEO Will Change in 2020?

Are you ready for SEO in 2020? I know you’re probably saying, “But Eric, 2020 is months away! Why do I need to worry about that now?” I’ll tell you why. Things are going to change in a big way and if you aren’t preparing now, you’re going to miss the boat.

The biggest change to SEO next year is going to be the growth of voice search. Consider these statistics:

- 31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice technology at least once a week

- 50% of all online searches will be voice-based by 2020

- 55% of U.S. households will have a smart speaker by 2022

Are you getting nervous yet? You should be. With voice search on a smartphone or desktop, it’s still good enough to have your links appear on the first page of Google search results. But on a smart speaker, it’s not enough.

If you’re not worried yet, let me lay it out for you: When voice search overtakes text search, only one search result will matter. If it’s not you, you’re going to lose, big time.

Now that I’ve probably totally freaked you out – and I hope I have, because this is serious – let me tell you what to do about it.

Always Aim for Google’s Featured Snippet

When you Google something now, you usually get a box where your query is answered, either in a paragraph, list or table. That’s called the featured snippet. In almost every case, the answer box text is pulled from one of the top 10 search results for that query. About 40% of Google Home results come from the featured snippet.

How SEO Will Change in 2020

This information is from yoga purveyor Gaiam, and it’s the second search result for the term. The snippet gives you a nice 4-step beginner’s guide to meditation with images. Because it’s so thorough, it pushes the actual search results way down, below YouTube video results and the “People Also Ask” section.

This is actually a good snippet for SEO, because it doesn’t give you all the information that you need in order to meditate; you have to click over for the rest of the information. But if I want to know how old Taylor Swift is?

You can see how that’s a problem for SEO. There’s my answer – no need to click anywhere or even figure out where the information originated.

To further complicate things, smart speakers don’t all use the same algorithms for answering queries. If I’m Gaiam, I’m happy with that spot on Google, but when you ask Alexa the same question, you get directed to wikiHow’s How to Meditate for Beginners.

WikiHow’s content is also a first page result for “how do you meditate,” but it’s much farther down than Gaiam. The smart speakers are optimizing results based on what works best for voice, and Google will likely follow suit as voice search grows in popularity.

Here’s how you get into Google’s featured snippet spot and dominate voice search:

Focus on long-tail keywords. Whenever you create a piece of content, think about the questions that your readers have and how they ask them. Those are the phrases you should aim for.

Make sure your title tags and headers ask the exact question as the keyword search. If your article is “The Ultimate Guide to Work-Life Balance” and you want your snippet to answer the question “What Is Work-Life Balance?” then make that your title tag – which doesn’t have to be the same as your headline. Then repeat the question in your first header and immediately answer it.

Answer the question succinctly. The average paragraph length in a featured snippet is 40-60 words, so make sure to answer your keyword question as clearly and succinctly as possible.

These are good strategies to use when creating new content, but it’s also a good idea to go back and optimize old content, especially your most popular, evergreen pieces. Again, think of the main question that each article or blog post answers, and optimize for that.

You might already have featured snippets that link back to your website and not know it. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool can give you that information without your having to manually look up every keyword you rank for in Google:

If you do find out that you have content in featured snippets, don’t think that your work is done. You need to lock that down. Make sure that your content hits all the bullets I listed above, because if it doesn’t, it won’t be long until someone else creates something that does. Make sure there’s no room for competition in that spot.

Focus on Building a Brand

A lot of people don’t think of brand building as a way to positively impact SEO, but it absolutely does. Branding gives you authority and trust, two things that search engines look at when determining where your content is ranked.

One of the big factors in Google’s algorithm is brand queries. You want to make sure that most – if not all – of the first page real estate for searches for your brand is made up of your own links. And you definitely want to make sure that nothing negative about your brand comes up there:

Single Grain on Google

So how do you build a brand? You take an omnichannel approach to marketing. By using several different platforms for your marketing, like blogs, social media and podcasts, you’re building brand awareness and also giving Google more brand links to index. It’s a win-win.

The more first page results your brand has for search terms related to it, the better positioned you’ll be when voice search takes over. You’ll have full control over the messaging.

Building your brand also means that you’ll get more links, which are one of the most important ranking factors on Google. Social shares and inbound links from websites with authority count for a lot.

Start building relationships with potential customers and deepen relationships with existing ones, but also reach out to influencers and experts in your niche. If you can get them to share your content, you’ll build your brand much more quickly.

Install Amazon Polly on Your Website

Amazon Polly is a speech recognition tool that will read a piece of content out loud for you. It’s available as a WordPress plug-in, so it’s easy to integrate with blog posts. We added it to some of our content, and it increased dwell time on our website by 19%. And dwell time is an important factor for SEO.

