10 Latest Trends in SEO
As a book publisher, you must stay on top of the latest developments in SEO for your content, website, and business to maintain its high rankings in Google’s search engine and stay viable and profitable.
During the course of a year, so much takes place with the ever-changing Google algorithms and SEO that you could easily blink and fail to spot what seems like years worth of progress.
As a result, it becomes harder and harder to keep up, invite more customers, and show up the competition.
Market research by such research analysis and review organizations as 99 Firms and Statista finds search engines produce 93 percent more traffic to your site and business than social media.
Research also demonstrates that roughly 80 percent of visitors to sites never make it past the first page for search engine results.
In other words, you miss out if your content, site, and business don’t land on page one of search results.
Here are 10 of the latest trends in SEO that will affect the rankings and success of your content and keep you ahead of the competition.
Setting Your Brand Authority
Keywords and thousands of backlinks may take a backseat to what is known as Google’s E-A-T algorithm, which stands for the “expertise, authority, and trustworthiness” of your content, website, or business.
E-A-T is prioritized this year because of the publicized controversy of the explosion of misinformation on the Web. Going forward, Google will reward content and businesses that establish their reliability or leadership in a particular sector. An article by Trotons Tech Magazine about the latest SEO trends last summer explains this development.
A special focus is being placed on the health, finance, and business sectors though this will soon extend to other fields and industries.
The E-A-T factors will decide whether your content, site or business will keep its high rankings in the search engine results pages, also known as SERPS.
To maintain a respectable score this year, you must set yourself apart from others in your field or industry and provide pertinent, accurate, and practical content.
Your attention should be directed towards growing your brand rather than on temporary rankings.
Learn All About Your Audience, Apply The Lessons
Google’s machine learning skills grow more potent with each passing year. It learns more and more about clients with its machine capacities. Whether Google can detect search intent may influence your SEO scores.
To improve your visibility or presence, you must seek to learn all that you can about your audience. What are your customer’s most salient issues? Your answers must directly address their questions.
Consider what they might look for in a search and then try to cater to their wants and needs by producing customized content. Tailoring your content to suit their tastes may enable you to approach your audience with greater success.
Be sure that you are focusing on the value you provide to your consumers. They will take notice if you have the solutions to their problems. Your ratings will increase as more visitors examine your site or seek out your brand.
Consider First Input Delay
The time lapse between your visitor accessing your website by clicking on a button or inadvertently making use of any other JavaScript-based element, and the browser replying to that access is known as the First Input Delay or FID.
You would work with your webmaster or staff information technology specialist to factor FID into your SEO strategy.
FID is a user-focused measuring tool that helps companies gauge the load responsiveness of the pages of their websites.
It measures the experience in milliseconds that visitors or customers to their sites have when they try to interact with slow-loading pages.
A FID score of 100 milliseconds is ideal while one between 100 and 300 milliseconds leaves much to be desired and a score above 300 milliseconds is deemed unacceptable.
A low FID score brings some level of accountability to the site and its webmaster or owner and makes sure its pages can be used by visitors or customers.
Indeed, your main goal is to enhance the speed of your company webpages, especially your home or landing pages, responding to the touch of a visitor or potential customer.
To achieve this, you must improve FID by optimizing your JavaScript code, breaking up long tasks on your site into smaller ones, generating as much content as you can, examining and using the on-demand loading of third-party code, bypassing unused JavaScript and activating the Idle Until Urgent software feature.
Your webmaster or IT specialist would instruct you accordingly and advise you to take note of the following software or Web development or maintenance jargon or concepts as to its relevance to your SEO plan for the new fiscal year:
- CSS, HTML, and JavaScript file compression is important: you ought to compress documents that are bigger than 150 bytes;
- You need to avoid redirection on your webpages as much as possible so that the visitors to your site don’t have to wait too long for a response;
- You should make use of browser caching so that your potential customer need not reload an entire webpage when he or she returns to your site from a break;
- You must get your webmaster or staff IT specialist to detect the weak spots on your server such as routing that slows down or queries to your database to accelerate response times to your visitors or customers when they re-visit your site;
- Your IT staffer will recommend that you utilize a Content Delivery Network to diversify your content delivery load (CDN), and;
- He or she will also advise you to make the most of your photos by ensuring that they are made and used in the proper format when they are needed.
