According to Statista, Google’s global share reached 88.47% after April 2019. So when we talk about searching, we mean Google. Google regularly updates its comprehensive list of rankings, and while some indications are important, some may be less important. We can never know for sure what factors will be affected this year or next year. However, we can make some predictions. Google has been getting user-oriented to improve the user experience for many years. Therefore, by looking at the changes and analyzing emerging SEO trends, we can infer what factors we need to prioritize. So what will be the factors of the situation till 2020? in this article, We are going to answer this question.
User Experience
User experience (UX) generally refers to how users feel about using any product, service, or system. Speaking of a website, UX means that users are satisfied with its usefulness and ease of use. User behavior factors, such as CTR, bounce rate, or display time, help Google evaluate the user experience (provided that a user enters a website from the SERP and goes back to the SERP). User experience, therefore, plays an essential role in SEO and ranking.
There are many areas that you need to focus on to make your website user friendly.
Work on website design and architecture
A good user-oriented website is a website where users can easily find what they need. People will not stay long on a strange website with confusing navigation. For a website owner, it is important to ensure that their most valuable content is easily accessible. And the site is easy to use. However, according to this study, an attractive layout is also important. There are several elements that help to build a website with good architecture:
- Make navigation as simple and as straightforward as possible.
- Ensure that the user can reach your most important pages with a maximum of 3-4 clicks.
- Do not ignore site search. It allows users to find the required information faster and with less hassle.
Create a proper site structure with internal linking
Internal links are links that link pages under the same domain. They form a website structure and form a hierarchy of pages. Internal links are of two types. Navigation links – menus, categories, tag clouds, etc. – direct users from the homepage to other site pages. Non-navigation links are placed within the content of the website and lead to other site pages.
Proper internal linking helps search engines browse more websites, define their importance better, and make search access to the public. There are many things required to build your website structure with internal links.
- Make sure that your most valuable pages have a significant number of links from other pages.
- Verify that you have internal links on keyword-based anchors that are relevant to the content of the pages.
- Make sure you don’t have essential pages. (Those that link to other pages but are not bound back by any page).
- Turn off for indexing or redirection on pages with thin or outdated content.
- Imagine your website structure to see a real picture in your pages’ hierarchy and ways to improve.
Mobile Performance
Although closely related to user experience, I believe that this topic deserves a separate paragraph. Google ranks sites that perform better. Since the introduction of Mobile’s first index and Google’s Mobile Speed Update, mobile sites’ performance has officially become an important place.
Remember, whatever is mobile is possible due to the increased use of smartphones. To remain the best search engine, Google must conform to changing user behavior. Therefore Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems prioritize versions of mobile sites on desktop. And this is what you need to do to ensure that your website meets the new reality.
Ensure Mobile-friendliness
Your website needs to work well on mobile devices. Design, functionality, content – it will look good on all mobile devices. The best way to be mobile friendly is to choose a responsive design for your website. This would make the creation of multiple site versions redundant for different devices. Your website will automatically adapt. Google has an easy-to-use tool that rates mobile-friendliness. Check to make sure you look good in the eyes of Google.
Decrease Page Loading Time
53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. All of this proves once again that site speed should be the most important for website owners. To ensure that your site performs well, you should regularly check the loading time and performance of pages with Google’s Pagespeed Insights or any other third-party tool. It helps to find out what your site’s speed is and suggest how to fix speed issues. Make sure none of your content elements interrupt your pages to load. Consider resizing large images, destroying slow or unsupported elements (such as Flash) by mobile browsers.
Quality Content
You have heard a thousand times that content is king. But how do you know that your material deserves the crown? We liked the recent statement by Martin Split, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google:
“You have to have excellent material. And that means you have content that is for the user. So, if your stuff says where you are, what you do, how you can help me achieve what I want, that’s fantastic. ‘
It makes some cloudy interpretations of the fact that you are terrific without defining “awesomeness.” And that brings us to the point. Quality content is relevant to the user’s query, has a specific purpose, and is intended to solve a user’s problem (such as searching, learning, buying, etc.). To ensure that your content meets new situations, you need to see how you make it from a different angle.
Pay Attention to Search Intent
Google has been using a different approach to process search queries for many years. The time has passed to adapt it only to the keywords in the texts. Google defines the intent behind the queries and serves the results that best cover it.
So if you want to stay on top, you need to stop being keyword oriented. See what people want to use this or that keyword, for example, by analyzing SERPs. Once you find out what Google results in for various queries, it is becoming evident which search terms to use in your SEO campaign. You will also know what content you need to create and how you can optimize it better.
Answering Your Ideal Consumer’s Questions
The most natural way for people to get something or learn something is to ask for it. Fortunately, search engines today understand questions. This means saying goodbye to good old keyword-based search engines. Another approach to content Hello. Build your content around answering users’ questions: how to, where to search, how to get. Help people compare things and make the right decisions. There are different methods for this.
- Look in the boxes “people ask too” and auto-completion. You get the search terms you are looking for and other people who have already searched.
- Use services like AnswerThePublic, in which all types of questions are formed with the search term of your interest.
- Use keyword research tools. Many of them collect many search queries from auto-complete, related queries, etc., of search engines.
Increase Relevance With TF-IDF
Relevance indicates the quality of the content. Because Google focuses on the topic’s relevance rather than individual keywords, you need to make sure that your content is relevant. In terms of ranking, your content needs to be more relevant than your competitors.
