Organic content still commands the majority (53%) of all website traffic, and with Google rewarding brands that publish a consistent stream of high-quality, relevant articles and blogs, there has never been a better time to prioritise natural SEO. Here are a few search engine optimisation tips for the year ahead.
Don’t worry about every signal
You may feel overwhelmed by the amount of signals and factors you need to implement and keep track of in your quest for SERPs success, but don’t worry as the majority of SEOs believe that Google’s algorithm weighs these inputs differently for each query.
The best thing you can do is prioritise content quality and relevance. Other factors such as mobile-friendliness and page load speeds are important, but they won’t save your SEO strategy if you are publishing substandard content.
Google’s own Twitter channel recently noted: “We have updates that happen all the time in Google Search. If we don’t share about them, there is no particular actionable guidance to follow nor changes to make other than to keep focused on great content as we’ve advised generally.”
Search becomes sophisticated
The recent rollout of Google’s BERT tech marks the beginning of a new era of sophisticated search. You can expect Google and Bing to strive even harder to understand the intent of a query as a whole rather than trying to make sense of words and phrases in isolation.
Creating content with natural phrasing and flow will again help here, especially as 2020 will also see the continued rise of voice search and AI-powered assistants. This change also reduces the importance of specific keywords as Google will start to look at the ideas that a particular article or blog conveys rather than picking up on individual words.
Trust and authority take on greater import
Search algorithms are also prioritising sources that can deliver trustworthy and authoritative content. Google says that its systems are designed specifically to unearth this expertise on a given topic. So, now is a great time to double down on content marketing and web copy that pushes something known as E-A-T – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
