Search Trends in This New Year

According to google, 55 percent of teens and 40 percent of adults use voice search each day. Voice search is experiencing a faster growth than type search, especially with the prevalence of digital assistants in recent years. When we do voice searches, we tend to use proper conversational sentences instead of the query lingo that is used when typing out our queries into a search engine. This means we now need to focus more on long-tail search keywords as well as a natural language that matches the user’s conversational tone.

Link building

Be it backlinks from popular sites, or from sites that are relevant to your industry, referral traffic can contribute to your site’s organic search rankings. It is also useful to start thinking of link building as a long-term process, focusing on relationship building, developing powerful contacts and links that will be profitable in the long term. It is advisable to have a more diversified link building strategy, aiming for a complete backlink profile, and not just single links.

Speed

Google expects pages to load in under three seconds. This is an important point to note during your web development stage as well, making it optimal for speed.

Relevance

We have discussed how content is key when it comes to ranking well on the search engines. This trend is not one we are getting rid of anytime soon. Heard of Latent Semantic Indexing? You might or might not have but this is one of the ways Google assesses content quality. They do this by learning which terms are related, after looking through billions of pages and terms used in them. Then they build expectations as to the terms that are likely to appear in a given context. In this way, Google is able to decide whether a piece of content is “comprehensive”.

User experience

User experience for SEO will become even more important in the near future. Google has made it clear that the focus is on the user and this should make more sites deliver a smooth UX for their visitors, like we discussed in this article (link to seo article) A good user experience results in the increase of the chances of people engaging with the pages that they visit. In this way, search engines are able to discover which pages are more useful for people. They will be favored them over others.

Helpful insights can also be gotten by studying your visitors’ browsing habits. For instance, if the visits coming directly from search last merely 30 seconds, then this probably means that the website content or the user experience is not helping your site’s conversions. As an increasing number of people are now consuming content from their mobile devices, there is also an increasing need to provide an excellent user experience across all devices. It is not sufficient anymore just to see a rise in search traffic unless it is also resulting in the visitors engaging and converting, thus creating a loyal audience.