7 Innovations in Search Engine Optimization and Their Application

The search engine optimization industry is constantly making innovations. Likewise, new technologies regularly emerge to help marketers and developers streamline their content creation strategy to achieve better organic search results. As a result, to ensure that your brand stays relevant in search engine results, you'll need an SEO expert to adapt to these fast-changing technologies and the latest trends in online marketing, social media, and more.

Don't get left behind. To reach your potential customer, your search engine marketing plan will need to combine social media, link building, email marketing, keyword research, Google AdWords, backlinks, and (of course) great fresh content. Your targeted audience will find you once you begin to rise in search engine ranking.

Learn to scale your SEO process, use specific keywords, tweak all of your core web vitals, and generate a high-quality search result. Do this by implementing these seven innovations in search engine optimization as a core component of your marketing strategy. There is a lot of trial and error involved with attaining effective SEO and digital marketing success, so plan on that!

1. Mobile-First Indexing for Improved SEO Ranking

Did you know that 50.81% of total global website traffic comes from mobile devices? Search engines, as a result, have begun prioritizing mobile-friendly content.

Smartphone proliferation has grown by leaps and bounds. As a result, more and more users are switching to mobile search rather than using desktops, laptops, or other devices. Your SEO efforts and content marketing will stall out if you're designing and marketing for desktop and ignoring what Google Analytics is trying to tell you.

In response to the dramatic increase in mobile search, Google Search introduced the approach of mobile-first indexing. This approach uses the mobile version of a website to index and rank it in search engine result pages (SERPs). Consequently, Google rolled out its mobile-first indexing for every website. That being so, optimizing websites to be mobile-friendly and cross-device compatible has become more pertinent for marketing than ever.

Google is steadily moving toward indexing only mobile versions of websites rather than desktop versions. If your website is still focused primarily on its desktop index and not optimized for mobile viewing, then it is likely that Google may not index it at all even if your relevant keywords are all top-notch. Obviously, this is likely to significantly affect your search engine rankings and ROI.

The need of the hour is to switch to responsive website design with Google mobile-first indexing, fast loading time, and improved user-friendliness.

Optimize dynamic website content and images to deliver enhanced mobile experiences. Mobile-first indexing can help boost your page rankings and organic traffic and backlinks using a mobile-optimized version of your site.

2. Natural Language Processing: Producing Effective Short-Form Content

Ever since Google rolled out its 2019 Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm update, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a technology innovation powering the SEO industry.

Using NLP, Googles algorithm looks at the context of a word as it appears within a sentence to understand its meaning. This means that Google will no longer rely on particular search terms and phrases to provide the most relevant answers. Rather, they will look into the intent behind the search.

Leveraging BERT, the Google algorithm now understands the context behind every search and then provides appropriate information.

"By trying to understand the 'context' of search queries, and by mining the relationship between stop-words with other words in the query, Google's BERT algorithm pushes the limits of how a traditional search engine understands a user's needs. With Google weighing in on NLP to gain a deeper understanding of user queries, it implies that content-makers who get more specific, relevant, and descriptive with their content and information - including links - in their pages tend to rank higher."

Jaya Kumar Data Scientist, Deep Learning and NLP Specialist

From the perspective of SEO, NLP is important to marketing because creating high-quality, informational content will help make it most relevant to a searcher's intent and not the keywords they are using.

3. SSL Certificate Labeling for Strengthening Customer Trust

While often overlooked, SSL certificate (HTTPS) labeling is an important SEO trend that businesses must consider. HTTPS is a crucial ranking factor for Google as it secures improved trust with your target audience. Ongoing innovations in search engine optimization have only reinforced this requirement.

Websites that hold an SSL certificate are labeled as "HTTPS" by Google. This indicates that the site offers high-level security and integrity. The security of user data is a vital factor! It can help boost your search engine rankings and drive increased traffic.

A site that does not hold SSL certification or is a non-HTTPS site will be labeled as "Not Secure" by Google and other search engines. This can significantly affect search engine rankings. Additionally, end-users will be reluctant to visit any site that is not safe.