Some people like to read content, while others prefer to listen to it. With Amazon Polly, anyone who visits your website has both options. And they’ll stick around as long as the content is interesting, useful and easily consumed.

Having your content already optimized for voice can only help you when search moves that way completely. In the meantime, your content will get ranked higher because more people are engaging with it.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Remember that earlier stat that 31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice technology at least once a week? Do you think Google is going to serve them up a result that isn’t mobile-friendly? No way.

You can check whether or not your website is fully optimized for mobile with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Here’s what it looks like:

Mobile friendly page

If your site doesn’t pass Google’s test, you’ll need to make some adjustments. If you use a CMS like WordPress for your website, try switching to a new theme that’s responsive – meaning that it will have a flexible layout that allows it to reconfigure for different screen sizes and still look great.

When creating mobile-friendly content, keep these principles in mind:

Keep paragraphs short: ideally two or three sentences

Break up text with headers: every 2-3 paragraphs, introduce the next idea with a header for easier scanning.

Use bullets and numbered lists: help break up blocks of text by displaying multiple related ideas in list form (like this one!)

If you don’t have the chops to write mobile- and SEO-friendly content yourself, hand it off to someone else within the company or outsource it to a freelancer or agency.

When optimizing for voice search, it’s important to have the best content, not the most. One long-form article that clocks in at 2,500 words will do much more for you than four 500-word blog posts that barely scratch the surface of a topic. Content is an investment and if you do it right, you’ll recoup the money you put into it and then some.

Backlinko’s Voice Search Ranking Factors Study

Backlinko recently analyzed 10,000 Google Home results to learn about voice SEO, and they found out that there are some other factors that help determine who gets the coveted spot, including:

Page speed: The average voice search result page loads in 4.6 seconds. This is 52% faster than the average page.

HTTPS over HTTP: More than 70% of Google Home results had HTTPS.

Social engagement: The average voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets.

Word count: The average word count of a voice search result page is 2,312 words. This is slightly higher than on Google, which is 1,890 words.

Reading difficulty: The average Google voice search result is written at a 9th grade level.

There’s tons of great information in the study and I highly recommend you read it all. But definitely try to incorporate these takeaways into your voice SEO strategy.

Source: https://www.singlegrain.com/

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What Is Corporate SEO?

Most of us are familiar with SEO in general, but corporate SEO is a bit of a different animal. There are all kinds of SEO best practices that work just as well for smaller enterprises as they do for large corporations, but how they play out can be very different.

What makes corporate SEO different?

Large corporations already have some instinctive trust from Google (usually, at least), so any changes go into place faster than they would with a newer and smaller company. They can also make a much bigger difference, for good or bad.

When you're doing corporate SEO then, it's essential that you be 100 percent sure before you make any changes. Remember that any change will go live quickly; it's going to immediately affect results and levels of trust. And it has to work across a large and sprawling website that may have to index thousands of pages.

Elements of SEO

No matter what size of company you're running, there are two sides to SEO you need to pay attention to. The first is on-page SEO, which includes blogs, internal linking, optimizing your title tags and metadata, and general content.

Then you have off-page SEO, which includes link building, social media outreach, and more. In corporate SEO, on-page is the most crucial are to work on, and the place where you’ll need expert help from resources like https://linkgraph.io.

On page corporate SEO

Because Google ranks pages and not sites, every page on your corporate website is important. Having enormous authority on your homepage is great, but it won’t help much if your sub-pages aren’t ranking well.

Internal linking is one of the key areas where most large corporate sites can improve their SEO. One reason many haven’t worked on this already is that doing it right requires a serious investment of time for a large site.

You first have to find pages that are relevant for the keyword phrases you need to use and optimize them for those phrases. Then you need to link to the target word used on another page to bring people to your optimized page.

If you have hundreds of web pages, getting this done takes a lot of time and care. Once the links are in place, you then need to set up a site map and index to help web crawlers find your content and index it the way you want.

Off page corporate SEO

Getting quality links is arguably the most important part of off-page SEO for a major corporation. Google cares more about what others are saying about you then about what you say about yourself. A large corporation should be regularly referenced as an authority by others in the digital space.

Keep in mind that you need quality links. The best links are one-way links — that is, others linking to you without you necessarily having to link back. The best links also happen naturally and in context. Instead of anchor text that says "visit X today", you want anchor text that naturally references key terms that your site is optimized for.

The number of links you have is important to. Too many can look bad, but too few is even worse. To get the links you need, start by using trusted directories like Yahoo or business.com. Submit several pages relevant to what people might be searching for in those directories.

