With the start of the year, we thought it would be good to look at some of the key trends that may impact on your SEO strategies. There are many emerging trends right now, we’ve highlighted five we believe are especially noteworthy.

Becoming ubiquitous

SEO has shifted from making websites rank well on search engines to making sure they show up wherever and however your audience is searching for your kind of services or products.

Businesses should focus their efforts on driving organic traffic to other platforms besides websites, while still ensuring a high level of brand engagement. And for many businesses, this is still not common practice.

Ranking well in app stores, for example, is of equal importance today as ranking well on search engines. This also applies to other media where your brand should be visible: videos, podcasts and so on.  It’s essential to have a solid brand presence on as many platforms as possible where your audience is spending time on.

Drawing a parallel between content and branding

As the SEO landscape continues to evolve, we are seeing parallels in the way search engines handle topics and the way companies (should) handle their brands.

SEO strategies have moved towards finding a distinctive idea, which the industry calls a ‘topic’ and which branding calls a ‘brand promise’. SEO practitioners then work with content teams to build content around specific topics, to prove the business is ‘in the know’ and relevant. This prevents clouding the site with non-associated content.

As the ultimate plan is to make a business known for its expertise – and be ranked accordingly – in the case of SEO, it is a search algorithm that ranks and displays the website at the top of page one.  In the case of branding, it is the human mind that forms a perception on a particular brand – and what that brand stands for – making it top-of-mind (a ‘mental’ page one) or not when it comes to consideration. So the key is to make Branding, SEO and Content work closely together to create cohesive strategies that send out relevant and consistent messages across all media.

Making more sense of attribution modeling

Over the years user journeys have become much more complex. The conversion funnel is no longer linear, and for both B2B and B2C organisations, tracking specific customer relationship development paths has become a far bigger challenge.

This is essentially due to the increasing number of touch-points audiences go through before reaching the conversion stage. As a direct consequence, businesses need more clarity on specific ‘events’ and their impact on the campaigns. Marketers have to go beyond tracking rank positions and click data and need to adopt an omnichannel, inter-departmental measurement approach, to ensure a more accurate attribution reporting.

Furthermore, having a clearer understanding of how the different channels perform, and their impact on the overall marketing performance, can improve motivation across the entire organisation.

Refining user experience

Machine learning has spurred search engines to advance at an even faster rate, pushing them to focus on providing the most relevant results for any given search query, and best user experience.

Search engines now take into consideration factors such as content quality, content structure, user intent and page dwell-time in their algorithms, a clear indicator that giving more importance to users’ behaviour after landing on a website is critical to success.

Ultimately, what is good for users (humans) is good for search engines (machines). As a result, businesses should place a lot more focus on user experience across their full range of digital assets than ever before.

Keeping pace

Websites keep growing in complexity all the time. This makes technical SEO a constantly evolving discipline which organisations should always keep an eye on.

Not considering and optimising for the latest technologies can seriously hinder a website’s performance on search engines. And whilst most businesses now understand the importance of having a fast loading site, for example, understanding how search engines read and interpret JavaScript frameworks remains a mystery for most. Retransforming and optimising websites as an app have often proven to be a very blurred area.

Therefore, understanding and applying the latest technologies can have an incredibly positive impact on campaign effectiveness and in turn on a business’ overall performance.

The SEO landscape keeps evolving every year, but we do believe these key SEO recommendations are a good starting point to ensure your business is on the cutting edge.

If you’d like to find out more about SEO and how it can improve your business, get in touch with one of our SEO experts.

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