Future of SEO: A Thread on New Technology to Improve Your Client’s Site
Whether your company is brand new and grassroots, or you’re seasoned with a technology stack a mile deep in trial and error: the importance of new technology cannot be understated. Client sites, where most sales are made for information companies, are becoming more critical every day. Here are the top new technologies every company should look into when considering the future of search engine optimization.
Google’s BERT
Google created a new algorithm that is known to crawl and bring back information more meticulous. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which means that the search engine will understand human thought patterns easier than any artificial intelligence has before. Unfortunately, the best way to advertise or guarantee clicks for your site is still relatively unknown. Unlike most algorithms that are familiar and capable of being easily understood, many companies scrambled earlier this year to discover how they could best optimize their company’s search results.
Turning to User Pathways
Instead of hoping their customers will search for specific keywords or phrases that will lead them to their company’s website, they operate by giving customers what they already know they will seek out. Search engine optimization is a fantastic tool, but these businesses are operating under the challenge of not needing it.
Death of Ad Space
A third of all internet users are using some form of an ad blocker. This shift has probably already made you change your digital advertising strategy: but it will need to change even more in years to come. By not getting as much of a return on classic advertising, the main focus will fall back on search engine optimization, appeals to use artificial intelligence more, and many companies trying new and previously untested types of advertising.
In testing these advertising styles, many companies may be gambling their livelihood on the chance of succeeding. The payoff could be huge, but failure may mean the business fails, and the owners go bankrupt. A lot of companies will be made or broken by this.
Brand Recognition to Search Engines
CEOs of search engine companies, like Sundar Pichai of Google, are coming forward in the fight against misinformation. This movement has had a lot of pressure on companies like Google to weed out the small sites that quickly seem to pop up overnight to get into searches and spread misinformation seeds. In doing this, they’re putting reputable brands first, which means the more trustworthy your site seems, the higher up you’ll be on search results. Heavily focus on your brand’s reliability, rating with customers, and attention to detail- and this can push you up in the works.
The Merging of Social Media and Search Engines
Many social media websites have already begun to integrate search engine capabilities. Facebook alone averages 1.5 million searches a day. Twitter has joined in, working with Google, and ranking high in searches that mean more companies need to work harder on their social media game.
Be available wherever your customers may look for you. By paying attention to trends and working to meet them halfway, your company will generate more leads and make more sales. If your company exists without a social media presence, you’re leaving yourself without success. Tools like twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are invaluable because they connect leads with your brand naturally. Their minds assign personalities to brands and could make them lifelong customers.
Logfile Analysis
Although knowing where your leads come from can be useful, it’s not the end all be all of getting to know how your customers think. Logfile analysis needs to be considered in depth further so that companies can analyze how long they’re on pages, what searches brought them there, and if the page urged customers to check out others. Using this information can help companies keep more customers on their sites for longer, which will result in more sales and a higher search result appearance.
AI Accessibility
Elon Musk recently came forward with the work his company has been doing to integrate artificial intelligence into human bodies to keep us evolutionarily vital still. Although this is controversial, it shows that we’re already living in the future that many are always viewed as science fiction even just months ago. Artificial intelligence will play a massive hand at the end of searching, of website building, and getting leads. It’s vital to build around this idea and work to make your site one that artificial intelligence will automatically mark as trustworthy and beneficial to leads.
Optimizing for Mobile
Although everyone uses a mixture of mobile devices, a third of internet users only use them. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be alienating or losing these searchers. It’s better if your company doesn’t have a simple, quickly thrown together mobile version: put in the time and resources you do into your website so that your company can make the best impression possible.
Need for Speed
Most users these days live in a rush. Whether they’re just searching around for answers or wanting to make a quick purchase, if they can’t find what they need to from you- these leads will click away. If your site loads too slowly, or if there are too many popups that they have to filter through, you’re chasing people away from your website. Although you must keep people on your site longer, the way to do it is by giving them information that will make them want to stay, not by trapping them in searching.
Voice Search
Searching by talking to devices like Google Home, Alexa, or Siri, is a quick way to see which results are on the top. Google home curates these answers, focusing on making ‘journeys’ out of them instead of search results. Not only do these reliable results have full access to leads in this way, but they also have a near-monopoly. This step will bring more customers in by droves, which will boost your site’s visibility.