It also pays to visit small publications and organizations related to your industry and get them to link to you. If you have sponsors or partners related to your business, getting links from them, and particularly to the sub-pages you want to promote, is a great way to build a solid off-page corporate SEO link strategy.

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3 Important SEO Tips for Your Website

Any business that wants to increase the leads and sales they get through their website and other online platforms, must invest time and effort into search engine optimization. SEO tactics, such as using keywords, building links, and creating new content, can help a company’s website move up in ranking on search engine results pages. But this isn’t always an easy task. So whether you’re just getting started on SEO or are looking to improve your search engine rankings, here are a few important SEO tips you should know.

Understand the importance of user experience

Consumers have a lot to do with how a website ends up ranking in search engine results pages. Google uses tools to analyze how users interact with a website. If they click on a link and immediately click off of it, Google is going to see this as a site that should go down in the rankings. This is why it’s important to focus on user experience.

When a consumer visits a site, it should load quickly, be easy to navigate, and provide the right information. Businesses should start by making sure their pages load quickly, because if consumers have to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load, they’re not likely to stay. Instead they’ll go to another site. Bounce rate can have a huge impact on rankings. Aside from page speed, businesses should focus on other ways to keep visitors on their site for more than a few minutes. Making the navigation bar simple, providing a lot of great content for visitors to read and look at, and having a great call-to-action will all help increase dwell time.

All in all, businesses should ensure their website is set up to provide the best user experience possible. When consumers click on a site’s link in the search engine results page and actually stay on that site for a while, that shows Google that the site deserves to stay at or increase its ranking. Without a good user experience, sites will lose rankings quickly.

Consider using video marketing

Businesses should create different types of content for their website. Many companies focus on publishing news articles, company updates, and evergreen content for their site visitors to read and gain valuable information from. But aside from written content, what other kind of content should businesses create?

Consider starting with video content. While many businesses focus on written content because it can include keywords, video content can also bring in a lot of online traffic. Companies can add videos to pages or even replace poor content with video content. Creating a few high-quality videos allows companies to create content that is actually engaging. Yes, written content can provide great information and be interesting to consumers, but seeing people within the company and hearing their voices shows consumers that the company actually cares about their audience. This type of content can be meaningful and impressive as well as fun to make.

Create content for your audience, not search engines

One of the biggest SEO mistakes companies can make is creating content for a search engine and not for actual people. Many businesses think that if they stuff enough keywords into their content and have a ton of links that this will help improve their rankings. But this can actually end up doing the opposite. Businesses should be creating content for humans. After all, consumers are the ones actually reading the content.

When businesses create content for humans, consumers are going to be more likely to contact the company and make a purchase. Keywords and links are certainly important to help the website show up in a consumer’s search engine results, but it won’t go any further if people aren’t actually reading the website’s content and engaging with the company.

SEO can be complex, and it may require some time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This is why so many businesses choose to work with an SEO company, such as linkgraph.io, for professional help. SEO companies know what businesses should be focusing on right now, which tactics no longer work, and how to build an SEO plan with specific goals in mind. So if you want an SEO strategy that will meet your wants and needs, consider working with a reputable SEO company.

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The Ultimate Guide to Do Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business and reach new customers.

While it's critical you employ organic strategies to attract traffic over the long-term, sometimes, you can't properly compete on the SERPs without putting money behind it -- and that's where SEM comes into play.

SEORapidly clearly has an effective SEO strategy, since its "Summer shoes" page ranks first organically. However, their paid "Summer Shoes" ad, circled above, ranks as the first search result overall.

With 35% of product searches starting on Google, and the average Google search lasting only a minute, it's critical your business's product or service appear at the top of a SERP when a user is searching for it. This isn't always possible organically, particularly when other businesses are paying to ensure their products appear above yours. When this is the case, it's critical you invest in a SEM strategy.

Create a Google Ads campaign that makes money for your business using this essential guide.

What is SEM?
SEM, or search engine marketing, is using paid advertising to ensure that your business's products or services are visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). When a user types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a result for that search query.

To ensure you're able to use SEM to properly advertise your products or services on the SERPs, we've cultivated a list of the best SEM tools, as well as the components of a SEM Ad Auction.

Best SEM tools:
- SEMRush
- Google Trends
- Keywordtool.Io
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- SpyFu

1. SEMRush
SEMRush allows you to conduct extensive keyword research, keyword rank tracking, site audits, traffic analysis, and more. SEMRush is a fantastic tool for finding opportunities to rank for long-tail keywords organically, but additionally, you can use the tool for various SEM efforts. For instance, you can use SEMRush to figure out where your competitors are concentrating their marketing efforts, and analyze their regional presence, to figure out how much money you want to put behind certain keywords.

