Satisfy Search Intent
Google BERT uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand the search intent of the users.
So, if you are not keeping search intent in mind while creating your content, chances are Google won’t rank it for the relevant keywords.
When you don’t satisfy search intent, your visitors are unlikely to take profitable action even if Google ranks your content.
For instance, when someone searches for “Search engine optimization”, they are just looking for information.
Whereas, “search engine optimization expert” indicates that they are looking to hire an SEO expert, making it a commercial intent keyword.
Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is an important part of SEO. Whether or not you’ll be successful in getting your desired Google ranking largely depends on your keyword selection.
Google itself says that “words of your query” is an important Google ranking factor.
Otherwise, it would be virtually impossible to find a webpage against a search term (keyword).
More than 50% of searches on Google are zero-click. This means most of the people are getting the information they require on the first page without having to visit any website.
Featured snippets, accordion answers, and Google knowledge graphs are some of the ways Google answers a query itself.
What you can do is, find a profitable keyword and search it on Google. If the first page has multiple ads, frequently asked questions, a knowledge graph, and a featured snippet, avoid that keyword.
This is because even if you get ranked for it, you won’t get clicks. That’s because a lot of search engine real estate is already occupied.
Moreover, find keywords that people are searching for and produce content around them. It’s better to target long-tail keywords as they are less competitive.
Optimize Your Website for Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals are factors that contribute to user-experience. These include page speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.
User-experience is going to be of great importance in 2021. So, websites need to create fast-loading, responsive, and stable webpages.
The loading speed depends on several factors.
- Optimize your images and enable lazy loading to let the browser load your website faster.
- Choosing a good hosting company can also impact your website’s speed.
Responsiveness of your website will be an important search engine optimization factor in the future.
Plus, 50.81% of worldwide website traffic comes from mobile phones. So, create your website mobile-friendly if you want to leverage that audience and score first-page Google ranking.
Create SEO-Friendly Content
No matter how much SEO evolves, nothing can beat high-quality, valuable, and helpful content. It’s the content of your website that helps Google index and rank it.
You can help Google rank your website by using relevant keywords in URLs, titles, descriptions, headings, and articles.
But don’t go overboard. Keyword stuffing can actually get your website penalized.
Optimize for Voice Search
Voice search is growing in popularity, especially on mobile phones. According to Google, voice search is being done on mobile phones by 27% of the worldwide online population.
And, this trend is only going to increase in the coming days. But, the good thing is, you won’t have to do anything different. Just follow the SEO best practices for now.
Leverage the Power of Video Marketing
With 2.3 billion users, YouTube is the second largest search engine. And, since it’s owned by Google, if your videos are optimized, they’ll show up on Google search.
So, if you aren’t doing video marketing, now would be the time.
But, how do you optimize your videos? By using the keywords that people are searching for, in addition to creating high-quality videos, of course.
Search YouTube for a keyword related to your niche. You’ll see several suggestions by YouTube. Those are the keywords that are being searched by people.
Use these keywords in your channel’s title, description, video tags, and video description. But, don’t go overboard. As already mentioned, keyword stuffing is never good.
Plus, embedding a video on your webpage can increase your website’s dwell time (the amount of time a user spends on your page). An increase in dwell time tends to affect your website’s Google ranking positively.
Don’t ignore Influencer SEO
The fact that influencer marketing is earning $6.50 per dollar spent speaks a lot about its effectiveness. A majority of marketers believe that this ROI (return on investment) compares to or is even better than other marketing strategies.
Influencers are content creators whom an online audience follows and trusts. Influencer marketing is basically leveraging that trust.
Influencers are trusted by an audience in a specific niche. It’s more like word-of-mouth marketing, which is why it’s so effective.
Picking the right influencer is arguably the most important step. Make sure to find influencers that have a sizeable audience in your niche and have good engagement with them.
Your budget will also define what size of the audience is suitable for your business. Typically, the larger the audience, the higher you’ll have to invest.
A major advantage of influencer SEO is backlinks. Backlinks will improve your website’s Google ranking. Plus, when your website gets social media shares and engagement, it tends to rank better in search engines.
Final Thoughts
As an online business, you’d want Google to rank your website. While search engine optimization takes time, it’s not as tricky as it may seem.
You’d need to follow a few techniques and provide value to your target customers. To sum up, make sure you follow these strategies:
- Satisfy search intent
- Perform effective keyword research
- Optimize your website for Core Web Vitals
- Leverage the power of Video
- Create SEO-friendly content
- Optimize for voice search
- Don’t ignore influencer marketing