Search Engine optimization (SEO) is something many people find themselves scrambling to understand – especially in regard to its impact on their business. It’s no longer something you can place on your wish list. It’s something every business needs to understand and keep up with today.
With each passing year, SEO grows more important. It will continue growing, evolving, and innovating in the future too. Certain factors are at work here. While they change yearly, it’s still important to understand what they are and how they’ll impact your business.
Google Pushes Quality Over Quantity
Google continually updates their algorithm for quality purposes. Since they happen so frequently anymore (every few weeks), they’re no longer naming them. What this means to you though is that you can no longer focus on just one part of your website – you must focus on its entirety instead of trying to figure out how algorithms work and making your tweaks based on this information alone.
There’s Emphasis Being Placed on Creating Online Experiences
Companies must adopt new technologies to help them create a more immersive and informative online experience for their website visitors. Since people’s attention spans are diminishing, videos must become shorter and digestible blurbs of information delivered to them instead of huge chunks. The fact that millennials are taking over and they’re cost-conscious also means these short experiences must also be meaningful for them. The challenge here isn’t only in conversions, but also in fulfilling your purpose with the traffic you’re already receiving. At the same time you still need to remember Google’s role when it comes to your SEO especially.
Google Alone is Responsible for Your Site’s Indexation
Google is busy at work sculpting our websites. This is something we should expect them to do in the foreseeable future. This isn’t their attempt to make our lives more difficult, but to provide their users with the best experience possible. It’s something they’re deeply passionate about because they want their users to continue using their search engine so they can continue advertising to them – in this way they’re really not that different from you and I in that they care about SEO and what it can do to benefit them.
Longer Form Content Has Matured
As user behavior trends toward the desire for more information and education before a conversion is made, this changes the perception of what longer-form content can be. In the past, long-form content was seen and used in the early stages to entice new users to visit your website by answering a question or addressing a broad topic that your product or service can solve for them. This wasn’t meant to result in a hard sell, but to position your business as a leader in your niche. Now long-form content has become more of a transactional vehicle to provide information and education before people buy anything. Ultimately you can think of it as a car driving the user from their need to their purchase.
What This Means to You
While Google wants to index more high-quality pages, users want a more immersive online experience. They also need information on which to base their purchasing decisions. These user-focused trends are what we should ultimately be concerned about. Focusing on them will lead to more business, higher conversions, and a better relationship with visitors.
Local SEO Tampa stays on top of these current trends and upcoming changes in SEO and what they’ll mean to businesses like yours. Put them to work for your website so you can spend your time focusing on other parts of your business and still rise to the top of the SERPs.