Additionally, SEMRush enables you to discover your main paid search competitors, figure out which keywords they're bidding on, and study the composition of their ads. This is vital information when you're cultivating your own paid strategy and are unsure how to out-rank other businesses on the SERPs.

2. Google Trends
Google Trends allows you to track search volume for a particular keyword across a specific region, language, or time frame -- which can enable you to identify which search terms are trending, and which ones aren't. Since you don't want to put money behind a keyword that's decreasing in popularity, this is an incredibly useful tool for your SEM efforts.

Additionally, particularly if you work for an ecommerce business, the ability to gauge interest in your product or service in a certain geographical area is undoubtedly powerful for ensuring you tailor your paid efforts to specific locations, saving you money in the long-run.

3. Keywordtool.Io
One of the most helpful features of Keywordtool.Io is its ability to tap into Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, Instagram, Twitter, and the App Store, so that you're able to segment your keyword research through various channels and better target your efforts. Additionally, the tool takes your base keyword and provides you with variations of words and phrases, which allows you to cultivate a more extensive list of possible keywords you might want to include in a paid ad.

Using Google Autocomplete to provide relevant keywords for you, the free version of Keywordtool.Io lets you generate up to 750 long-tail keywords and keyword suggestions for every search term. Plus, you can use the tool to analyze search trends on Google, to ensure your desired keywords are increasing in popularity and will continue to serve you well over the long-term.

4. Google Ads Keyword Planner
Since Google is likely where you want your ads to appear, it makes sense to consider using Google Ads Keyword Planner to research relevant keywords for your business, and keep track of how searches for certain keywords change over time. The Keyword Planner will help you narrow down a list of possible keywords to ensure you're choosing the most effective ones for your business.

Additionally, Keyword Planner will give you suggested bid estimates for each keyword, so you can determine which keywords work with your advertising budget. Best of all, once you've found your ideal keywords and are ready to launch an ad campaign, you can do it all from within the tool.

5. SpyFu
Ever wish you could see which keywords your competitors are buying on Google, or check out which ad tests they've run? With SpyFu, you're able to do just that -- simply search a domain, and you'll see every keyword that business has bought on Adwords, every organic keyword for which they've ranked, and every ad variation they've had in the last 12 years. Plus, you can monitor your own paid and SEO rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

How an Ad Auction Works
Once you're ready to invest in SEM, you'll need to enter into an ad auction -- for our purposes, we'll focus on the ad auction in Google Adwords.

In simple terms, every Google ad you see goes through an ad auction before appearing in the SERPs. To enter into an ad auction, you'll first need to identify the keywords you want to bid on, and clarify how much you're willing to spend per click on each of those keywords.

Once Google determines the keywords you bid on are contained within a user's search query, you're entered into the ad auction.

Not every ad will appear on every search related to that keyword. Some keywords don't have enough commercial intent to justify incorporating ads into the page -- for instance, when I type "What is Marketing?" into Google, I don't see any ads appear.

Additionally, even if your keyword is a good fit for an ad, it doesn't mean you'll "win" the bidding. The ad auction considers two main factors when determining which ads to place on the SERP -- your maximum bid, and your ads Quality Score.

A Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. You can find your Quality Score, which is reported on a 1-10 scale, in your keywords' "Status" column in your Google Adwords account. The more relevant your ad is to a user, as well as how likely a user is to click through and have an enjoyable landing page experience, all factor into your overall Quality Score.

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Best SEO Techniques to Rank Your Site

In today’s rapidly shifting world, SEO techniques can change on a dime—and the worst part is, that you might not even know it. Hacks that could have won you a front-page result as recently as 2018 are not only obsolete now, but they may even hurt your website’s rankings. Especially if those so-called “hacks” land your site a Google penalty that’s tough to shift.

That’s why you need to stay on top of the ball in SEO. If not, you’ll fall behind and see your competitors zoom past you in the SERPs.

We spoke with Jacob Warwick, Director of Communications at Skedulo, and Jesse Teske, SEO Manager at YLighting, to get their expert thoughts on the most current SEO tactics, as well as writer and content marketer Puranjay Singh, founder of GrowthSimple.

In this post, we’ve broken down the top SEO techniques to help you skyrocket your rankings and boost your number of monthly visitors from organic search.

But before we dive into the details on improving your web page ranking, let’s take some time to test your current page ranking on search engine results. Head over to Keyword Rank Checker – a tool that you can use to determine your page ranking based on keyword search:

It goes without saying that your goal, as an SEO expert, is make your website reach the  top of this list. Higher rankings equals more organic traffic – people you can convert at a later stage, and boost the overall ROI of your SEO strategy.