Create a Marketplace
Depending on the type of book publisher you are, you may find the notion of building your own marketplace to be a bit of a stretch in terms of improving your SEO strategy.
You may wonder: why do I need to build a separate marketplace when my books are selling well across popular bookstores? Will this truly upgrade my SEO strategy?
However, this year, this practice by industry leaders is becoming fairly commonplace and some business sectors or categories of products and services lend themselves to this approach to enhancing a SEO plan such as insurance and financing.
If done well, you may draw desired attention to your content, business, or website if you start a marketplace that also informs your site visitors or potential customers about aspects of your industry that are most relevant to them.
Your marketplace may hold the answers to questions or problems they may have. If so, you will stand out as an authority figure in your industry and this may lead to increased monthly traffic to your site.
Publish Quality Long-Form Posts
As another trend this year, when you develop content for your SEO strategy, you should concentrate on writing long-form articles or posts about subjects or topics most pertinent to your industry—book marketing or new title acquisitions.
Be sure to make quality first and foremost with your material. For example, you may provide readers with practical, useful suggestions or recommendations.
You will want to ensure that your posts are readable. You may take into account the headings, subheadings, lists, bullets, shorter sentences, and paragraphs.
When crafting your content, avoid intimidating or overpowering your readers with professional or industry lingo.
To make your material simple to find, you should add a search function to your site.
Establ
ish a Sound Mobile Device Presence
As a book author or publisher, by now, you have long since established a presence for your content, business or website using a mobile device app.
You should continue to make sure your site functions well on cell phones. This year, SEO experts will focus on user experience on mobile phones.
The secret to a user-friendly website is ease of use. You should customize the content of your site to suit the needs of your customers in a mobile format.
In fact, over the course of time, Google may cease paying attention to your desktop web presence and concentrate on your mobile device influence to evaluate your site or brand.
In other words, if you have procrastinated or put off upgrading user experience on mobile devices, now is the time to devote all of your efforts to it. If you have a dedicated site, you ought to change to a more mobile-friendly one.
Follow Changes In Functionality, SERP Layout
With Google Passage Ranking being published, the layout of information on industry websites will change. Instead of having multiple pages on a particular topic, more content creators and businesses will devote only one page of their websites to it.
Google Passage Ranking is a new method which Google uses to rate passages on a web page. It is meant to deepen Google’s comprehension of a page’s content, improving user experience by populating search engine result pages with the most relevant output.
This year, passage ranking will prove to be an important SEO tool. With respect to Google’s ability to draw out specific content that site visitors are searching for, passages will be significant.
Consequently, as a book author or publisher, you must maintain a solid website presence with a high level of content readability.
Ponder Long-Tail Keywords
When you conduct a search for keywords in an engine on the Web, you will discover several new keywords with their search volumes.
The most common will appear at the top of the search results’ graphics while the least used will remain at the bottom. The graph will look like a dragon. With the most widely-used keywords at the head of the dragon, they are called “head keywords” and are typically short.
For instance, if you are searching for “SEO strategy,” the most common keywords will be just those two words.
Such keywords are at an advantage in helping content creators, businesses or websites achieve their SEO goals. Search trends often impact keyword popularity. This will have an effect on how successful they are with respect to SERP rankings.
Long-tail keywords are well-known for being stable and pertinent. Related words in the same industry or sector will not overpower these terms.
As a consequence, businesses may be able to maximize the benefits of using keywords they know will be relevant in the long term, producing substantial traffic to their sites.
Take Voice Search Into Account
With the debut of artificial intelligence, also known as AI, and chatbots, whose software is meant to facilitate online chat ultimately with a live customer service human agent, voice search is part of the latest SEO practice.
User experience has been expanded with exposure to such voice-oriented features as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant.
The influence of voice searches has spread in the last few years because of the number of mobile device users.
Depending on the type of book author or publisher you are, you may not see the need to incorporate voice searches into your overall SEO strategy.
