SEO is a constantly evolving world. To ensure you're always implementing best practices , it's essential to keep up with emerging trends . This is how you can stay competitive by improving your visibility and ranking on various search engines.
SEO Trends and Practices: In Brief
To begin this chapter, here is a point-by-point summary illustrating the main web practices and trends in terms of natural referencing :
- Voice search is booming with the increasing use of voice assistants such as Siri , Alexa , and Google Assistant . Adapting your content strategy to address voice search queries, which are often longer and more conversational, is therefore a good SEO practice to consider.
- Video content is also playing an increasingly important role in the SEO landscape. Below, we'll provide some practical tips for optimizing your videos and making them more attractive to search engines.
- User experience ( UX) is another key, sometimes overlooked, factor that is essential to web page ranking. Therefore, it is beneficial to put in the effort required to improve your website 's UX by making it fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.
- High-quality content is arguably the cornerstone of SEO, so creating unique, informative, and relevant content for your target audience should be a priority.
- Featured snippets , which answer questions asked by Google users , offer great additional visibility to your content since they appear at the top of the SERP . It can therefore be profitable to adapt your SEO optimization strategy accordingly, in order to attract users' attention.
- Performance measurement and tracking remain essential to understanding what's working well and what isn't. Remember that there are valuable tools like Google Analytics , for example, that can track organic traffic, bounce rates, conversions, and other key metrics.
- Mobile SEO has become a top priority since the rise of smartphone usage. Optimizing your site for mobile is essential for a quality user experience across all mobile devices.
- Local SEO is another aspect of SEO that shouldn't be overlooked. Optimizing for local searches is becoming increasingly important, especially for small businesses. Therefore, it's recommended to take advantage of all the advice available to maximize your local visibility and attract more local customers.
- Are you familiar with Core Web Vitals ? Comprised of three key metrics (loading speed, responsiveness, and interactivity), they are crucial metrics for user experience. These factors play an important role, influencing your website 's ranking in search results.
- The EAT concept ( Expertise , Authoritativeness , Trustworthiness ) is a good example of how Google 's algorithm works to always offer the most relevant results to Internet users. Through this theory, sites demonstrating expertise and reliability are put forward and thus benefit from better SEO.
- Finally, using Schema Markup and structured data can help search engines improve their understanding of your content and increase your visibility on search results pages.
Since SEO is constantly evolving, it's important to stay up-to-date on emerging SEO trends, whether that means checking out the latest news on trusted SEO blogs, attending conferences, or regularly testing new strategies.
At Bofu , we believe that SEO is at the heart of any effective and profitable growth strategy. By following best practices and staying on top of new trends , you can aim to attract qualified traffic , improve your search rankings, and achieve your SEO goals . All this to propel your website to new heights of success!
Voice search and SEO
As the use of voice assistants such as Siri , Alexa , and Google Assistant becomes increasingly common, it becomes crucial to optimize your website accordingly. To do this, it is first worth noting that voice search queries are generally longer than traditional search queries. Therefore, it is recommended to include full sentences and questions in your SEO content . The idea is for the content to then take on more of a conversational feel, able to answer the user's queries.
For example, instead of targeting keywords like "best restaurant," a good strategy might be to rank for full sentences like "What is the best Italian restaurant near me?" This type of question is more likely to be what voice assistants are asked.
SEO for videos
In order to properly adapt your organic referencing (SEO) practices , it is important to take into account that the algorithms of Google , Bing , as well as other major search engines are giving more and more importance to video content .
In order to adapt to it, here are 3 relevant tips to put into action:
- include a transcript of your videos in the form of optimized text;
- use relevant title tags and descriptions;
- add ALT tags for thumbnails.
For example, if you have a YouTube channel where you do cooking tutorials, it's relevant to make sure that each video you publish has a full transcript, a clear title, and a description containing relevant keywords.
User Experience (UX) and SEO
Google places significant importance on user experience (UX) through its ranking algorithm . To comply with this, a good practice is to ensure that your website is fast , easy to navigate, and suitable for tablets and smartphones. By providing users with a better overall experience and adapting your content for humans, your ranking on search results pages should improve !
For example, you could improve UX by reducing your website 's loading time, making it more mobile-friendly, and improving the clarity and navigability of your navigation menu.
Quality content
As you now know, high-quality content is the key to SEO success . In this sense, the content you publish must be unique, informative, and relevant to your target audience. In other words, the more value it adds to your target audience, the higher its quality will be considered.
For example, it might be relevant for a clothing store to create a blog with fashion tips, presenting new trends and including interviews with designers. This type of content could thus boost the online visibility of this store through good natural referencing .