Sounds like the dream, right? But if you’re feeling disheartened with the keyword ranking check you just ran, don’t panic.

9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic

1) Improve User Experience Across Your Entire Website

Let’s kick things off with a brief explanation of what Google is here to do. Just like any search engine, they want to show the best results for a user’s query, and if they’re greeting users with a list of irrelevant, low-quality results, they won’t use them again. By the way, Google does this very well, which is why they’re the largest search engine in the world – by far.

You’ll need to think about that constant desire to show the best results when you’re optimizing your website for SEO. Why? The answer is simple: If your site isn’t high-quality enough, you’ll have a tough job ranking for your target keywords.

Nobody wants to land on a spammy website that takes years to load, right? That’s bound to lead to a high bounce rate. And although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that the search engine giant does reward sites that have low bounce rates with higher page ranking.

Google’s reasoning is that if a user spends more time on a page, it’s probably because she found the page useful. And since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

So how can you improve the experience that visitors are having with your website? Unfortunately, reducing your overall bounce rate isn’t as simple as removing a few annoying pop-up ads.

A) Make Your Posts Easy to Read

Ever heard the phrase “formatting content for the web”? To stand any chance at increasing your organic rankings, we need to take that a step further and optimize your content for readability.

Remember: More people reading your content = lower bounce rate = higher organic rankings.

But how do you format your posts for readability? The following formatting tips can help increase the readability of your content:

Shorter paragraphs: Generally speaking, limit each paragraph to 3-4 sentences. It’s even okay to use one-sentence paragraphs if necessary, but use them sparingly or your post will look like a bullet-pointed blog without the bullets. A paragraph is a group of related sentences that support one main idea, so if you split up one paragraph into individual lines, your idea tends to be fragmented and makes it hard to grasp the overall point. 

Mixed sentence lengths: Longer sentences are hard to follow on a computer or phone screen, but they can work well when used sparingly, particularly when mixed with medium and short sentences. Here’s a fantastic example of how sentence structures can be varied for readability:

Sentence and paragraph formatting

Sub-headers: Did you know that the average person spends just 37 seconds reading a piece of online content? You can boost that time significantly by including subheadings to make scanning the article easier. Use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page, along with call-out points that are emphasized in bold. Readers should be able to scan your blog post and get the gist of what you’re talking about.

Bullet points: When you have a lot of data—stats, facts, ideas, examples—packed into one paragraph, it makes it easier to read when you list them with bullet points (like this!).

White space and images: When you visit a web page and are greeted with a huge wall of text, it can feel overwhelming. Prevent your site visitors from overwhelm by breaking up large chunks of text with relevant, supporting media, including photos, videos and graphs (in addition to bullet points and sub-headers).

Write quality content: All these other points are meaningless if your writing is just bad. Good writing is not necessarily about paragraph or sentence length, bullet points, headers and images; good writing is about great ideas and compelling delivery.

B) Use Bucket Brigades to Pique Interest

Originally, a “bucket brigade” was a chain of people who pass buckets of water from person to person to extinguish a fire. Now it's a copywriting technique designed to capture a reader’s interest and then keep them reading the rest of your page (reducing bounce rate), much like the flow of the bucket being passed down the line. 

It essentially involves breaking an idea into multiple sentences, using a trigger word or phrase, and then ending the sentence with a colon to pique interest. Look at this example from Copyhackers:

C) Write in the Inverted Pyramid Style

This method means giving away the most valuable information at the top of the article, and following it up with less important information. If readers tend to scan and rarely make it to the bottom of an article, it makes sense to give them what they want as soon as they land on the page.

D) Analyze (and Improve) Current Page Designs

More often than not, high bounce rates result from poor usability and an awkward user experience (UX). However, it’s tough to figure out where pesky UX problems are an issue because they can vary dramatically from site to site.

E) Site Speed

Back in 2010, Google announced that it would be using site speed as a ranking factor. Fast forward almost a decade and now Google has consistently emphasized the importance of site speed.

Site speed plays a huge role in SEO because people don’t want to wait years to access information they’re searching for.

You should improve your site’s speed not only to work your way up Google’s rankings, but also to increase conversions. One survey found that nearly 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance won’t return to the site to buy again – which could see you losing out on a ton of conversion-rich search traffic who are ready to hand over their hard-earned cash for your product or service.

2) Optimize for Voice Search

Did you know that 50% of all searches will be conducted by voice by next year?

