Everyone loves summer vacations, but you don’t want to take a break when it comes to SEO. SEO is an ever-evolving craft. It is growing at breakneck speed, and businesses must keep up with new trends if they do not want to be left behind. Google continues to update its algorithms, requiring business owners to stay on their toes to keep pace.
(Pixabay / Picography)
As you stay vigilant with your efforts heading into summer, here are some trends you can expect to see:
- Optimize for user intent – Keywords are still important. However, search engines today are getting good at identifying user intent as consumers become increasingly aware of what they are looking for. Users enter phrases or full queries in their searches, which require data gathering or heuristics for effective results. To ascend in the search result rankings, you must investigate beyond the keywords to understand what drove users to your page. After gathering research data and determining areas that need improvement, incorporate optimization changes that will boost your ratings. When you continually adjust to keep up with the analytics, your website will stay competitive.
- More rich answers and snippets – Structured data markup or schema markup will help website owners achieve enhanced listings on search engine results pages. The markup helps search engines understand website content in order to display information that will be helpful to users. When Google is asked for instructions, the results feature a direct or rich answer followed by listings of rich snippets that are relevant to the instructions.
- Cross-channel marketing – Cross-channel marketing involves the use of several channels to market your product or brand. Users that browsed products but decided not to purchase can be sent targeted ads based on the searches they conducted. The targeted ads could be sent via social media or email.
- Increased mobile growth – Mobile search keeps on growing and has greatly influenced SEO over the past few years. The distribution of traffic is continuing to shift from desktop to mobile devices. Many websites today get a big chunk of their traffic from mobile devices. Mobile design optimization is now a necessity for website owners.
With summer upon us and new trends developing, stay current and adjust your SEO efforts accordingly.