8 most important areas of focus in SEO

It is the dream of every site owner or webmaster to be on top of the competition and to appear top on the SERPs. But this process takes multiple and consistent efforts to achieve. In most cases, not knowing what to pay attention to most may deny you the chance of eating your share of success. The following are the eight most important areas of focus in SEO:

Mobile first indexing

The biggest shift to come in the SEO industry is the possibility of search engines to use mobile experiences as a ranking signal. Google announced the possible switch from desktop to completely mobile first indexing. As the months go by, this possibility will fruit.

This implies that you need to pay attention to the experiences of mobile users by making mobile-friendly designs for mobile gadgets.  This can be achieved by creating quality and relevant content, ensuring you use ideal UX and styles and fast loading speed.

Voice search is growing immensely

Voice search has dramatically modified the way search engines work and how people search for and find content. Speaking instead of typing in queries makes these searches almost natural speeches and the keywords used to become the increasingly long tail.  This is to mean that the searches are specific and highly targeted.

This aspect presents opportunities for competition for site owners. Voice search enables content producers to create content that is highly relevant, meeting specified needs of their audiences. To top this up, voice searches are incredibly vital to local SEO- phrases used are action-oriented and locally specific than typed queries.

By 2020, it is estimated that more than 50% of all the searches will be voice searches. This calls for optimizing for long tail keywords that use natural and more focused human language.

AI and machine learning

The introduction of Google’s rank braid shook the SEO industry. The introduction of machine learning and artificial intelligence into the process of website ranking has changed the industry.

RankBrain s can strike connections beyond the basic manipulations that many content marketers use to achieve exploded results. Its creators have admitted that it has surpassed their expectations to achieve excellent results.

The machine learning part of the algorithm continues to affect searches. As it learns more and more, the number of affected queries is going to rise significantly to make it tough for SEOs to manipulate rankings easily.

Structured data and schema markup

Every great SEO must know schema markup and structured data. If you are not using them, do not worry as only about 30% of sites that are using the two.

Structured data is info that describes your products, company or business which is entered on your site via a code. It aids search engines to understand your content better. Search engines use this info to know what your site is about and also assist them during SERP.

Users expect richer experiences when going through the SERPS, and if your web’s presence lacks excellent delivery, then you are going to miss out clicks as you will be pushed down the search results list.

Content marketing

Search engines always call for quality and highly relevant content. Your content should be extremely engaging not only to express your site’s authority but also to enable high links coming back to your site.

No one has time for poor content or simply posted content that adds no value. Users have become savvier with time, and they know how to navigate the web better to ensure they get what they need. To be competitive, your content needs to be useful, highly targeted, likable and well written.

You will also need to pull down your old content that does not add any value to your site. 2018 and going forward demands that less is more. This means that well-written content is much more important than many blog posts that are useless. There is a need to invest more time in your topics, understanding your audience, the right channels, different forms of media and how to cite your sources.

UX and engagement metrics to help you rank better

User experience metrics are going to dominate rankings over time. If search engines determine that traffic to your site quickly returns to the SERPs, or that your engagement rates are low, you going to rank low.

Your site needs a specific target audience so that your entire web presence gets focused on providing it with incredible experiences.  This will lead to more engaged resulting in higher customer numbers and more sales.

To improve on this, optimize meta information, increase your site’s speed, design for mobile and structuring your content to be highly relevant and informative.

Switch to HTTPS to enhance your search visibility

Https sites are highly secure. Google, on the other hand, has declared that a secure site is a ranking factor. Today you’ll be able to know non-secure sites easily because Chrome easily identifies them. This is going to be more severe as time goes on.

Less secure sites are devalued by search engines and users distrust them due to the warnings given about your site being non-secure. If your non-secure site asks sensitive information such as emails, credit card info and passwords, users are going to run. Also, read the negative factors of SEO.

To change this, install a security certificate. The process is lengthy and presents potential harm to your rankings. For a flawless work hire an expert.

Answer boxes and rich snippets

Averagely speaking, non-standard SERP features and rich snippets have risen in the past few years. It is hard to come by ten blue links for a single keyword query nowadays.

Google’s knowledge graph has greatly improved as to how it accrues and makes sense of new data to return it to visitors quickly and more accurately. This has reduced the stress of digging around through sites to find what you are searching for as you can get your queries direct to the point in the SERPS. With users spending less time on the internet, good SEOs have fully embraced SERP features for their sites. Remember, ranking is everything to an online business. Do not forget to check SERP tracking at serpbook.com.