That’s right: Half of all the people heading to Google aren’t typing their queries – they’re using a voice-assisted device to do the job for them.

If you think that's not something you’ll need to factor into your SEO strategy, you're wrong. Voice searchers have different habits than text searchers, and the devices they’re using (whether that’s an Amazon Alexa, Siri or Google Home) take data from SERPs to replay information from the featured snippet box back as their answer.

That’s why our second SEO technique is to optimize your website to answer questions – if you want to target the one in six Americans who own a smart speaker. But how do you do that without overhauling your entire website. Here’s the answer:

A) Write Content Around Long-Tail Keywords

Moz found that voice searchers use long-tail keywords when they’re searching for information through Google, and these terms are 3+ words in length.

B) Use Structured Data

Remember how we said that Google takes information from the featured snippet box and replays that back to voice searchers? Using structured data is a fantastic way to boost the chances of your information being read aloud to your target audience.

There are several types of structured data (also known as Schema markup) that SEOs can use, both of which give Google a quick rundown of what your page is about. That, in turn, helps it to rank better.

Get started by heading over to Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to find out whether you’ve already got Schema implemented.

3) Focus on Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords

Source

Google is evolving – and so is its algorithm. Its objective now is to understand the intention of its users: what they expect, what they’re looking for and, more specifically, what search results would best help answer their query.

But don’t expect your website to end up on the first page of Google simply by creating keyword-focused content. It’s not enough to look at keywords alone. We need to look at the context around them.

Also referred to as “user intent,” you must consider what your users are looking for, rather than coming up with different ways that users can phrase a search query.

Here are two things in particular you should consider:

A) Know Your Target Audience

The type of content you’ll create will depend entirely on your audience. The better you know them — their location, age, interests, etc. — the better the content you’ll create (and the better your SEO).

B) Organize Content into Clusters

Instead of focusing on standalone keywords, organize all your content into different themes. The topic cluster model, created by HubSpot, works by  breaking down your content calendar into topic and clusters.

Using that content strategy satisfies user intent since they’re getting information they’re searching for, while also creating a library of internally linked content that Google’s spiders will crawl, understand and use to rank each page.

C) Research Keywords and Use Them Sparingly

Confused why we’re listing keyword research as an SEO technique when we’ve told you to focus on topic clusters, rather than keywords? Because keywords still matter.

Organizing content thematically is very important, but it’s a mistake to ignore keywords entirely, given that they serve as signposts to Google’s spiders, signaling topics and giving hints as to the nature of the content on the website.

Marketers now face a struggle to find accurate search volume data with Google Ads hiding those results (unless you run a PPC campaign). However, there are a number of tricks and tools that can help marketers find topics and volume data.

4) Longer Content Equals Higher Ranking Usually

A recent study by Backlinko concluded that the longer the content, the higher the likelihood of its ranking at the top of the SERPs.

However, writing 2,000+ words for every blog post is not for everyone. It’s an intensive and time-consuming process – but most of all, sometimes it’s not necessary. Remember what we said about satisfying user intent?

Some search queries are by people who aren’t looking to digest a lengthy blog post. Their answer could be a matter of words or a few paragraphs, so the other 1,500+ words you’re pressuring yourself to create might be a total waste of time and energy.

Let’s take the “link building tips” keyword, for example. People searching for that phrase are likely looking for a comprehensive guide to link-building strategies they can use to conquer Google.

People searching for “link building do’s and don’ts”, on the other hand, might not need that lengthy type of content. A simple bullet-pointed list is probably all they’re looking for.

Unfortunately, there’s no hack to determine how long your content should be other than good old-fashioned common sense. Ask yourself what information someone would be looking for if they’re using a keyword you’re targeting, and start from there.

Struggling to find the motivation to write a long-form blog post? Instead of starting from nothing, take an existing page from 1,200 words to 2,000, rather than going from 0 words to 2,000 words.

Existing content already has authority and an established readership. So rather than writing something entirely from scratch, it’s much simpler to find a post of yours that is already doing well on Google, refresh it with updated information and extra content, and rely on existing signals to make it rank for terms.

5) Conquer Video with YouTube SEO

YouTube videos rank in the top 10 of Google search far more often than any other type of video. And, according to Forbes, YouTube is also the second most popular search engine with more than 3 billion searches per month – surpassing Bing, Yahoo, and AOL combined.

Most SEOers forget about YouTube when they think of search engines. But if you’re smart, have a knack for creating engaging videos, and have the time to invest into optimizing each video for YouTube SEO, there’s no reason you can't build a huge audience on that platform. One YouTuber doubled their traffic with the same content after implementing YouTube SEO.

