If you have your own business then marketing will be a huge priority for you to drive your business forward. Whether you work as a personal trainer or sell IT hardware, understanding the key trends in marketing will help you to succeed. Of course, if you are fortunate enough to be able to pass your digital marketing responsibilities over to a specialist in-house team or pay for a company to do it for you, you can concentrate on other things.
However, for most small businesses, it is becoming more important for business owners to understand marketing strategies including the latest SEO trends. If you are not fully familiar with SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimisation and to really simplify the concept, it involves a set of principles that determine search engine rankings. There is a long list of SEO elements and search engines regularly update their ranking algorithms to ensure that their rankings serve users the best way.
Here are some of the main SEO trends that it will be beneficial for you to know about.
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Mobile-first
If your website is not ‘mobile-first’ i.e. offers a mobile-friendly experience, then your website will get penalised for that. More website users (over 57%) are accessing via mobile than desktop now and that is why it is so important to make mobile users your main focus when it comes to your website and its content.
Voice search
You have probably noticed the rising popularity of voice search on smart devices like Alexa, Siri and Google voice search. As more people start to use their voice to perform Internet searches, you need to ensure that your content is geared up for this. This means that keywords and phrases used in your content should be developed with voice queries and commands in mind.
Video
Video content is a big player in marketing and its popularity means that it is becoming more prevalent in SEO. When people want to find out how to style their hair, fix a leaking tap or learn how to perform a task in Microsoft Excel, there are plenty of online resources out there to help. Video tutorials are usually the form of content that people will choose first because video can offer visual demonstrations as well as a more concise way to deliver a set of instructions.
Most people would rather watch a quick video than read a few pages of text, simply because they find it easier and can get the information they require faster. High-quality video and transcripts can give your website a huge boost in terms of search engine rankings.
Link building
Backlink building has been a part of SEO for some time and it basically involves creating quality links within your content to external sources. For a link to be of high quality, it should be an authoritative website that is trusted, well-used and established. So for example, a link to the BBC website or research from a well-respected university will have higher authority than smaller, less known sites. Be aware that having broken links or poor quality links can be detrimental to your search engine rankings.
