Digital marketers and corporate organizations have long been aware of and accustomed to the dynamic nature of SEO. Even now, if anyone can be sure of one thing, it is that this trend is set to continue in the coming year.
Keeping up with new SEO trends remains vital to helping brands stay competitive. Learning what to expect with SEO will help brands and niche players optimize their strategies to take full advantage of these trends.
With this in mind, here are three top SEO trends to look out for this year. If you’re considering Google marketing training, staying on top of these trends will give you an important advantage heading into your digital marketing career.
SERPs Are Becoming Even Smarter, As Google Marketing Training Emphasizes
Powered by artificial intelligence, Google’s algorithm is more intelligent than ever. Google’s Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm update is merely the latest step in an evolution that gets more sophisticated as it goes.
With this latest update, Google’s search engine’s understanding of the language is superior to that of humans, meaning that only highly valuable content will be given priority by BERT. In other words, practices such as keyword stuffing, which hover around the margins, are more likely to reduce rankings than give them a boost.
More than anything else, Google prefers content that meets up with its expertise, authority, and trust score (EAT score). If you want to produce content and other marketing collateral that leaves the competition in its wake, Cumberland College’s Google marketing training teaches all the relevant knowledge you’ll need.
Voice Search
Google’s recent rollouts have signalled the company’s intention to focus more on understanding how users converse in order to deliver a more interactive experience for its users. As such, voice search is set to be a major SEO trend in the future.
As opposed to entering a search query, voice search focuses on natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend how consumers search using words. To take advantage of this new angle, it’s in your best interest to optimize for voice search queries as Google moves toward understanding conversational searches from users.
It’s important to remember that voice search may use different conventions from the ones you may be accustomed to. Since it’s designed to mirror natural conversation, queries made using voice search are more likely to be phrased differently from typed queries.
Topic Clusters
Much has been made about creating buyer personas and putting yourself in the prospective customer’s shoes. And as Google’s algorithms become more sophisticated, this strategy is about to take on added dimensions.
Recently, Google unveiled its Multitask Unified Model, or MUM, at the most recent I/O conference. As AI that can decipher emotion and purpose from search queries in more than 75 languages, MUM may play a defining role in the future of search.
To take advantage of this trend, pay attention to topic clusters rather than focusing on a single keyword. While writing content for your audience, use semantically related keywords. Finally, write with your audience in mind and try to answer any questions they have, as you learned in Google marketing school.
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