A) Make Your Video SEO-Friendly

Just like Google’s spiders, YouTube’s algorithm works by understanding information about your video. The filename, the title, the description of your uploaded content — all these elements affect your rankings in YouTube search.

Video Title – Crafting a compelling video title is a balancing act — you have to make the title SEO friendly and make it clickable to improve your click-through rate. Ideally, you should follow the same convention in your video titles as you would in your blog posts; to get clicks and shares, include keywords as well as power words. Here’s a great example of a killer title.

B) Make Longer Videos

Like content, longer videos tend to do better in YouTube search. Try it yourself. Type in a popular keyword or topic and see what shows up at the top of the page. 

Notice how all these videos are 5+ minutes long? As with written content, longer videos tend to get the most traction – but remember to think about user intent first.

C) Create Custom Thumbnails

The majority of search engines use click-through rate as a ranking factor. If people are clicking through to your result when they’re searching for a specific term, you must be offering something of value, right?

Optimizing your video with a great thumbnail can help that.

A strong thumbnail should tell viewers exactly what the video is about. Ditch one of YouTube’s screenshots of your video and create a custom thumbnail that uses a compelling image along with a title card. 

6) Build a Variety of Backlinks

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that backlinks are important in the SEO world.

According to Google, links are still the #1 factor when it comes to determining search rank because without them “ranking without links is really, really hard.”

However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking “any link is a good link.” Low-quality links that are easily spammed — blog comments, paid links, etc. — don’t seem to work anymore and can actively harm your site.

Links that are earned — through high-quality content, outreach and influencer marketing — on the other hand, are safe and extremely effective.

7) Get a Grip on Technical Optimization

SEO and content tips aside, it’s absolutely essential to have a solid website, without worrying about any technical issues that may arise. Why would Google rank your site in position #1 if users are greeted with a ton of glitches?

You’ll need to get a grip on your technical SEO in order to rank well in 2019 and beyond using these tips:

A) Switch to HTTPS

It happens when sites don’t have HTTPS – the most commonly used, securest version of the old HTTP web protocol.

Google has started to warn users when they’re visiting non-HTTPS websites, and if you’re yet to make the switch to secure, encrypted connections, you might be turning away a huge chunk of people willing to visit your site.

HTTPS is a best practice that will help your website boost its SEO presence, stay secure, and make it harder for malicious parties to break in and take advantage of your website.

B) Enable AMP for Mobile

AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, began as a Google-backed open initiative to allow publishers to easily create responsive, mobile-optimized content.

It takes information from website pages and displays them in an easy-to-view format for mobile devices.

Envisioned as a way to quickly render content on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, AMP combines three components:

HTML tags: which help common web patterns render quickly

AMP JS: a library that manages the resource loading and best practices necessary for fast rendering

AMP cache: a content delivery network that both loads content and ensures speed

Since AMP was only incorporated into the search giant’s results in February 2016, the format itself is still fairly new. For those of you who use WordPress, AMP should be much easier to implement than a home-grown CMS from scratch.

C) Budget Money for Crawlers

To make sure Google is crawling your preferred pages (and not pages that don’t appear in its index), you might need an extra pair of hands in the form of crawl software. We want to give search engines the best view of our website, right?

These SEO crawler programs are similar to Google’s own crawlers, and will give you an overview of how your page will perform when determining rankings for your target keywords:

Deep Crawl: Possibly the most comprehensive tool of its kind available today, Deep Crawl is the equivalent of a physical exam for your website, checking its SEO health and viability in an increasingly crowded market. Deep Crawl will provide you with a laundry list of necessary improvements and errors, such as: duplicate content, broken pages, flawed titles, descriptions and metadata.

Botify: A cloud-based crawler that has already signed up big names like Expedia and eBay, Botify is one of the strongest crawlers available today, short of Google’s own secret algorithms. Not only can Botify check whether Google has crawled your page, but it can also offer suggestions on how to restructure web content and site maps to optimize your web page for Google’s crawlers.

Botify Analytics

D) Correct Your Semantic Markups

To help Google understand your data, or to show your website smartcards and voice searches, you need to ensure that your semantic markups are correct.

Semantic markups are essentially HTML tags which can help emphasize key information on your website. It tells Google’s spiders what the page is about without needing to digest every word on the page.

Just take heading tags, for instance. Text wrapped in a <h1> tag is the page’s main title, and should give a brief explanation of the entire shared content on that page. Text wrapped in a <h2> tag are subheadings, and so on.

Here’s an example heading structure:

<h1> The Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting

<h2> What is guest posting?

