Is that still relevant? Doesn’t everyone know everything by now?

YES! And that would be the day!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an integral part of the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic traffic (not paid advertisements). This is through positioning the content on your website that allows for search engines to pull your webpage so it appears at (or near) the top of results.

Approximately over 70,000 Google searches per second are happening, with the average person performing 3-4 searches per day. The use of search engines are not dwindling, which is why SEO is still very important to businesses.

Organic traffic from SEO is important because it shows the intent and journey of the user through a different lens. There was a specific question the user had and through SEO optimization, found your company’s website to be the most helpful in solving that issue for them. We can also view their journey from the search used through their ultimate conversion on your website. Analyzing the searches used to be delivered to your website can help your team reevaluate what keywords and content can be changed to be optimized for search engine results.

2021 Trends

As we move through the beginning of 2021 and look back on 2020, there have been one world-wide issue after the other that have been (and still are) occurring, which all businesses and users are being effected by. How businesses adapted and continue to do so to these situations with the use of SEO can help alleviate some of the uncertainty that comes with a global setting.

How SEO will change for future uses can be found in the following methods:

User Semantics

With the development of home assistant devices, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo, and our smartphones, users are finding it faster and easier to speak in to the devices to find what they need. With that, more users are using full sentences in their searches versus topics or keywords. Meaning, searches are becoming more conversational and less one-two words in orientation. “What is the average temperature of Spain in May?” is an example. How users interact with search engines is effecting how searches are being delivered and accounted for.

However, clear and simple language and keywords are still needed for searches to be the most optimal. Yes, shorter keywords come to the top are the most competitive, but search engines still need to understand what your website is about and find those phrases.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Applied algorithms to searches has grown exponentially throughout the years. How can a search engine keep pushing the best content to the top, while analyzing traffic and website content at the same time?

Automation has become a part of lives in all spectrums and the more AI advances, the more some items are out of our hands to control. Artificial learning is also helping search engines find the best and natural solution to deliver high-quality searches through how the initial searches are initially inputted by the user – keywords or full sentences.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 API is fascinating and will give more editorial control to your content managers. This control allows for a full text to be delivered back by the prompt that it is given, which can be in a full sentence back, instead of the 1:1 ratio most AI is using. Weeding out fake to real content is where we will see this hit road bumps.

Voice Search

Voice search is simply a technology that allows users to complete searches by speaking in to a device, usually their smartphones and home assistant devices. Again, how the users initially inputs the search is determining how webpages are being pulled to the top of each search and how artificial intelligence analyzes the voice search.

Our article on voice search will help you to learn more about what it is and how your company can utilize this strategy to optimize your SEO results.

Google Technology

Users look to Google to find all the answers. It’s even become a verb – “Google it!” The authority that Google has within the internet is increasingly rising and their investments are becoming increasingly important to companies for data and analytics.

In looking at artificial intelligence, Google has significantly invested in Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (BERT), which as of October 2020, it is nearly 100% complete. It is becoming the leader in how language is processed and indicating the fundamentals of how people search. It is in nearly every search completed on Google and helps the search better understand the intent of the search query, which is why we see what we are looking for populate so fast. Companies cannot optimize for it, as it is used to understand the user, not companies’ content.

What Google has also invested in is how they position entities (content and links on your website). Entities on Google are classified as a “thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable”. This is important for SEO because “trusted” entities are displayed in high-ranking positions as Google understands how well-defined and optimized your entities actually are on your website.

Google’s suite of SEO analytics features are redefining what aspects need to be optimized in order to be best delivered to users.

Visual Image Search

This method has yet to be fully defined in SEO as only in September 2018 is when Google Lens was developed. Algorithms and tags for your videos and images on webpages should already be properly optimized, but how a full understanding of how users can convert buy purchasing products and learning more information on the full use of image search to create that fully user journey is still being discovered and is something companies should keep their eye on.

In Conclusion

SEO is not just tagging keywords, images, and linking properly to your content. It is a full analytical journey through how organic traffic is pushed to your website from search engines that are embedded in user’s daily routine and how your company can use that information to be the answer to the user’s question. From the advance work of AI to Google’s BERT, the world of SEO will be getting very interesting and your team will need to constantly monitor what needs to be optimized from your content.

Working with Colleen Eakins Design, we can assist in not only the design and content for your webpage, but deliver on what should be optimized for your SEO strategy.