The funny thing about SEO is how misunderstood it is even in this day and age. It used to be about SERPs success and little else. Nowadays, SEO success isn’t just about ranking highly for keywords. The “new” SEO is harder to quantify but just as effective as traditional approaches. The following four practices will make your SEO efforts thrive.
1. Target Natural Questions
More and more, search algorithms are prioritising natural language questions over keywords. Services like Siri, Google Now and Cortana prove that AI-like search is already here. If you’re going to put out content, it should revolve around specific questions that a real person would ask. Use Quora for question research and tailor your output as needed.
2. Rank in the Video Results
Nowadays, web users are relying on instructional or informational videos for their content fill. Doing well on YouTube is therefore of the utmost importance. Google looks at the popularity of videos hosted on their platform when determining SERPs results. And even if you don’t get a SERPs boost, a popular video will draw loads of traffic anyway.
3. Make Your App a Smash Hit
While mobile browsers are getting better and better, a dedicated app for your site or service is always appreciated by followers. If you can get your app to rank highly on iTunes or Google Play, it’ll really help your brand in terms of visibility and increased traffic over the long haul. Put together a solid app and market it via social media if you want to get ahead.
4. Optimise Content for Mobile
Even if you have a mobile app, you need to make every web property that you own as mobile-friendly as possible. Fortunately, common CMS platforms like WordPress have mobile compatibility baked into the cake via handy plugins. Whatever software that you use to make your content compatible with mobile, the most important thing to do is to thoroughly test your sites for glitches on a variety of devices and operating systems.
Re-Training Your SEO Brain
Ultimately, adjusting to the new SEO paradigm isn’t all that tough. You don’t really need to throw out everything you already know. Keywords and content still count. However, incorporating the aforementioned tactics is the best way to push the envelope. Experiment with these approaches, build your skills and see what works best.