Featured Snippets: an interesting SEO optimization
You may have already noticed, when performing a search on Google , that a series of questions is offered to you at the top of the first page of results. The term " featured snippets " refers to these short extracts of text that follow, related to your query. They offer, according to the algorithms, a direct and relevant answer to the questions that the user asks. The additional visibility that they can offer thus represents a very good SEO opportunity . In order to optimize your content for snippets , we advise you to structure it in such a way as to clearly and precisely answer common questions.
For example, let's take a blog post about "How to Care for an Orchid." To maximize your SEO potential, it might be a good idea to structure a section of your post as a question-and-answer format .
So, when asked " How should an orchid be watered? ", one could immediately read that " Orchids should be watered once a week in winter and twice a week in summer ."
Performance measurement and monitoring
Despite all the efforts to get SEO right, it's still essential to track your SEO performance to understand what's working and what needs to be changed. A good practice would therefore be to consider using tools like Google Analytics to effectively track organic traffic to your website, bounce rates, conversions, as well as several other key indicators . Google Search Console is another valuable tool for accurately measuring your impressions and overall organic clicks to your site.
So, in a scenario where a sudden drop in traffic on certain pages is noted, for example, you could then immediately look for whether a technical issue needs to be fixed in order to restore everything.
Mobile SEO
Since a major part of the world's population now uses their cell phones ( smartphones ) to access the Internet, it is necessary to adapt to this trend in order to maintain effective SEO . In fact, Google has even started using mobile-first indexing , which means that the search engine's index is primarily based on the mobile version of a site.
It is therefore strongly recommended that you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and thus offers a quality user experience on all smartphones and tablets. This point particularly concerns the speed at which the site loads on mobile, ease of navigation, and the readability of the text (display).
Local SEO
If you have a small business serving a specific geographic area, we believe local SEO should be on your priority list. Indeed, we've noticed that optimizing for local searches is becoming increasingly important, especially for SMEs and large companies operating in a specific area.
To perfect your local SEO strategy , first make sure you have a well-optimized Google My Business page . This simple aspect can have a significant impact on your online visibility. Other tips for good local SEO include using local keywords in your content (city name, geographical landmark, etc.), as well as promoting the sharing of local reviews , when possible.
For example, if you own a bike shop in Montreal , it would be worth including phrases like "bike shop in Montreal" or "bike shop Greater Montreal" in your content to optimize your SEO and rankings locally. It would also be profitable to encourage your customers to leave reviews on Google and other local review platforms.
SEO Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals , as the name suggests, represent a series of metrics that Google considers crucial to the proper functioning of a website , in order to provide an optimal user experience.
The key indicators of this concept are:
- the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading time;
- First Input Delay (FID), measuring interactivity;
- as well as the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which focuses on the visual stability of the site.
Optimizing your site for Core Web Vitals requires ensuring that it loads quickly, responds promptly to user interactions, and avoids unexpected layout changes, for example.
The EAT method
It is well known that the primary objective of search engines is generally to provide the best possible answer to the query submitted by a user via the query entered in the search bar. The EAT method ( Expertise , Authoritativeness , Trustworthiness ) is based exactly on this principle. In other words, Google is constantly seeking to highlight sites that demonstrate particular expertise , good authority , as well as greater reliability .
YMYL ( Your Money, Your Life ) industries , such as healthcare and finance, are particularly susceptible to this theory. For proper SEO optimization in this area, it's recommended to ensure your content is written by experts, supported by reliable sources, and clearly presents, for example, your contact details and privacy policies.
Schema Markup and Structured Data
Using Schema Markup and structured data is another way to help search engines better understand your content and, in turn, improve your site's ranking on the SERP (search results page).
For example, you could use Schema Markup to provide additional information about the products you sell, customer reviews, events you host, and more.
Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
An optimal SEO strategy must, of course, avoid the main mistakes encountered in the world of SEO . These mistakes could cost your web positioning dearly.
Here are some examples of bad SEO habits that are best avoided altogether :
- cloaking , which could be translated as camouflage, and which consists of showing different content to search engines than to users);
- over - optimization , which is defined as excessive use of keywords to the point of harming readability;
- duplicate content , which is a technique often heavily penalized by Google, which instead wants to promote unique content;
- as well as the use of poor quality links .
By avoiding these mistakes , you can ensure that your SEO efforts are rewarded rather than penalized.
In short, by taking into account best practices and key trends in SEO , it is possible to optimize your website . This is a wonderful opportunity to improve your online presence, attract more (and better) traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately improve your sales!
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