One of Google’s methods to evaluate relevance is TF-IDF (an abbreviation of ‘term frequency-inverse document frequency’). It is a reasonably old method used to collect information, among other criteria. It helps to define the importance of a word for a particular document in a collection of documents.
Take TF-IDF to help you with SEO. Evaluate your content based on your competitors and find more additional keywords and phrases to increase your content’s relevance.
Use Metadata
Although some meta tags are considered less important today, they are an important relevance signal. It helps search engines identify your content faster and easier. Different labels are useful for SEO, and some of them have more impact on relevance and CTR.
- The title page summarizes your page. Make it unique, accurate, and informative when writing title tags.
- Meta-description labels provide more detail about the content of your pages. It is often used to create search result snippets. Try to explain to users what they will find on your pages and how it can help solve their problem.
- Image-alt property is meant to describe your visual content to search engines and make it more accessible. The best way to take advantage of alt labels is to fill them with concise, relevant descriptions of image content.
Get an Extended Snippet.
Today, rich results make up the most visible part of SERPs, and the best snippets are the most popular of them. Recently there has been a discussion that other snippets may fall short of victory. If you receive an extended snippet, it reaches the top of a SERP. Also, about 40% of voice search results come from extracts.
By structuring your content, you get the best chance of getting results from the issue of this. You can apply various structural elements.
- Structure your content through short and meaningful paragraphs.
- Use different titles wisely, such as H2, H3, etc.
- Wrap your content in tables, where applicable.
- Use numbered and bulleted lists, etc.
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the oldest factors that are important today. Backlinks serve as a vote for your website, proving that it is reliable for search engines. According to this study, links significantly affect the ranking of a website in Google search.
Link building is an integral part of an SEO strategy, and various link building strategies help create an excellent backlink profile. Google looks at various factors that evaluate backlinks, pointing to a website. Regardless of the number of link pages and domains, the links’ quality and diversity are considered. At the top, Google considers natural backlinks: these are what you earn when someone likes your content and is linked to it, for example. There are different ways to get quality backlinks:
Create Original Content
Nothing inspires people to talk more than unique, original, and useful content. Today you cannot create content to create content. No, if you want people to call after that. Instead, give them something they haven’t read before. Let people see things from a different angle. Share interesting findings. Tell them how to solve their problems. In other words, make your content valuable links.
You may have interviewed experts in your business or your clients. Or you may have an interesting case study. Or you may have compared different data sets and found interesting patterns. All of these are potential considerations for switchable content.
Trust – The Most Important asset
Some business and society rules work in the same way. People share what they know and trust. And you can use it to earn backlinks.
First of all, check out the link for people who already know and trust your brand. Think about publishing content relevant to your niche to your colleagues, customers, your business associates. This is a great opportunity to bear fruit fast because you don’t even have to explain who you are.
Another opportunity that may work is to look for listings unlinked from your brand. You can do this using social media monitoring tools. You can refer to a referral for a link. Why not? They already mentioned it to you. And if you provide them with something original to follow, then something that can help their users, it can be a win-win.
Use Your Most Successful Competitors
This is a good rule of thumb that already works well. Look at those ahead of you. Google puts it at the top of SERPs. So it probably has no objection to their backlinks.
Feedback analysis of competitors can provide you with feedback opportunities that you may have missed. It can also indicate what the best link opportunities in your niche are.
A small note to add: Check the source quality and relevance by analyzing your potential link sources. It would also not be a disadvantage to see if a potential link source is receiving traffic. (Because if a page has no traffic, no one will see a link to your site, so no such backlink will be used.)
Security
Issues related to Internet security and data privacy have been cited among the most critical global concerns for individuals and businesses. To protect users, Google introduced HTTPS as a ranking factor in early 2014. This means that it will prioritize secure websites in search results. HTTPS means Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is intended to secure communications by encrypting via the SSL / TLS protocol over a computer network.
HTTPS prevents sensitive data of users from being stolen by intruders. It also ensures that communication between the user and your website is not harmed, and no malware is secretly installed on your website. A personal and secure connection significantly improves the user experience and increases trust in your website (and brand). HTTPS will increase in importance over time, and its impact on rankings will increase. So if you have not yet migrated to HTTPS, then it is high time to do so.
Enable HTTPS for Your Website
To make your website work safely, add validly, and properly configured SSL / TLS certificates to your server. Since SSL certificates are not granted forever, you should check the status of your SSL and update your certificate on time.
HTTPS migration requires several steps. And you will need a sound migration plan on hand to prevent problems from occurring.
Consider implementing changes in a testing environment, and make sure everything works smoothly before bringing it to life. When migrating, make sure none of your HTTPS pages are hidden for indexing. Ensure that all canonical, optional, and hreflang tags point to the URL to be protected.
Provide internal links and mixed content (such as pictures, scripts, videos, etc.). They should also refer to HTTPS or Upload. For more information about enabling HTTPS, you can read this guide by Google or read the migration guide for HTTP to HTTPS.
Conclusion
The ranking factors above are certainly not complete lists. Remember, there are over 200 factors that are confirmed by Google to evaluate and rank Google. And there is no one-size-fits-all recipe. Different industries will have their specialties, and therefore different SEO
