The Top 10 SEO Trends To Drive More Traffic

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a significant part of digital marketing that directs towards making the website more search-friendly and promoting its rankings in organic search results. There is constant change in SEO, and keeping up with the latest changes can be difficult.

To achieve top-ranking SEO results, several factors are required to be considered, including backlinks, traffic, and social shares. The below list provides information on some of the most important and timely search engine optimization trends to follow this current year, which also helps to plan the SEO strategy accordingly.

The following are the top SEO trends that could drive more traffic:

1. Search Intent

The reason for a search query is known as search intent. To put it another way, why did a person do this search? Further, various questions arise, such as;

• Do people want to gain some knowledge of their search topic?
• Are they trying to buy something?
• Is it possible that they are searching for a specific website?

Earlier, the main emphasis was on keyword optimization. Companies were more concerned with incorporating keywords into their promotion instead of focusing on the accuracy of the details mentioned on the website. Or can say that rather than concentrating on the details associated with those keywords, it was more about integrating keywords.

Now Google has become smarter, focusing on the user’s experience, and delivering search results that provide the best possible results to searchers. Besides, in 2019, the BERT update was released by Google, which shows that searches are better understood than they have ever been.

Thus, simply incorporating keywords into the promotion or campaign is not sufficient. It is essential to have useful knowledge that corresponds to and builds on certain keywords.

The landing pages and content should be tailored as per the target audience and their search intent. It is critical to match user search intent. User search intent is essential for all SEO campaigns for the following four reasons:

• Fulfill the audience’s needs
• One platform full of massive information
• Providing relevant information
• Boost brand awareness by engaging visitors

2. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is important not only for improving SERP rankings but also for capturing traffic. The mobile version of a website would have a major effect on search engine rankings. Most people prefer to access websites via their mobile devices.

These mobile marketing statistics described the most important trends affecting the online marketplace. Mobile’s growth continues to increase, providing businesses, web development agencies, and advertisers with a huge opportunity to attract potential consumers.

Maintaining or improving the SERP ranking needs mobile optimization. The amount of time it takes for the website to load, the font size, the design, the mobile app, and how well the content is customized, and all these aspects contribute to the rating. Furthermore, a mobile-friendly website will complement the overall digital marketing strategy and help with remarketing. Thus, aligning the SEO strategies for the mobile-first segment makes perfect sense.

Designing websites with mobile-friendly components makes them more accessible. However, it is necessary to ensure that the website is easy to navigate and that users who access it via mobile have a better experience by using custom page designs. Mobile users who experience sluggish and cumbersome websites are likely to leave and never return, which sometimes happens on desktop websites. It’s no wonder that this pattern will continue in 2024.

With a feature in the Google Search Console, Google has made it simple to check how well the website loads on mobile devices. By simply entering the website’s URL, Google will inform you if the website is mobile-friendly according to its latest algorithm. Otherwise, plug in the code of the website to see if a newly created website is mobile-friendly before launching it.

3. Core Web Vitals

Google considers Core Web Vitals to be one of the unique aspects that contribute to the overall user experience of the webpage. Three remarkable page speed and user engagement metrics make up Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

These three metrics play a vital role in determining a user’s overall experience while visiting a website. They share information about how quickly a web page loads, how stable it is while loading, and how quickly it becomes interactive. As a result, websites that have better user interfaces make more money.

To put it another way, Google favors websites that provide better user experiences for their users. As a result, if there is a need to improve the SERP scores, make sure the visitors have the best on-page experience possible.

In a nutshell, Core Web Vitals are a subset of aspects that contribute to Google’s “page experience” score (basically, how Google evaluates the page’s overall user experience).

4. Voice Search

While voice search started as a small idea, it has grown to become one of the most talked-about topics in the search industry. The simplicity with which people can search using their voice is unparalleled, and they can not get enough of it.

Voice search started with smartphones and soon expanded to smart speakers and voice assistants around the world. Today, a revolution can be witnessed in voice search, with almost every generation enthusiastically embracing this technology. Some of the most important voice search statistics that can be considered to put up the efforts in voice search features.

Marketers and SEOs need to make it a practice to optimize their content for voice search in the age of voice search, where competition can only get tougher in the coming days. This best practice will help you improve your voice search rankings and expand your organic scope.

Many people believe that it doesn’t matter how the website operates or what kind of experience it provides because users can’t see it. Voice search devices, on the other hand, rely on search results to provide answers to users. Answers are pulled from the top of the search results by voice search devices, so there is a requirement for optimization to appear at the top.

There are fewer chances for a website to appear in voice search if it is not optimized for SEO.

