Back to all articlesSEO is evolving. The KeyWord Stuffing, the spammy content, algorithm-first tactics are headed for the bin. Want to achieve success on Google? Well, you need to ensure the needs of the user comes first. The more useful your website is for a visitor, the better it will perform.
Traffic First
In 2017, SEM Rush confirmed that direct traffic, bounce rate and page views are the three highest ranking factors. Therefore, it is clear that Google is making links less relevant and important to ranking well on the search engine.
Direct website traffic is the #1 ranking factor and this is why traffic should be your key performance indicator (KPI) this year!
Blogging
Having a blog once a month at a minimum, this is an achievable target for a website with fewer resources. This helps generate enough content to benefit your website’s SEO efforts as it creates a chain of internal links, keywords, relevant and new content and organic traffic. Moreover, it makes it easier to focus on creating high quality content for your visitors, which ranks better on search engines.
Schema MarkUp
We may think Google Algorithm can crawl through the web pages and understand the concept of what you’re trying to look for. However, it still struggles to make sense of what a web page is actually about.
Therefore, this is why there is schema markup.
This is a form of metadata added to a webpage that tells Google’s Algorithm what it is crawling and how to categorise it. Using this has a variety of benefits. Also, in December Google even launched an algorithm change that penalized websites without it.
Click-Through-Rate
Every 3% increase in Click-Through-Rate improves a given organic position by one spot. Google has been uses metrics related to the relevancy of results as a ranking factor. More evidence shown through Google shows that generating more clicks on a result compared to competitors, will mean that you will rank above them.
KeyWords
Around 2% of any article should be made up of keyword synonyms. Using a thesaurus maybe your best SEO tool this year!
Now, keyword targeting requires an in-depth knowledge of related terms based in that industry, and synonyms of keywords. Therefore, it’s best to implement this into you SEO and expand your vocabulary!
Mobile-First – Optimisation
53% of all Global Web Traffic was on mobile in 2017!
Mobile-First needs to be at top of find as mobile traffic is already an important aspect of SEO, and it will become the next big thing in 2018. This is because the launch of the mobile first index and the continued growth of mobile traffic. All SEO specialists will have to keep their strategies and websites optimised for mobile.