The SEO industry is among the most volatile as a result of the frequent changes made to the Google algorithm. What works for you today will certainly not be what works a few short months from now. SEO specialists need to always be alert of any announcements by Google regarding changes made to its constantly evolving search algorithm.
Now that we’re getting into the last quarter of 2017, it is imperative that SEO specialists identify emerging trends that have an impact on their clients’ search rankings. Here are three important areas they need to look into.
- Rich answers
Everyone wants to get the top spot on Google’s search results. However, you also need to make efforts toward optimizing for rich answers, i.e., the results that appear near the top of Google search engine result pages.
The prominence of rich answers continues to grow. For now, they appear most frequently for song lyrics. With time, however, the number of searches that feature rich answers is likely to increase. Google has made it clear that delivering value to its users is the highest priority, and rich answers play a significant role in the offering that level of value.
It is important to keep in mind that before you begin to think about optimizing for rich answers, you need to have done your best to optimize for your keyword first. That is because for you to feature in the rich answers sections, your site needs to have made it to page one of Google search engine results.
Granted, it’s not possible to completely figure out how Google’s search algorithm works. Nonetheless, there are a number of strategies you can implement to considerably increase your rankings.
- Other featured content on Google SERPs
Rich answers are not the only featured content on Google’s search engine results pages. Other types of featured content include “related questions” and featured images/videos. Design your content in a way that briefly answers “related questions” and use the appropriate image headers and tags to increase the likelihood of images from your site being featured for Google SERPs for your chosen keywords.
- User engagement
Almost every experienced SEO expert agrees that user engagement has a significant impact on your site’s search engine rankings. Some measures of user engagement include bounce rates, average time spent on the site, etc.
The more engaging your website is, the more likely visitors to the site will heed your calls to action, leading to higher conversion rates. The main problem with attempting to enhance user engagement is the fact there are yet no reliable ways of measuring the correlation between user engagement rates and search engine rankings.
The relationship between user engagement and search engine rankings is indirect. Nevertheless, as an online ecommerce site owner, it is in your best interest to ensure that your site is optimized in a way that offers visitors to your site an excellent user experience in order to increase the engagement.
SEO specialists are agreed that having an enjoyable site will positively affect the amount of time visitors stay on the site, the number of pages they visit within your domain, and the likelihood of them returning to the site later. Put together, all these positive effects lead to your site ranking higher on Google and other major search engines because Google likes the site that its user like.
Heat mapping is effective for gaining insight into how engaging your site is. It is centered on the number of clicks certain pages on your site get. Use heat mapping tool to help you come up with a strategy for improving the number of clicks you get for certain pages. Based on data you gather from heat mapping tools, optimize your site using buttons and links for your calls to action.
These are just but a few of the aspects that the SEO expert you work with needs to look into in order to improve the search rankings of your ecommerce website. Before hiring SEO specialists, have a brief discussion about the strategies they intend to use. Make your choice based on whether the specialist’s strategies line up with your ecommerce site’s unique needs. Customizable SEO solutions tend to yield far better results than generic solutions.