5. Featured Snippets

Rich search results that pop up as a box of content on search engine results pages (SERPs) are known as featured snippets. They are information fields that seek to provide answers to a user’s questions. Featured snippets appear at the top of the SERPs, under the paid ads, and at the top of the other organic search results.

The featured snippets are associated with SEO in two ways. Firstly, Featured Snippets are a way to get more views from organic search results without having to pay for higher Google rankings. Secondly, Featured Snippets boost the count of searches that don’t need a click. To put it another way, it happens when a Google user does not click on any of the search results.

This is because the Featured Snippet always provides the information that someone is searching for.  According to an Ahref Report, featured snippets receive more traffic as compared to the first organic search result.

6. Long-Form Content

The content that provides a lot of information on a particular subject is known as long-form content. The minimum word count for long-form content should be between 700 and 2,000 words. The upper limit varies depending on a variety of aspects, such as the scope, focus topic, expected goals, and target audience.

Search engines mainly focus on the context. Long articles can simply provide more context for the focus topic by delving deeper into it and linking it to various similar topics and demonstrating how these two are associated with each other. Furthermore, search engines prefer massive or deep content over short or concentrated content. In fact, Google’s algorithm will not only rank short content but penalize it.

As per core dna, long-form content is described as anything between a short story (word count less than 7,500) and a novelette (under 17,500 words) in length. Writing longer articles has many advantages.

7. Image Optimization

The process of delivering high-quality images in the right format, dimension, scale, and resolution while keeping the file size as small as possible is known as web image optimization. There are a variety of ways to carry out image optimization, including resizing, caching, and compression.

It has been shown that photos are crucial in linking consumers to the products. Users are more likely to leave the website if it takes over 3 seconds to load, which will greatly raise the bounce rate and potentially affect the conversions. Image optimization enhances page load speed, SEO rankings, and user experience.

According to research carried out by WebsiteBuilderExperts, optimizing the images on a website can have a positive impact in different areas.

8. Data and Analytics

Since the new age of SEO has started, the quality of content matters even more than dubious SEO strategies in the past, and it has been important to really understand how the customers think and engage with search engines.

So, Big Data and Analytics can help you with this. Analytics tools like White Label Reporting Dashboards show who your potential audience is and what they’re looking for. It helps to know how visitors find the business or website, as well as how long they stay on the platform to get what they need.

Analytics and reporting give a lot of information on how the audience behaves. It is possible to build personalized messages, campaigns, and better serve visitors by using data science. Moreover, the use of analytics to check page loading times, identify URLs that are being crawled, identify response errors, and track referral sources. So, to stay on top of the rankings, ensure including data and analytics in the SEO plan.

Big data allows for a more in-depth analysis of SEO tactics and results than ever before.

9. Video Marketing

Video marketing for SEO is a significant tool for helping the website outrank its online rivals. Numerous ranking factors decide where the page will appear in the search engine results pages when optimizing the website for search engines, especially Google (SERPs). Video marketing enables us to improve the SEO content to meet search engine expectations and reach top rankings.

• Below are three ways that videos can help to boost content and search engine rankings.
• Videos boost user experience (UX) and time spent on the webpage.
• Videos improve the profundity and quality of the SEO content.
• Get more backlinks through videos

Google favors video marketing because people prefer viewing videos to reading lengthy web pages. So, the incorporation of video content into the SEO plan is significant. It is great to begin with keyword and description optimization for each video. However, ensure that the explanation is not stuffed with keywords.

Take a look at these numbers from a recent wyzowl survey to see why video is here to stay:

• Video is used in marketing by 85% of companies, and 92% of marketers consider video to be an integral aspect of their marketing plan.
• 87% of video marketers say their website traffic has increased because of the videos.
• 96% of people have watched product or service explainer videos.
• 84% of people say the video was a factor in their decision to purchase something.

10. Content Quality

Authentic content is vital for companies in more ways than just branding because great content is quite important for SEO and ranking. Simply putting the original material that has not been released elsewhere is not sufficient as consistency also matters. It is essential to develop optimized content for organic search visibility, traffic, and rankings.

Content and search engine optimization (SEO) build a bond that can propel any website to the top of search engine rankings when they are at their best. However, it is only possible when both are at their best. Otherwise, they can incur Google penalties that are almost impossible to reverse when both are at their worst.

Some SEO experts claim that Google’s May 2020 Core Update was akin to an EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) update, signaling to the industry that the quality of content matters far more than the authority of a given domain.

To conclude, the field of SEO is rapidly growing. Business owners and advertisers need to adjust quickly as per the industry standards. Keep up with technology developments and the effects of aspects like backlinks, site pace, and schema by devoting time to the fundamentals of good content development and copywriting. There is a lot to think about. But keep in mind that even learning the fundamentals of SEO can make a significant difference in the website’s click-through rates, interaction, and rankings.