How SEO Works in 2020
SEO is a continuous changing discipline. Let’s see what we should be doing in the present time in SEO if we want our website to attract quality traffic.
What is happening with SEO is that it is becoming the collection of several techniques: Content Marketing, User Experience Optimization, Social Media, etc.
In this more complex world, what are the practices to master today’s SEO? So, let’s start discussing.
How to Master SEO in Today’s Time
We are going to review those points that we consider essential so that nothing escapes us in terms of positioning.
Mobile-first
The mobile is a fundamental part of any digital marketing strategy not disputed by anyone. Mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our essentials.
Ten years ago, mobile users were 1% of the worldwide population, But today it is more than 80%. A trend that only increases year by year.
But if we think about the reasons that have led us to this, we will find the user experience. If the primary purpose of a website is to deliver valuable content, we should first think about the best possible UX, and one of the techniques to give the best possible UX goes through a mobile-friendly design. Google gives priority to mobile-friendliness in search engine rankings, it makes sense to keep it in mind when starting a new project.
When it comes to conversion from traffic, the mobile conversion rates are up 64% when compared with the average desktop conversion rates.
Site structure
If the user experience is essential to SEO, the structure of the website is equally important.
Bounce rate and average session duration have always been relevant and important ranking factors. If users bounce on our site or a particular, Google bots will downgrade it. That is why it is essential to have a clean and orderly web structure, facilitating tracking and benefiting ranking.
An XML sitemap aids search engine bots to find and index our pages more easily, and Google Webmaster Tools to identify and correct crawl errors.
Semantic search
Once we have identified a good UX as a base, and we have a good website structure, we will focus on a purely SEO factor that is currently gaining a lot of ground: semantic search.
Let’s go by parts, what is semantic search? Since Google launched the Hummingbird update, Google became able to differentiate between different things (people, places, and things) and interpret user intent based on a number of factors such as:
- User search history
- User location
- Spelling variations
For example, if you search “diamondback” after performing 10 searches on snakes, Google search will consider that you probably want to know about rattlesnakes as opposed to the bicycle brand.
In other words, it tries to understand the meaning of the query and the user’s intention, ensuring that the entire sentence is taken into account, instead of, for example, a few specific keywords.
New keyword approach
The change to a semantic search has resulted in that nowadays, separately, the keywords have lost all the strength they had with previous algorithms. Although new keyword research has to start with specific terms, it must be developed with attention to so-called long-tail and slow-indexing “conversation queries.”
The long-tail keywords were more likely to be used when the user was closer to making a purchase, that throughout the entire process of knowledge and decision. However, in today’s SEO, they gain importance because a good ranking is capable of generating a large amount of quality traffic.
For its part, slow indexing keywords, known as Latent Semantic Indexing, is a term that is used to have a correlation of terms, so that Google is able to know which keywords are related to each other. So if, for example, a web page contains Apple along with terms such as iPhone or Tim Cook, it is understood that it is not a greengrocer, but the brand.
Social Media yes, but from Branding
Social media is one of the channels that have best adapted to the present SEO scenario, but it does not have much of the impact that it seemed it would have. Despite the fact that no one disputes that they are a powerful element to achieve better ranking in search results, the truth is that although Matt Cutts assured the opposite long ago, the first results of Twitter begin to appear in Google searches.
We cannot forget that both Twitter and Facebook are sites with a lot of authority. And that if our blog is the user gateway, social networks are the windows through which content flows.
What does this mean? That it is not that social networks are not important, but it is the correlation between both disciplines that makes them so relevant separately. However, social media does, but more Branding is done, the better, in the broader context of a content strategy. Shared content, both your own and that of others, generates links and drives traffic, increasing brand queries. Unless we are only on TikTok, of course.
Build relationships, not links
With the large amount of content that is produced daily on the Internet, link building is losing importance within an SEO strategy. Instead, Google is beginning to realize that if content and user experience is important, relationship building is no less important.
An SEO must not only be a person with technical concerns but must have a point of creativity when it comes to distributing their content: campaigns with influencers and their loyalty on social networks, among many other techniques.
On-page Optimization
SEO on-page includes all the positioning factors that directly depend on your content and your website.
They are those over which you have greater control, such as the text you write, the titles you use, images you include or server response speed.
Below you will find 5 important aspects to optimize the SEO on-page of your articles. You will realize that they have no secret!
- Content
The value that your content brings to the user is basic to position yourself.
Remember: Google’s sole objective is to offer content that satisfies the user’s intention in the best possible way.
Unfortunately, it is common to believe that our content is better when, in reality, they are not contributing anything other than what already exists.
Before writing, research what is there. Don’t do it blindly. And strive so that your content offers differential added value.
Perhaps you can include a useful infographic, contribute case studies, create eye-catching images, offer an alternative view of that topic, or share your own personal experiences.
Don’t confuse this with writing longer articles. Although there are studies that correlate a greater number of words with better positions, you cannot use it as a general rule.
The content does not necessarily have to be longer to rank; it should be better. It’s something that even John Mueller, a Google spokesman, has recognized.
- Title
After the content of the article itself, the title is probably the next most important factor.
The title tells users what the article is about, so it’s not uncommon for search engines like Google to rank first.
So it is good that you include the keyword to rank. But don’t be afraid to use synonyms or similar expressions to make it natural: Google is pretty good at interpreting them.
- Subtitles
The main function of subtitles (also called H1, H2, H3, etc.) is to organize the content and make it more readable.
Since they are parts of the content with greater visibility, it is good that they include the keywords or variations to rank. That will give more importance to the article.
Good practice says that captions should be used hierarchically. H1 would be the main heading, its different sections would be H2, and subsections would be H3.
H1: How to take care of a dog
H2: Food
H3: Feed
H3: Homemade food
H3: Treats
H2: Dog Bath
H3: Water temperature
H3: Soaps
My advice is to use captions with common sense for readability, and if possible, include some related keywords in them.
- Internal linking
The internal link is the links that you include in your content to other articles on the same website.
It often receives little attention, but it can be an important ranking factor for several reasons:
- They allow you to send traffic to other parts of your website. This increases the user’s total residence time.
- They allow you to control the text with which you link your content (the so-called anchor text ), giving them more relevance to the search engines for that keyword.
- Loading speed
Finally, the speed with which a web page loads can also be a ranking factor.
But, despite what many WordPress template sellers and hosting companies want us to believe, Google has also said that the speed with which a website loads is not a determining factor unless it is so slow that it causes a bad user experience.
Just make sure your server has decent speed, and your page doesn’t take too long to load (don’t add a bunch of heavy images, for example).
- HTTPS and SSL
Google announced that the security of a web page is a positioning signal.
Although it still does not seem to provide any plus, it is true that users may be scared that a “not safe” notice appears in the browser bar.
In order for your website to use a secure connection, you must install an SSL certificate on your server. Some certificates are paid and others free, and although it may seem laborious, in reality, it is not so much. Always consider best practices while moving your site to https from https so that your SEO doesn’t get harmed.
Conclusion
SEO is just common sense.
It is not necessary to study any master to position a website and get traffic. Otherwise, a granny who wanted to create a blog to sell homemade cookies could never do it.
And creating an expert-only environment is not Google’s goal.
Do not look for magic tricks or fall into the trap of someone who tries to sell you the “secrets” of SEO. That does not exist. With the general concepts, you have learned in this article, you have more than enough.
Now you only have to put them into practice.
If you have any doubts, you can leave them in the comments section, and I will answer you as soon as possible. And if the article seemed useful to you, I would be very grateful if you share it on any social network. Thank you!