<h3> Benefits of guest blogging

<h3> 5 types of links you can build

<h2> How to write an awesome guest post

<h3> 1. Pick the perfect website

<h3> 2. Send an email pitch

<h3> 3. Write your content

E) Fix “Page Not Found” 404 Errors by Redirecting URLs

Nothing will sink your website faster in search rankings than a 404 error.

Following a link that leads to a 404 page with the text “Error: Not Found” is essentially a dead end. And nobody likes being stuck in a dead end – especially your audience. So it’s in your interest to fix these broken or missing pages and re-engage your users as soon as you can.

First of all, download your backlink profile using a tool like Monitor Backlinks. Backlinks that are pointing to a pesky 404 error page will be highlighted, so sieve them out and head to your Google Analytics dashboard to find out how many page views the 404 error page gets.

You never know – you might find that you’re turning away 300 visitors each month because they’re arriving on your site with a dead end!

Keep those users around by using an SEO plugin like Redirection to redirect URLs of broken links to fully functioning pages. You’ll want to redirect the broken page to the next, most relevant page to make sure they’re not frustrated with landing on a totally different page than they expected.

8) Target Local Searchers with Landing Pages and Listings

Almost half (46%) of all searches on Google are from people looking for local information. That could include:

Local shops

Opening hours

Telephone numbers

Addresses

So, if you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can’t neglect local SEO and listings if you want to stay profitable.

Here are three huge SEO techniques to capture local people who could become your customers. After all, 72% of people who search for local businesses online end up visiting stores within a five mile radius!

A) Double-Check Your Directory Listings

As powerful as search engines like Google or Bing are, they still can’t be everywhere at once, and have to rely on additional information from local, on-the-ground sources.

These sources can include directory listings, which gather, aggregate, and submit relevant data for area businesses – information from physical directories (like Yellow Pages) or scanning business registrations.

In a nutshell: Bigger search engines (like Google) will rely on these data aggregators to fill in the gaps of the existing information that's already in their databases, and will also cross-check to make sure that the facts are up-to-date.

Problems arise, however, when aggregators collect out-of-date data, leading a search engine like Google or Bing to list the wrong information – such as an old address for your business or a disconnected phone number.

9) Know How to Measure SEO Performance

Reporting and analytics are two critical elements of SEO – both of which are indispensable to improving your overall marketing strategies.

Effective reporting means you can understand key questions such as:

What content really appealed to your customer?

What part of the website had the most UX issues?

Which page was the least (or most) visited, and why?

Which on-page SEO changes resulted in the highest rankings?

Which style of keyword should you focus on, in future?

It’s tricky to understand those intricacies (and use them to your advantage to skyrocket your SEO even further) without regularly monitoring and reporting your results.

Here are three tools you can use to conquer exactly that:

A) Data Studio

Interested in gaining the ability to tie online data back to offline data in order to get a full 360 view of how your content and marketing is performing?

Google’s Data Studio helps you to do that by aggregating data (such as rankings, traffic, conversion data) from multiple sources into a single interface. It’s a fantastic SEO tool for internal teams to use, but also a superb way for SEO agencies to share fancy reports with their clients.

But, most importantly, the SEO metrics you’re able to track with Datastudio can help you determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, and assess whether you need to pivot or change tactics to improve on your results.

B) Wayback Machine

Always be on the lookout to see what your competitors are doing and how well it’s working for them. What techniques are they using? How have they changed their approach? What mistakes have they learned from?

One great tool to see how your competition has changed is Wayback Machine, which allows marketers to access petabytes of archived web pages. By sifting through Wayback Machine’s extensive database, you can track the evolution of your competitor’s brand and web presence – taking note of factors such as:

Changes in UX design

Differences in copy from one web version to the next

Movements of key page elements, such as page navigation or calls to action

Still, you shouldn’t implement something just because your competitor is doing it – whether that’s designing a website a certain way or using specific copy or images. You’ve got to use your common sense, combined with industry knowledge, before giving your SEO team the go-ahead to copy their changes.

C) SEMrush

If you’ve followed this guide to a T, you might notice an influx of organic traffic arriving at your website from Google. That’s great news, but how can you find out which keywords are driving the most results?

SEO is rapidly changing from one year to the next, with new algorithms constantly emerging and Google frequently editing their webmaster guidelines. Business owners and marketers have to adapt quickly, but it’s still possible to give your business website the edge on your competition.

Remember to focus on solid content creation and copywriting fundamentals, engage your viewers deeply, and stay abreast of technical trends like backlinks, SEO health, site speed, and schema. And don’t be afraid of using a handful of the AI-based tools we’ve recommended to welcome the emerging AI revolution that’s set to take over the marketing world.

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