SEO Trends – Google RankBrain, Core Web Vitals, Voice Searches

Google RankBrain algorithm

Search engine optimization will continue to be about working on producing quality content. Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way people interact with online content. An algorithm called RankBrain, unveiled a few years ago, plays an important role in Google’s rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

RankBrain has the ability to learn. “The other signals are all based on discoveries and insights that people working on search engine optimization have noticed”. This presumably means that RankBrain will only get better over time, making AI an SEO trend worth following.

How do you optimise for RankBrain? Experts believe that the primary factor is user experience signals. These can include factors from click-through rate to time spent on page.

You need to capture and engage readers with useful, well-organised content. Use quality keyword research to do this. An SEO tool such as the WordPress publishing platform Yoast SEO Plungin can help you assess the strength of your page based on factors such as readability, internal links and other aspects of on-page optimization.

You can read more about Google RankBrain here.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google’s metrics that measure the user experience of a website. These three major metrics include load speed (LCP), (FID) interactivity and (CLS) which relates to visual stability. These elements will be measured by Google as of August 2021. Google has a dedicated service, PageSpeed insights, where anyone can go to see how their website is doing.

High quality videos for search engine optimization

Online video is growing strongly across all channels. In case you didn’t know, YouTube is the world’s 2nd most popular search engine. According to research, video’s share of searches will only increase in the future.

More and more, especially young people, are using YouTube as their primary search tool and are skipping traditional search engines.

So if you want more traffic to your site, try to use video. Search engine optimization through the use of videos is still a big factor in search engines and the production of higher quality website content.

YouTube as a marketing channel is definitely worth exploiting, as many marketers do not make use of videos, at least in smaller markets, as many businesses find them too laborious to make and may not get enough quality videos made.

Producing a good video is often more about producing engaging content than, for example, harnessing an expensive production team to film your SME’s production facilities.

The best and most addictive videos come from these “amateurs” who take some interesting angle on their own products and services and make videos about them.

So, in general, videos are used to get traffic, and that traffic is then used to get leads and contact details of potential buyers for e-commerce, for example, for further marketing.

Google Voice Skin and Schema

Google voice search could be the next big factor and game changer. One way to better respond to and rank in voice searches is to follow Google’s guidelines. If Google can decipher your page markup, Rich Snippets and other features can be added to your search results based on your data.

For example, a snippet that appears in a restaurant’s search results might have an average review and a price range. You can add structured data to your pages using schema.org vocabulary and formats such as microdata and RDFa, or using an approach such as microforms. You can also add structured data by tagging the data on your page with the Data Highlighter.

On the Structured Data page in Search Console, you can see what structured data Google has identified on your site. You can also see information about any tagging errors on your pages that may prevent Rich Snippets (or other search features) from displaying.

Rich Snippets is a term used to describe structured data markup that site administrators can add to their existing HTML code, which in turn allows search engines to better understand what information is on each web page.

Various SEO plug-ins such as Rank Math make it possible to structure information in a pre-packaged form for search engines. This add-on automatically changes the ALT and title attributes for all images. Rich snippets increase the click-through rate of search results and thus also bring more traffic to your website.

Build only high quality and natural backlinks

This should be obvious to anyone with any knowledge of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is all about networking, and content and the links that point to it play a crucial role. Good content and links go hand in hand.

For example, if you are building a website for your business and you want to get your pages to rank well in local searches. Make excellent product and service descriptions. Ask for links from your principals and partners, and you’ve already done more than 90% of your competitors.

A few years ago we were talking about just content and now the definition of content has been refined a bit, what kind of content does Google consider good content? According to my own observations, quality content is considered by search engines to be a body of textual content longer than 2000 words. Time spent on the site is also a big criterion for measuring quality.

For example, if the length of time spent on a site is not very long, the search engine will not consider the page to be of very high quality and it will not rank well in searches. Google Analytics tools help you to study the length of visits to a site.

