Your business is one in a billion. With everyone fighting to stay relevant, how are you going to stand out from the crowd? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is key to unlocking your potential for stable organic traffic and site visitors. So let’s explore 3 SEO trends that will help improve your stream of visitors and ensure you stay on top of the competition.
1. Reduce Focus on Keywords
Keywords were king when Google first launched but things have changed since 1997. One of the biggest changes is the way consumers engage online. Mobile usage has soared and has affected the platform user experience.
Google has teamed up with panels of experts to develop their search engine’s artificial intelligence (AI), by better understanding and experimenting with what people expect from search engines.
Let’s explore below how SEO trends relating to keywords and AI are influencing organic traffic.
While Google does rely on keywords for specific searches, it doesn’t depend on keywords to determine the relevance or usefulness of the content. Let’s break down the example below.
Instead of showing skate shops which could provide skateboard maintenance, the results for “skateboard maintenance” show blogs, articles, and videos about how to maintain your skateboard yourself.
Through user insights Google has found that people searching for “skateboard maintenance” aren’t actually searching for external service providers but want to know how to maintain their skateboards themselves.
However, when you search only for “skateboards” the results show shopping sites instead of blogs etc. The search engine’s AI already knows what you’re most likely looking for.
High search results rankings can be elusive. To have your channels rank highly you’ll need to provide a rich and exciting experience for your customers, who will in turn like and link your content and increase the likelihood it will pop up on top of the search results.
2. Utilise Earned Links
Creating great, relevant and useful content isn’t the only way to generate organic traffic. Promoting content, leveraging your public presence and earning links are more important in generating organic traffic than you might think.
So what’s an earned link? You can earn a link to your site when you have good content that someone links to without your active participation.
You can also capitalise on link building, where you invite and often pay a commission to a guest to link to your site through theirs.
Some sound advice is to have a strategy in place to get your great, relevant and useful content in the hands of popular sites and influencers to build your public presence. Over time, you’ll see organic traffic flow through those links.
3. Capitalise on Broken Links
Few things in life come close to the disappointment of a 404 error. You’re excited about your interesting link and suddenly… you’re letdown. These links, which are too often ignored, can be your key to generating more organic traffic.
Broken link building is one of the easiest ways to generate traffic through your website, and you can follow these three simple steps to make the most from broken link building.
1) Use keywords to find websites with similar content to yours.
If you want to find sites about drunk parrots, you would search “parrots+drunk”.
From the first page of results, click on the most suitable website that aligns with yours.
For this example we’ve chosen to look for broken links in nationalgeographic.com’s web page.
2) Filter out broken links
Copy and paste the link of the webpage you chose into an online SEO tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics etc. to identify the broken links with a 404 error. We’ve used a free online dead link checker to check the webpage circled above. Make sure you click on “check single webpage”.
As you can see below, the dead link checker has found the webpage has one broken link with a 404 error.
3) Connect with the website owner
You can now get in touch with the website’s owner to let them know about the existing broken links on their webpage and how replacing them with an inbound link to your website would be a good decision. It will be easier and cheaper to link to your existing content than to fix the broken link or rewrite the content it previously linked to.
Key Takeaway
Digital marketing has come a long way, with AI now responding to the way consumers interact online. If you use the 3 SEO trends we’ve outlined (reducing focus on keywords, utilising earned links, and capitalising on broken links) you’ll generate stable organic traffic and establish your brand in the digital market.
If you want help optimising your SEO get in touch with us today!