However, just in case, you do, here are some recommendations for achieving voice search content success with your visitors or customers:
- Start to add natural language to your content, providing direct replies to your visitors’ or customers’ voice search queries;
- Begin using long-tail keywords and generating long-form content. Voice searches are longer than those typed, and;
- Consider using appropriate addresses and locations for your local listings with the right data if you want to rate well on the “near me” searches.
Firstly, you can incorporate voice searches of audio clips you create into your publisher’s or bookseller’s site to answer your potential readers’ top questions and address their main concerns. The most common questions readers tend to ask about a new book are as follows:
1. Can you help me find [a particular book title]?
2. Where is the [a particular genre] section of your store or online site?
3. Where would I find a book on [a particular genre or subgenre]?
4. I need to purchase a book for my child or grandchild to read. What would you suggest?
5. I am looking for a good book? What do you suggest?
6. I am searching for a particular book but I don’t know the author or title. Can you help me?
For such frequently-asked questions, you may, for example, add a FAQ webpage to your site, especially on the mobile device version, and enable voice searches of audio clips you create to provide some generic or specific answers.
The number of FAQs your webpage can hold would depend on the number of question scenarios you can anticipate or brainstorm and resolve with audio responses.
Secondly, you can also work voice searches of audio clips into a similar FAQs webpage for authors seeking a publisher on your desktop website as well as the mobile device version of your site. The questions may be of the variety that authors ask publishers or themselves first.
Basic questions often asked by authors in need of publishing services include the following:
- How long has your publishing company been in business?
2. How many authors and titles does your publishing company manage?
3. May I contact some of the authors you publish?
4. What services will you provide me as my publisher?
5. When will my book be ready for publishing and release?
6. What will my book look like when the publishing process is complete?
7. My marketing plan aside, who will be my readers?
8. Should I go for a traditional or independent publisher?
9. Do I retain all the rights to my book or books?
10. How and where will my book or books be sold?
11. Who will promote my book or books?
12. What is the cost of publishing my book or books?
13. What is my royalty rate and how often or when will I be paid?
14. Will I receive book sales reports?
15. How do I end our publishing agreement?
Thirdly, you can weave long-tail keywords into your SEO strategy for your site and the books you sell, including your voice searches of audio clips about genres or subgenres.
Long-tail keywords are more specific topics or subtopics than head keywords and contain more words as a result. A head keyword is a general term many writers or authors write about.
The difference between the two affords an opportunity for you to create unique terminology that will make the books on sale in your online store or brick-and-mortar location stand out to your visitors or customers.
As a result, the competition for such content will be less and you will find it easier to best your competition with your unique long-tail keywords about book categories. Your webpages will rank substantially higher as your content is favored by Google.
Examples of unique long-tail keywords include such themes as “educational books for autistic teens,” “picture books for hearing-challenged middle-school children,” or “historical novels for gay or transgendered youth.”
To brainstorm such long-tail keywords, you can consult your demographic data about the purchasers of your books by concentrating on which subgroups have bought your titles the most and under which genres or subgenres.
Those book c
ategories can inspire dozens of long-tail keywords and head keywords and combinations of them for audio clips that announce certain genres or subgenres and describe or define them for the visitors.
Year after year, you could constantly prune your list of such words until you hit on the best or most successful ones as part of your SEO strategy.
Enter Featured Snippets
As a book author or publisher, adding rich data to the content you wish to present in the search engine results pages is a viable means of capturing customers’ attention. This is the primary function of featured snippets.
For particular searches, Google produces highlighted snippets by reviewing the content of a webpage.
A featured snippet can consist of any aspect of a website such as a word definition, list, paragraph, an action step or a table.
To qualify for a snippet feature from Google, your site should be ranked on the first page of its search results.
You should also understand questions or concerns raised by your customers, create in-depth content that directly answers those specific questions, and strive to provide the best answers.
Including keywords in the subheadings of your posts, organizing them in lists and charts or using such formats like Q&A can also enhance your content.
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To get a jump on improving your SEO strategy, identify which of these 10 latest trends are relevant to your publishing business and apply the ones that best fit your short-term and long-term goals. If executed, these practices will boost your search engine rankings and generate more traffic to your site.
For more valuable book marketing insight, follow our SEO/SMM Services LinkedIn Showcase Page today.