Site load speed and site speed optimization

An essential part of web core vitals is that if a site loads very slowly it is a major detractor from the user experience for the site visitor. A slow page will lower the overall conversion rate of a site and is, for example, a major “real slowdown” for an online store. Many visitors expect a page to load between 2-3 seconds. You can measure your site speed and other things here.

It is also important that your site is fast on all devices, especially mobile devices.

Optimize your Google My Business profile page

People looking for services locally use a lot of location-specific terms in their Google searches. Google my business lets you add your free business name and email address, as well as images to the service. Google My Business also allows you to ask customers for reviews, and respond to them.

The Google My Business dashboard also allows you to create posts related to your business offerings, which will appear for a week with your business details added to the map data. Local posts also have relevance to who is doing well (in SEO competition).

Site user experience

The length of time a new visitor spends on your website after arriving at your company’s site often means the user experience.

Google has its own term for this, Dwell time, which is the time from when a user clicks on a search result to when they return later. This is not to be confused with the term (bounce rate) which is the % of visitors to your site from a single page.

On average, a visitor spends about one minute on your site. A good length of stay on a website is therefore, for example, more than 2-5 minutes.

Try to provide your users and visitors with content that will entice them to stop by your site and take the desired action. Average visit times can be a signal to Google that your content is of high quality and that this quality and relevant content is exactly what the search engine wants to offer to those seeking information.

Take advantage of image search

Visual search means searching using the image search feature instead of Google’s traditional artificial search. With image search, Google scans an image with artificial intelligence to understand its elements and produce the product or similar results you’re looking for.

Around 90% of the information transmitted to the human brain is visual. When we shop offline, we use our eyes to find the product we want. Adding visuals to a website is therefore one of the mega-trends in driving traffic to websites.

Companies such as Pinterest, Google, Bing and Amazon are among the best visual search platforms. Each of these has its own search features and also its own characteristics. If you sell home furnishings or fashion, your product should be optimised to appear on sites like Amazon or Pinterest. On the other hand, Google understands animals, plants, places, books and much more.

Incorporating visual search into your search engine strategy is certainly a worthwhile investment for the future. Visuality in search in various forms will lead to cross-selling and a more personalised shopping experience.

Long and quality content in posts

Blog articles over 2000 words get three times more traffic and four times more shares than articles under 1000 words. High quality posts also attract more links than posts with poor content. Start focusing on longer-form content for better search rankings.

Of course, long-form articles must also be of high quality. The goal is to provide users with shareable, addictive information that keeps them engaged.

It’s worth doing a search scan to ensure the effectiveness of your content production. Quality keywords that are researched will help optimise your content for search.

Write a query for which you want to rank, and you’ll get recommendations on content length, semantically related keywords, and a clearer idea of what needs to be done to make your content complete.

Geographic targeting

This topic is one of the most important elements of local search, but also comes up strongly in the results of broader search. In a sense, geographic targeting in search engine optimization is also part of long tail search engine optimization.

Your site should have a clear location if it is associated with a physical location (for example, a restaurant or gym). Your business may not be the top destination for reviews, but the search engine will show it in the geographic results (map results) rows if it turns out to be the closest option for the user.

Google is increasingly being used to find specific services, especially for voice searches. When your site has a comprehensive list of addresses, maps and, for example, directions to a bricks-and-mortar store, you are often already ahead of your competitors.

My last words

Everything changes all the time in Google’s algorithm and it can be hard to know what things Google will rate in the future. These things are likely to include quick access to the information you want, videos, images and other visual elements.

Some good articles about affiliate marketing:

The ultimate guide to affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing - free guide for beginners

Some good articles about article/content and text spinning (rewriting):

Article spinning - Wikipedia
What is article spinning? Is it bad for SEO?

Some good articles about keyword research:

How to do keyword research for SEO
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Some good articles about search engine optimization (SEO):

Search engine optimization - Wikipedia
Search engine optimization (SEO) Starter Guide