Another year is upon us, which means new trends, new resolutions, and new everything. The new year’s start is also a great time to look at your current SEO strategy and find significant ways to tweak and upgrade it.
There are several SEO tactics that you might want to incorporate into your business this coming year. Here are eight that you should test for yourself.
1. Prioritize User And Search Intent
When you’re doing your keyword research, one thing that you have to be mindful of at all times is user and search intent. You can create the most helpful and informative content in the world, but if you don’t accurately target users and search intent, it’s going to be hard to rank high in the search results.
Although prioritizing user and search intent isn’t a revolutionary SEO strategy, it’s a foundational one that helps you realign your priorities. It should be one of the most critical parts of your SEO strategy.
Google prioritizes user and searcher intent when it comes to search engine rankings, which is why you, too, should be deliberate and careful about it.
2. Keyword Gap Analysis
Any SEO specialist should have something along the Keyword Gap Analysis lines included in their Keyword research as part of their SEO packages. When you’re starting, the key is to create SEO content, but it might be better to apply Keyword Gap Analysis on this content if you already have content.
You don’t want to start over and remove that content because Google, or search engines, might have already indexed that piece of content. Thus, it’s much easier to optimize content that Google already indexed to perform better rather than have to create content and wait for Google to index it.
That’s where Keyword Gap Analysis can come into play.
If you have content that you never applied SEO techniques on, the Keyword Gap Analysis can help. However, it shines when you have content that you already used SEO techniques on, but you want to optimize it further. The Keyword Gap Analysis will help you identify lapses in that area.
3. Artificial Intelligence
AI or artificial intelligence is becoming a massive part of many people’s search engine optimization strategies in the coming years. Not only is it a part of SEO, but it’s also even becoming a part of day-to-day life in people without them realizing it. Thus, it’s also affecting how they search for things on search engines.
For example, as voice-to-text search becomes more popular, you also have to be wary of how that affects the format of search queries. It will affect your keyword research, which will have a ripple effect all through your SEO strategy. It will affect your content and your topic discovery.
Of course, now you can also use AI to help you with your SEO strategy. One excellent way to do that is by using AI to help you better understand your consumer’s behavior. You can then use the consolidated data to inform your next tactics properly.
4. Voice Search
We briefly mentioned how voice search’s growing popularity would affect how people create search queries on search engines nowadays. Therefore, you will have to carefully consider your keywords, knowing that voice search is becoming more popular. If you’re unclear what makes them different, picture this.
If you’re asking through voice search, you’ll probably say, “What is the nearest Japanese restaurant to me?” However, when you type it out on search engines, you might only put in the term “Japanese restaurants near me” instead of the whole question. This difference is enormous in terms of your keyword strategy.
Since there’s such a huge difference, you have to learn to bridge these two in your content strategy and your SEO strategy overall.
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses more on the back-end part of your website’s SEO strategy. It’s all about how crawlable your site is, which means how easy it is to access all of the content on your site. Technical SEO has less to do with your content and the marketing or advertising you do for your site.
With that said, if you don’t know how to do this, it might be best to hire someone who can help you with the more technical aspects of your SEO strategy. That’s because technical SEO has a lot to do with decreasing the load time in your website, eliminating broken links, creating XML sitemaps, and so on.
6. Write Compelling Content
Of course, if your website doesn’t have any compelling content for users to want to stay on your website, there’s no point in all the back-end work you did on technical SEO. You still need to ensure that your SEO strategy includes well-optimized content that your target audience would love to consume.
When you have excellent content paired with powerful SEO tactics, your content will spread far and wide. You’ll be able to reach a broader range of your target audience and have better results with your SEO strategy.
SEO is a very tough thing to master because results are rarely ever instantaneous. The same applies to creating compelling content.
Remember that your content should all be about promoting your product or service because that’s also not how search engines work. Thus, you still need to be careful with the type of content you make.
7. Video Carousel
Video is an excellent piece of content because it is engaging and helps keep users on your site for a long time, given the format. Therefore, it might make sense for you to have a video carousel on your website. It’s even a trend that might grow in numbers this coming year because of its effective video content.
However, when it comes to video carousels, you have to be careful with the placement and video. That’s because, if you’re not careful, it can do more harm than good, especially when it ends up slowing down the loading time of your site.
You have to discuss the pros and cons of video carousels before you set it up for your site so that you’re sure you get the most out of it.
8. Influencers Marketing
Influencers are a powerful group of people that do what their title entails: influence. Therefore, a lot of businesses know just how powerful it is to collaborate with them. That’s because when you collaborate with influencers, it also helps get the word out for your product or service. It also means that you’re going to get more inbound links leading to you.
That’s why, when it comes to influencer marketing for your SEO, it might be better to connect with successful bloggers because of the link building benefit that it gives you.
These eight SEO tactics will help you improve your SEO strategy and take it to the next level. Of course, as always with SEO, these tactics won’t take immediate effect most of the time. Therefore, you should give them a period to settle into your SEO ecosystem until you find which ones work the best for your business.
Study these tactics yourself and start your year off by learning, educating, and improving yourself and your SEO for the better.
