With the start of a latest 12 months, marketing’s favourite tradition is speculating about the hottest trends for the next 12 months. The discussions imply that these trends are the most vital things to concentrate on for the 12 months ahead and there’s all the time a powerful bias in favour of the latest technology. Unfortunately, the emphasis on latest trends often creates an unhelpful mentality of all the time trying to the future for answers, as an alternative of specializing in what really matters now.
Marketing Has a Problem With SEO Trends
The marketing industry has an unhealthy relationship with SEO trends. It’s formed a habit of speculating about the next big thing, consistently promising that major breakthroughs are only around the corner.
Voice search was presupposed to change every little thing, then it was chatbots and now generative AI is making all the headlines. Trends may come and go, but the SEO fundamentals are only as essential as ever and corporations should dedicate as much resource as possible to the core foundations: content, technical SEO, UX, etc.
This bad habit isn’t unique to marketing or SEO – it’s prevalent across tech-driven industries. In fact, AI hype propped up the entire stock market in 2023 but investment is already cooling as the tech falls wanting expectations.
Marketers shouldn’t emulate the tech industry’s hype machine. Doing so, feeds into client expectations, suggesting they need to chase the latest trends to maintain up. When, in point of fact, the things that matter most in SEO haven’t modified all that much over the past decade.
Master the SEO Essentials & Build from There
Google’s Gary Illyes, John Mueller and Martin Splitt emphasised this in a recent episode of its Search Off the Record podcast, raising just a few key points:
- “If Googlebot cannot reach your site, or rendering fails miserably, or there are not any tokens (words) on the site or a page, then there’s not that much that Google can do for you.” – Gary Illyes
- “What if quality is definitely simpler than a minimum of most individuals think? What if it’s about writing the thing that can help people achieve whatever they need to attain after they come to the page? And that’s it.” – Gary Illyes
- “But that is the form of stuff that everybody must be doing on their site, like reconsidering, ‘Do I really need this content? Is this content still relevant? Can I mix this? Can I simplify it?’ I feel that’s the form of stuff that everybody should just be doing over time” – John Mueller
Throughout the episode, Gary, John and Martin poke fun at loads of trends – current and past – including ChatGPT, other AI tools and voice search. The key point they keep coming back to is that too many marketers chase trends or get distracted by specifics, as an alternative of concentrating on the fundamentals.
Gary sums this up by saying: “What I actually wish is that folks focused on the very basics, like principally how the web works”.
What Do We Mean by the SEO ‘Basics’?
When we speak about the SEO basics, we’re not suggesting these items is straightforward. We’re talking about the stuff that really matters and excelling at the fundamentals is one among the hardest things to do in SEO. This might be why many website owners seek easy answers from trends, hacks and other shortcuts.
As a start line, there are three key SEO fundamentals it’s best to concentrate on:
- Technical SEO
- Information
- Experience
Technical SEO
Technical SEO starts with ensuring your website is crawlable and indexable for search platforms. It also ensures platforms like Google, Amazon, etc. have all the information they need to point out your pages, product listings, etc. for the most relevant searches.
Finally, it optimises and maintains technical performance to ensure you’re giving search platforms and users every little thing they’re in search of – eg: working links, descriptive URLs, loading times, etc.
Information
Call it content, call it messaging, call it whatever you wish – at the end of the day, information is the currency of SEO. People click through to your website, your Amazon store, your app listing page, etc. for one thing: information.
The questions you want to answer are: what information are they in search of and what are they going to do with it?
Broadly speaking, you possibly can break down information into two key categories: practical and motivational. Practical info is the information your audience needs; motivational info is what keeps them engaged, coming back and moving towards conversion.
Experience
Experience is the third key fundamental you want to prioritise in your SEO strategy. It doesn’t matter which keywords you optimise for or how well you match user intent if the user experience of your page saps all of the motivation out of users. Google knows poor experiences kill search sessions, which is why it has incorporated so many UX signals as rating aspects lately (mobile-friendliness, responsiveness, etc.).
Looking for Answers in the Wrong Place
Every 12 months, latest trends catch on in the SEO industry that lead website owners down the unsuitable path. For example, just a few years back, a bunch of studies found the average word count for top-ranking pages was 1,400 to 2,000 words.
This was misinterpreted in a complete bunch of the way – namely that word count is a rating factor and that Google boosts pages with 1,400+ words. Neither is true, but the trend caught on and there’s no telling how much money and time was wasted on cramming words into pages that didn’t need them.
Word count just isn’t an indication that a page is thin content. You’re the expert in your site’s topic (or try to be), you possibly can make a professional call on what’s helpful for users, and what’s fluff. Don’t use word count. https://t.co/lnuYObPiY6
— I’m John – 🍟 Say no to cookies, biscuits only 🍟 (@JohnMu) September 15, 2022
Stop Gambling Your SEO Budget on the Latest Trends
Chasing the latest trends is a dangerous habit and it’s a waste of resources that you can use to enhance what really matters: the fundamentals that make a difference, 12 months after 12 months. If you’re struggling to master the SEO basics, Vertical Leap will help.
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