Ready to Rank on the First Page of Google? Here Are 8 SEO Trends That Can Make This Happen!
- Who is BERT and what does it think of AI-created content?
- Why are SERPs the most important trend you’ve probably never heard about?
- Why is the EAT principle so hard for some content developers to swallow?
Faster than a speeding acronym, SEO is evolving and changing the rules for success. Since 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google, search engine optimization has been the “Holy Grail” for content marketing. Over the years the algorithmic angst experienced by brands and agencies who manage this task has increased exponentially.
What This Means for You — The biggest challenge for realizing success in content marketing resulting in higher search engine indexing is understanding the rules of engagement. They seem to change daily. If your brand or agency relies on search engines for customer engagement, understanding the SEO trends is paramount. To get a snapshot of these trends, read on.
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Marketing runs on customer engagement and nothing drives engagement like powerful search engine optimization. If you’re looking for images of diginistas (aka the digital workforce), click here to complete your brand’s visual story.
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Beware of BERT
Since we are talking about acronyms, here’s one that attempts to extinguish a polysyllabic hot mess of words. It is BERT. No, this is not one of those Sesame Street characters you or your kids loved to watch on PBS. This BERT is a Google algorithm introduced in 2019, and its short for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.”
According to Search Engine Journal, BERT is a “deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing. It helps a machine to understand what words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.” In other words, this algorithm, which is used on a large body of text, handles tasks such as entity recognition, part of speech tagging, and question-answering among other natural language processes.
Basically, BERT helps Google understand natural language text from the Web.
Simple, right?
Well, no. It’s not. It’s brilliant and it is the primary reason why the parent company of Google – Alphabet – is the fourth largest company in the world, with a market cap of $2.05 trillion.
Periodically, Google announces updates on its criteria for ranking. The most recent announcement occurred in March 2024, and it further deepens Google’s focus on “useful content” while presenting new challenges and opportunities for content creators and SEO experts.
The nuances of this algorithm and the directions from these updates are driving the SEO trends listed below.
Time to Noodle Google – Trend Spotting for SEO
While it is largely taken for granted now, when a question or phrase is typed into the search box of Google, Bing, or other search engines, miraculous things occur automatically. In a couple of seconds, millions of references and incredible amounts of germane information are returned to the person entering the request. This is part and parcel of the genius of the search engine algorithm.
Brands that succeed in garnering engagement for their goods and services by using these engines understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to present digital information in a manner that lends itself to having it show up in these results. Here are 8 trends to help savvy marketers make it to the first page of the search engine rankings.
#1 SERPs Up
SEO specialists are always on the prowl to find the latest “secret sauce” and Matthew Dwight, owner of Dwight Digital has some serious sauce. He notes, “While there are lots of different ranking factors to getting your webpage to pop up on Google and many other different ways to appear on Google, one of the highest converting ways is something called ‘SERPs.’ This acronym stands for: “Search Engine Results Page.” It is simply an excerpt from your website displayed on Google, and it provides the user with the answer to a question or query without ever having to leave Google.
“This is important for a couple of reasons,” he notes. “It gives the user/searcher the credibility that Google believes a source/website is so authoritative in that related space that it’s giving them an ‘exclusive.’ If someone searching on Google sees these excerpts and wants additional information, they’re significantly more likely to click on the link to the site the excerpt was pulled from, versus scrolling further down and looking for other sources or answers. Simply put, you get featured on Google for a specific keyword and most of the traffic searching that keyword will click on your site over your competitors.
“The other important factor relates to how search is evolving. Google recently announced “AI Overviews” noting that it’s already being rolled out across the US and hitting other countries later this year. SERPs are the foundation of AI Overviews.
“Until AIO can truly access all the data in Google Search independently, SERPs will become the most important factor for driving traffic to a site organically. This will become increasingly true as Google rolls this out and it becomes the primary way people search.”
#2 Video Is King
As has been noted in many previous Magnet articles, in every digital media, video rules. Many experts call video content a traffic magnet for SEO. However, for it to work, it must be optimized for search. This involves using video titles, descriptions and on-page SEO.
It is also important to remember that most digital video is consumed on mobile devices while they are set on mute. This makes captions critical to its effectiveness. Click here for more information on the best practices for captions.
#3 Spam Still Sucks
In a LinkedIn post discussing the Google March 2024 update, SEO expert, Mert Erkal notes “Google will prevent sites from generating content using automated or semi-automatic methods to manipulate search results, and it will prevent sites from gaining a reputation through fraudulent or misleading means. Finally, Google will block attempts to manipulate search results using expired domains.
“E-commerce sites containing fake products, misleading information, and SPAM content are among the sites that will be most affected by the update. Also, websites that provide medical advice or sell health products will likely experience ranking losses after the update.
“Finally, sites whose entire content is automatically produced with artificial intelligence will be penalized in rankings. There is already news that many such sites have started to be removed from the Google index.”
#4 What’s the UX?
Sometimes, the little things have a big impact, especially in SEO. According to the daily marketing newsletter, Please Advise, recent Google algorithm updates point to the importance of the user experience – from loading speeds to interactive elements. “If your users are clicking away because the site is too slow or clunky, your rankings will feel it.”
Having images that are optimized for web use can help speed up this process. Stock photo companies such as SuperStock can help with this effort.
#5 Call-And-Response
Blame it on Siri, but voice optimization has become sine qua non for SEO, especially on mobile devices. Voice search queries have become the norm rather than the exception and the best way to take advantage of this trend is to optimize conversational keywords and long-tail phrases.
#6 BERT + AI
As noted above, tools like BERT, Google’s algorithm, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand user intent. This means content must be written naturally and contextually. Ironically, this can require SEO specialists to tweak any copy written by an AI chat bot to ensure it doesn’t read like an AI chat bot wrote it. (See Google Update above.)
#7 Digesting the E-A-T Principle
From the very beginnings of search marketing, engines such as Google rewarded sources that offered original content and references from reputable third parties with better SEO rankings. That remains a constant in the current list of SEO trends.
For Google, rankings are all about expertise and credibility. This means content developers must remember to showcase Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT). This means all content should be well-researched, accurate and written by or backed by experts. This is another argument for careful use of AI in creating content.
#8 Quality Over Quantity
For any content developer with aspirations of having his or her words show up on the first page of the Google rankings, the practice (from the bad ‘ol days) of keyword “stuffing” should be considered anathema. The algorithms are now too smart for this attempt at gaming the system and using these gimmicks can potentially cause serious penalties from the search engines.
The best content for SEO involves a focus on semantic search. It is no longer about cramming in more and more keywords, but rather communicating the meaning about them. As Please Advise notes, “Structuring your content to answer specific questions can help you rank better.”
The Engine That Could
Everyone has had the experience of clicking on Google, moving the cursor to the search block, and beginning to type a query, only to have this see-all, know-all oracle finish the query after one word is typed. To some, this is creepy marketing at its worst. However, most have become inured and accept it as the new normal.
Predictive search is here and has been for some time. All it takes is a couple of words and based on a user’s history of searching and the enormous computational capacity of current technology, the “little engine that could” departs the station and chugs off into the world wide web, returning with a giant cargo of information. Who knew this could happen? Lots did. They just Googled it.
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Great SEO starts with concise messaging and brilliant images. We can help you with the latter. Hit us up for our FREE RESEARCH.
