Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is one of the longest-enduring business trends in eCommerce because it is an ever-evolving toolbox designed to boost a site’s rankings and land your website on the first page of search results. Some of these tools are new, and some are improvements on older techniques, but they are all trending because they work in the ever-changing landscapes of algorithms, consumer buying trends and online business.
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Link Building
Building links to and from your website has been one of the staples of SEO since its inception because these links will help establish your website’s authority. One of the latest trends in this area is white hat link building or guest posting. This trend involves creating high-quality content with links to your website, which will be guest-posted on related sites with established authority in the area. The opposite, or black hat link building, is linking low-quality and irrelevant content to increase the number of links without establishing relevance. While prevalent in past SEO strategies, search engines often flag black hat links negatively impacting your rankings.
Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals is a list from search engines letting you know which things the web crawlers are looking for in the rankings. These vitals are used to evaluate visitors’ overall experience of your site. They include three measures of interaction and speed, the first input display, largest contentful paint and cumulative layout shift. Schema markup is code placed behind the scenes of your site and helps search engines better understand what each page is about.
E.E.A.T.
There is a new “E” in the popular SEO acronym EAT, experience. Adding Experience to your Expertise, Authority and Trust can give your site the boost it needs to soar in the rankings. By focusing on Experience, search engines ensure that real people, not artificial intelligence, generate the highest-ranking content. Most of the other trends on this list will include the four aspects of this acronym as expertise and trust feed into the customer experience, authority ties into the inclusion of multiple related FAQs on the subject and each of the four aspects is reflected in quality content.
“People Also Ask”
The “People Also Ask” box on search engine results pages is one of the tools most commonly used by consumers, especially when looking for different answers than those presented on the first page of results. Knowing what this box is likely to include for each keyword can help you design a FAQ page to boost your rankings. Alternatively, you can use these items as headings in your content and the list as future content ideas.
Content
The content on your site should include a healthy mix of long-form articles, graphics and videos. Remember to refresh existing content and avoid posting AI-generated content, as search engines penalize AI use over human originality. Your content should be helpful and audience-targeted, not traffic targeted. This means writing content designed to help your audience and not just catch the attention of search engine algorithms. For instance, if your recipe blog starts posting articles about real estate investment, or being backlinked to investment magazines, then you are targeting traffic and the algorithm instead of bringing in your target audience.
Automation
You can use AI without compromising your site’s ranking by automating the idea-generation process with AI tools. Remember, however, that your content must feature the experienced voice that your company has developed through honest human interaction and not heavily rely on AI. Automating some aspects of your SEO is beneficial because the more mundane tasks can be taken off your plate, leaving room for core competencies such as quality content creation, product development and sales.
Watching and following some key SEO trends can help you improve the rankings of your website for various keywords in search engine results lists. By establishing your site as an experienced and trusted authority offering expert information about your keywords, you can avoid common pitfalls, such as reliance on AI-generated content and blackhat linking.
