“The future of SEO is here: understanding and marketing to specific and defined audiences through search engines.” – Adam Audette
Every business is looking to reach the number one spot in search engines for their particular target keywords. With the number one organic placement in search engines commanding around a 34% click through, the advantages of being in the top spots are huge.
In this article, we aim to present you with a SEO weather report for 2017 in the form of 3 upcoming trends.
Featured snippets
A featured snippet, also known as a ‘Rich Answer’ or ‘Direct Answer’, is a summary of the answer to the user’s search question. Google shows this in a block at the top of it’s Search Engine Returns Page (SERP) to give searchers a quick and authoritative answer to their queries.
Having a featured snippet allows you to jump the queue and feature at the very top of the search listings, ahead of the first organic returns. Featured snippet listings appear greater on voice search returns, compared to text queries. The use of voice search is growing at a rapid rate, so featured snippets present an opportunity that’s getting bigger and bigger.
Can you afford to miss it?
User Experience Optimisation (UEO)
User experience is an integral part of SEO, this is because the expectations of the user are rising higher and higher.
The average user is no longer satisfied with ‘good’ speeds and relatively navigable sites, they want instantaneous loading times and a clear, unambiguous navigation of sites. If they feel like they need to hunt for the answer on your site, they’ll quickly become bored and thus an increase in bounce rates.
Google favours quick loading times, mobile optimisation, and looks for indicators that users are enjoying their overall experience, such as low bounce rates on the site and a high average time on the page.
Dense Content
In today’s society where everything is instant and competition is fierce, content is key.
The average user’s attention span to an unknown brand is ever decreasing, you need to draw them in instantly.
There are so many examples of websites that have essentially recycled content from other sites. They may have tweaked a few bits and served it to their consumers or written too much spiel that it causes user’s to go into autopilot mode and lose all interest.
Therefore, you need to make your content compelling but relevant to your brand, so that they take action.
Dense content is the relevance of words or content per word value, this way there’s less time spent padding out your writing, more value within your content and your website users are happier!
High quality images are also very important and valuable. Visual content is more important than ever; Marketer Jeff Bullas cites that articles with images get 94% more views than those without. Furthermore, the content that you create can then be applied to social media marketing posts, which helps to spread awareness of your brand.
If you’d like to learn more about how to improve your website optimisation in 2017, please call us on 0113 871 5900 or drop us a line.