Search
marketing consistently outperforms other digital marketing tactics for return
on investment. An effective search marketing campaign, will encompass both
search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC). Like the
rest of the digital landscape, SEO marketing is continuously evolving. It’s
important for any professional in this field to keep up to date with the
changes in trends and algorithms.
Mobile First
Of course,
mobile has had a dramatic impact on the digital landscape over the past few
years. This is typified by the Mobile-First Index Roll-out on 26 March 2018,
which was announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. What this meant was
that after a lot of testing, Google confirmed it is moving a large number of
sites to this mobile-first indexing process. In essence, Google systems for
crawling and creating its index will be much more heavily focused on a mobile-first
experience going forward.
For clients
with a responsive website in main, the roll-out should have little impact;
however, it does get a little trickier for those clients with a desktop and
mobile site. For example, if a website has a device type redirect in place,
then the mobile crawler will see the mobile site only. This means that if some
content is missing from the mobile site in comparison with the desktop site,
then it will be not be seen by Mobile Googlebot and will not be included in the
mobile first index. So, the advance here is to ensure all key content is
present on both mobile and desktop versions of your website.
Maccabees
At the end
of last year (2017) we also saw the Maccabees update. Google announced that
they released several minor improvements over the period of the period of about
a week and after analysis, experts within the SEO industry concluded that the
updates were the result of keyword permutations and site using doorway pages.
The creation of multiple landing pages for close keyword permutations
undermines user experience and of course is an indicator of spam for search
engines. It’s for these reasons that it is a tactic that we would always advise
against.
Fred
Another
fairly recent but unconfirmed update dubbed ‘Fred’, looks to devalue
affiliate-heavy or ad-centred content. The update rolled out in March 2017 and
mainly sites (particularly blogs) with low quality posts that appear to have
been created largely for the purpose of generating ad revenue. This update has
a number of implications for clients:
• Ensure ads
are placed on high quality websites
• In terms
of outreach targets for content marketing, avoid websites such as those
described above at all costs!
This is
something that we will continue to see impact both websites looking to place
content on other websites, as well as publisher websites into 2018 and beyond.
For me, the
most impactful algorithm updates are often unconfirmed. While we can see their
impact in SERPs, any detail surrounding them is still yet to be provided by
Google as well as some the well-known, historic names such as, Penguin, Panda,
Hummingbird and of course Rank Brain.
The future
of engagement in SEO
In my view,
engagement is incredibly important and always has been for SEO. For example,
Google has access to a wealth of data including metrics from search engine
results pages such as click through rate, through to key engagement metrics
taken from individual websites that use Google Analytics. With that in mind, it
seems to me incredibly unlikely that data would not be used to either directly
or indirectly inform search engine results.
There is no
point in wasting resource and efforts to rank highly for a generic keyword
(albeit with high search volume) if that results in users not engaging with
your website because it is not specific enough. Equally, there is no point in
wasting your SEO marketing efforts by delivering lots of traffic to your
website from highly relevant search queries, if the user experience upon
landing on that website is poor quality.
Artificial
intelligence (AI)
Artificial
intelligence or AI has become a buzzword of the past couple of years and is set
to go on to be a 2019 trend. Positioned by the media as a phenomenon that seems
destined to impact to all aspect of our lives in the imminent future. While the
goal of introducing AI into search engine algorithms is to predict results that
are more useful to humans, Google’s continued efforts to embrace AI means we
can expect to see more and more search results where ranking factors change
from query to query. This will be impacted by factors such as location, search
history, favourite websites and what other users clicked on for a similar
query. The algorithm learns from the behaviour undertaken and data relevant to
a given search query and uses it to decides on the most relevant factors to
take into account for each search moving forward.
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