It’s important to keep up with trends as the SEO landscape is forever changing.
Google rolls out thousands of updates every year, so I always find myself squirrelling away to keep my finger on the pulse. The rise mobile and smart technologies prompted Google to move to mobile first indexing a while back, so mobile SEO is now a critical part of optimisation, but how else has life changed that can be reflected in SEO and how we optimise for search engines.
This article is run down for those who want to know the big changes, what you need to consider for your SEO strategy this year and what would be good to integrate on your websites!
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is essentially a trust score for search engines. It reflects the credibility of your site, and how trustworthy it is. Domain authority used to be just around backlinks, but it is not the case now. Google in modern times evaluates your site based on EAT.
So, what is EAT?
EAT is the next generation of domain authority. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. EAT has always been something considered by Google, but its importance has increased.
How can I increase my EAT score?
Google is looking for trustworthiness, we know this, but how do we achieve it.
Have thorough trust pages
Make sure your site has an about page, easy to find contact page, references and external links to sources, privacy policy and terms of service, and author bylines on any articles published.
Be an expert in your field!
Google ranks credible sources, so be one! Google is making software to figure out who is behind a certain piece of content, making content tough to rank if you don’t show consistency.
Your site needs to be specific to a certain topic or niche where possible. This allows your expertise to not be watered down by
You can also increase your EAT score by getting cited from reputed external websites. If you are mentioned on other peoples sites it also helps if your website is associated with one topic and specific to a niche.
Visual Search is rising in Modern SEO
According to Google’s guidelines, they like pages that are authoritative, and that feature an image at the top. Image SEO is a thing. The most important thing is to use descriptive files names and image alt texts for every image. This goes a long way.
Visual search technology is still early in it’s life, but it so far works incredibly well. People use visual search for all kinds of things, from shopping, directions, identifying landmarks, recipes and much more. Google Lens has been used well over a billion times, and it will take off in coming years, so be ready for when that happens!
Video SEO has landed and will only get bigger
Online videos are all the rage right now. They currently make up approximately 80% of online traffic at the moment which is a huge deal for us SEO’s.
Video should be a big part of your marketing plans to improve SEO.
Create a YouTube Channel
This is dealbreaker. If you don’t have a YouTube channel, you really should. It is the worlds largest search engine and not one to ignore.
Make high quality videos and when you publish them SEO optimised, you will be rewarded. Embed these videos into your text based blog posts for brownie points!
Optimise your videos for SEO
Google will use your title, description and tags to find out what the video is about. Make sure your videos have defined content. A recent study found that 80% of videos used in featured snippets had a keyword in the title. So make sure you optimise your videos as you would optimise your pages!
Provide a transcript
Always provide a text based transcript of your videos!
Voice Search
This is huge, we know this right? 41% of adults perform at least one voice search a day. I know I do.
Keeping this is mind, you must optimise for voice search.
The annoying thing is, to be considered for voice search you need to be ranking high, in at least the top three search results for your chosen keyword, but it is worth optimising your site for when this happens!
Use question and answer content
Google needs a question to answer for voice search. FAQ pages work really well for voice search.
Ranking in a featured snippet also helps a lot. 4 out of 10 search results come from a featured snippet, so make sure you optimise for featured snippets!
How do you get your content in a featured snippet?
This circles back to your standard SEO techniques that we all know and love. Do your keyword research!
99.57% of featured snippets are for pages that rank for that term. if you aren’t first page for your search term, you won’t get a featured snippet.
Also consider the search intent of your keyword research. Content that doesn’t match search intent, just won’t rank.
Your content and your keywords should be exactly what people are searching for! Don’t be afraid to optimise your old content either, you can change or modify it to make it better, fit the search intent if it has changed and to improve your user experience.
The conclusion to Modern SEO
The backbone of SEO is still there, great content, backlinks, core web vitals and all the other on-page and off-page search engine optimisation techniques that we have known for some time. But, Modern SEO is on the rise, and will only get more important as our world changes and gravitates towards new technologies.
If you are looking to increase search traffic, modernise your website for new SEO techniques or need advise. Feel free to contact me for an informal chat!
