SEO has become an indispensable factor in a company’s growth. Although the intensity with which you adopt SEO strategies depends on your business, your website will have less organic traffic and less online visibility if you don’t do SEO at all. Your rankings will also drop considerably, which will affect sales and user engagement as well.
SEO has been proven so many times to be essential for businesses because it boosts credibility in your brand and gives you a competitive advantage. Approaching SEO strategies correctly will help you stay on the first Google page, which can ensure your company’s success. Finally, SEO is the best tool for getting quantifiable results that are necessary for growth and innovation.
Regardless, SEO is constantly developing, so this year, we’ve got some trendy SEO strategies to keep an eye on.
Improved EAT Concept
The EAT concept has been around for some time, and it’s one of the ways through which Google ensures your website’s content is legit and credible. EAT stands for:
- Expertise: your website is recognised as being specialised in a specific subject or niche;
- Authority: your website clearly states who’s running it, and all blog articles include their authors;
- Trustworthiness: your website’s information is ranked as reliable;
As you can see, these concept elements are a must in identifying what a good website looks like. Lately, another element was added to the abbreviation, another “E”, which stands for experience. This final component requires content creators to create high-quality and authoritative material so that the search engine can rank it in a higher position. You can adapt your business to this trend by:
- Ensuring you choose topics you have solid knowledge in;
- Supporting your information with reliable sources;
Sustainability
Google is a giant search engine that consumes a lot of energy. According to Statista, in 2020, Google emitted around 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is less than in previous years. Consequently, the company devised a plan to reduce these stats and operate on carbon-free energy by 2030. Until then, you need to understand what elements of your website contribute to carbon emissions. Every interaction on your website requires energy, so if users interact more with it, you contribute to an increased amount of carbon footprint. Hosting the website also adds to the carbon emissions as information is kept in data centres.
So, how can you help minimise carbon emissions? By approaching these strategies:
- Choosing a green host;
- Reducing the size of your images and videos;
- Checking for refundable content;
- Making your website cleaner;
- Clocking bots to lower unnecessary traffic;
- Reducing website crawling;
Finally, many other SEO tasks can become more environmentally friendly. Link building, for example, can drive sustainable traffic by providing relevant information as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you want to know more about this strategy, you can hire a link-building agency to guide you through more sustainable SEO strategies.
Author highlight
As AI writing tools increasingly replace human content, users and search engines are starting to value authentic and individual writing. Therefore, if you want your business to flourish, it’s a good idea to create an author bio page on your website so that users can get closer to the writer’s creations. The bio should also include links to writers’ social media profiles, personal websites, and other relevant details. You can also outsource link building to make their bios more relevant to users.
High-quality content
The issue with qualitative content is that few people genuinely understand what qualitative means. Whether it’s about writing articles, uploading images, or doing videos, qualitative content should be easy to understand and presented neatly so that your target audience can understand it. At the same time, how you advertise also matters because if you don’t know how to adapt it to the market, your efforts will be wasted.
You can optimise content for helpfulness by:
- Using keyword-rich headings and subheadings, as well as keyword-rich snippets, to provide a well-composed brief;
- Having short paragraphs that make content more manageable so that both users and search engines can break it down clearly;
- Incorporating multimedia (videos, podcasts, infographics, animation) to make your website more interactive and engaging;
- Making your website mobile-friendly to help improve users’ experience;
High performance
Long gone are the times when we’d wait for a few seconds so that the website would load. Nowadays, respectable businesses provide fast-loading and high-performing sites that improve customers’ online experience. This element helps you rank higher in Google’s algorithm, so it would be best to analyse and monitor your website’s speed so that you can take proper measures.
To improve page loading speed, you can do the following:
- Choose a performance-optimised hosting solution;
- Compress and optimise your images;
- Reduce your redirects;
- Cache your web pages;
- Enable browser caching;
- Eliminate unnecessary plugins;
Improving your website will not only make your visitors happy but will also provide better conversion rates. You can take Amazon’s example regarding their website evolution, and you’ll see that this process takes time to perfect. A fast site also reduces your bounce rates and increases the number of page views.
A website’s high performance is by far more important than any advertisement approach because if a customer is impressed by your marketing strategy but, upon entering the website, waits for too much for simple searching, then your efforts are null. In these cases, investing in software and other methods is best to make your website faster and easier to navigate.
Bottom line
As you can see, 2023 SEO trends are not something new or unheard of. However, these trends must continue because they can improve users’ experiences and also help create a more sustainable online environment.