Well be talking about Modern SEO next. It becomes important to be at par with the ongoing trends Since the SEO landscape is constantly changing since Google rolls out thousands of updates every year. And that's why it becomes important to have the knowledge, the know-how of the ongoing trends in the SEO world. And it might seem tough to find out exactly what are the emerging trends in the current year, which is why we have made this section for you. We'll walk you through different things like Domain authority the rise of visual search, the rise of videos, voice search Optimization, featured snippets, mastering search intent, combating decreasing CTR
And backlinks And we'll give you some quick SEO tips for 2020 at the end
So let's get started. First one is Domain Authority.
What exactly is domain authority?
Well Domain Authority is the credibility of your website, and is used to determine how trustworthy you are, and how trustworthy your site is.
In earlier times, Domain authority used to be all about Backlinks, but it is not the case now. Now Google evaluates your site based on EAT. What is EAT? It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In short, EAT. In many ways, EAT is the Domain Authority 2.0. Last year, Google's quality rater guidelines really focused on EAT. It was important even before but in recent times, it's importance seems to have increased. In Google's How Search Works report, they clearly mention that they want to rank reliable sources. So how can you increase your EAT score? Here's how.
First, be an expert of your topic. Or hire one. Because if you hire random freelancers to write your content, you will be in trouble. Since Google has said that they only rank credible sources, things written by random freelancers don't have much of a chance being featured on the first page. Google goes as far as to say that medical content needs to be written by medical health professionals. Google is also making use of softwares to figure out who's behind a certain piece of content, making this a tough thing to fake. Therefore it's important to be credible in 2020, if you want good rankings. Be transparent. Google points out that they expect most of the websites to have some sort of information about who is responsible for the website. This means, having a thorough About Page, easy to find contact page, references and external links to sources, privacy policy and terms of service and author bylines on every article. Another step is to get cited. Most of Google's evaluation of EAT happens off of your website, which makes sense since anyone can claim to be an expert otherwise. But getting other websites to agree with you? That's a whole different story. In fact Google specifically mentions this in their guidelines that one website says one thing about itself and other reputable websites disagree with what the website says, trust the external sources. So you need to get cited in lots of different external websites. Reputed websites.
Second, be specific to a particular niche or field. Your site, as a whole, needs to be associated with a certain topic. Which again comes down to off-site mentions. Number Two. A very important rising trend which is Visual search. Based on how it is taking off, visual search is bound to take off in coming years. To put this into perspective, Google lens has already been used 1 billion times. Pinterest gets 600 million visual searches per month. 36 percent of American consumers have already used visual search. Even though visual search technology is still at an early phase, it works really well. You can test it out by scanning the stuff in your room with Google lens. You'll probably find that it can identify pretty much everything. Google lens can identify 1 billion objects and that number is growing everyday. People use Visual searches for a lot of factors like Shopping, Directions, Identifying landmarks, local business reviews, translations, recipes and lots more So how can you optimize your website for visual search? Image SEO is the key. First step is to use descriptive dile names and write alt text for every image. According to Google's guidelines, they prefer pages which are authoritative, fresh and feature the image at the top of their website.
Number three. The rise of videos. Online videos is all the rage right now. According to Cisco, online video will make up 80% of all online traffic by 2021. And that is a really big deal. Therefore video should be a part of your digital marketing plans, here's how you can use video to improve your SEO. Video featured snippets. You've probably noticed more video featured snippets in the search results. So here are three most important things to do to get your video content in a featured snippet. Organize your content into discrete sections. This is really important, clear sections help Google understand the content in your video. And this in turn makes it easy for them to use different clips from your video in a snippet. Second is optimizing your video for SEO. Google uses your title, description and tags to figure out what your video is all about. So apart from publishing videos with well defined content, it is also important to optimize your videos for SEO. A study of 165 videos found that 80% of all the videos in featured snippets contained a keyword in the title. Third, a transcript. It is really important to provide text based transcript of your videos. The captions generated by YouTube are really great, but not perfect. Hence it becomes important to upload a well crafted transcript. Another important point is to grow your YouTube channel. And if you don't have a youtube channel yet, you're missing out. YouTube is already the world's largest search engine. And it is still growing. More and more people are searching for stuff on YouTube than before. It is really too big a search engine to ignore. And most marketers are too lazy to make a video so you can get valuable brownie points by making a video. That is if you can make high quality videos. And it gets better. When you publish seo optimized YouTube videos, you'll own more Google real estate. Embed your video content into text based blog posts. That's because people want to see more content. So it's always better to embed videos into your blog posts. Another emerging and very important trend is Voice Search Optimization. Voice search Optimization is the next big thing. It is evident from these facts. 41% of adults perform at least one voice search every day. Voice search performed in Google are up by thirty five times since 2008. Keeping these in mind, it is important to optimize your ste for voice search. Here's how you can do it. First of all, your content should already rank high in the Google search results. And by high, I mean in the top three. According to a study, Google tended to source voice search answers from content that ranked in the top three search results. It's also important to include a question and answer in your content since the majority of voice searches are questions like how to do a pull-up or who starred in Shawshank redemption. When that happens Google usually picks a page which contains the question and the answer. Which is why FAQ pages work really well for voice search. Ranking in featured snippet also helps a lot. A study revealed that four out of ten voice search results come directly from a featured snippet. Which brings us to our next point. That is optimizing for featured snippets.
According to SEMrush, 11.52% of all search results have a featured snippet. And they're stealing a lot of clicks from the number one spot. As the new saying goes, zero is the new number one. So how do you get your content to appear in the featured snippets? You start with finding opportunities. By doing keywords research. Keywords that you already rank for. Why? Because 99.57% of all featured snippets are from pages that rank on the first page for that term. So if you aren't on the first page, you have zero chances of being ranked as a featured snippet. Second point is to add Snippet bait to the page. Snippet bait is a forty to sixty word block of content specifically designed to rank in je featured snippet spot. Why forty to sixty words, you might ask? Because according to a study by SEMrush, they found out that most of the featured snippets are forty to sixty words long. You could also use different types of snippet baits like list snippets, by using H2 and H3 subheaders for every item in your list. Or table snippets, by creating a table Google can easily pull data from. Another point at the core of SEO is Search intent. It is really the backbone of SEO. Why? Because any content which doesn't match search intent, simply doesn't get ranked. So how do you figure out search intent? It starts with keyword research. You have to figure out the search intent behind each keyword. And you have to create something that exactly matches the search intent.
Your content, and keyword should be exactly what the people are searching for. Another method is to optimize your old content. You can change or modify your old content to make it better, to make it a better fit for the search intent or just to improve user experience. It can have a good effect on your website. Backlinks still remain a key factor for the SEO. SEO is, eventually, all about content and backlinks. Without amazing content, you'll never be able to get backlinks and without backlinks, you'll never be able to rank on the first page of Google. Backlinks are that important. Therefore quality content and backlinks should be the main focus of your SEO.