The implications for innovation in this space are clear. To boost search engine rankings and offer a secure browsing experience, websites must obtain a basic SSL certificate. It's now an integral element of any SEO strategy.

4. Automated Content Curation Using GPT-3

If you are looking for true innovations within the SEO industry and digital marketing, the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Number 3 (GPT-3) is worth your attention. One of the most prominent examples of its application is a 2020 story published by The Guardian on its website - written entirely by a robot.

Using a broad pool of datasets, GPT-3 technology is trained to mimic the way humans write. Some of the datasets it uses come from Wikipedia, Common Crawl Dataset, historical books, etc. When you input a writing prompt into GPT-3, it will read the relevant information on the internet and predict what will follow next.

As such, the GPT-3 API is a revolutionary content curation tool you can use across different SEO applications. These include tasks such as writing emails or creating the first draft of a report. All you need to do is feed the API some bullet points as an outline, keeping your keyword ranking in mind, and the robot will write it automatically.

5. On-Page Automated SEO Optimization for Enhanced Search Experience

Google has been continuously updating its algorithm to offer an improved search experience to users. As a part of its algorithm update, the search engine giant now considers long-form content as a vital ranking factor. Long-form content ideally takes a more in-depth approach to the topic and, as such, tends to meet the searcher's intent.

However, writing high-quality and relevant long-form content is not easy. It involves considering a wide range of factors such as competitor research, keyword discovery, topic selection, creating engaging headings and subheadings, providing valuable insights, constructing a social media support strategy, and much more.

Continuously creating unique content that is of value to your readers is one of the more challenging innovations in search engine optimization.

"One of the first places I turn for new article ideas is the 'Top Content' area found within my Google Analytics account. There, I'm able to access a quick list of the posts on my site that have been viewed the most often, providing me with some interesting insight into the subject matter that my audience finds most interesting."

Eric Siu "Easy Market Research: Leveraging Your Existing Data for Content Creation"

New AI-Powered Tools Speed Content Creation

Normally, the next step would be to spend several hours editing and optimizing each piece of long-form content for search engines. This is where on-page automated content optimization and technical innovation come into the picture.

Tools such as Content Harmony or Frase AI streamline the process of content research or checking top-ranking pages. They provide useful data developers can use to curate high-quality content.

Content Harmony helps design content briefs automatically, helping meet a searcher's intent in a shorter amount of time. Writers only need to provide a keyword/keywords and the software will analyze SERPs automatically based on various data points. The generated results help the author create content briefs.

Source: MarketMuse (All rights reserved.)

6. Optimizing A/B Testing for SEO with Augmented User Interaction

Most SEO professionals tend to focus on end-user A/B testing rather than SEO A/B testing in digital marketing. The former involves picking website visitors randomly and assigning them to various versions of a web page. Based on the user's interaction with the pages, professionals use these SEO activities to gauge overall online marketing performance.

However, SEO A/B testing adds Google bots assigned to analyze the same version of any page. In essence, you are showing different elements of any page to Google to test their SEO-friendliness. These include meta description, featured snippet, title tags, H1, schema markup, anchor text, etc. SEO A/B testing helps clarify what works well for the page and what does not. Optimizing a page based on these results will help boost its search rankings and visibility.

7. Innovations in SEO Do Not Negate the Need for Non-Text Content

The purpose of using non-text content factors in SEO is to offer an improved user experience on your website.

Text alone lacks the engagement factor that keeps audiences interested, especially in long-form content. As a result, adding non-text content factors is crucial. These include images, graphs, infographics, videos, animations, audio clips, slideshows, PDFs, etc. will help improve the quality of your content. Likewise, doing so will make it more relevant and engaging.

Conclusion

With modern technology developments such as those already mentioned and Google Search Console making their way into the industry, it is evident that SEO optimization is definitely not dead. On the contrary, custom SEO has never been more important, especially local SEO. This will continue as Google constantly changes its approach to how websites are ranked in SERPs.

Do you want to leverage the potential of SEO to boost your search engine visibility, drive organic traffic, garner quality backlinks, and improve ROI? If so, you must commit to staying current on these technologies and implement regular modifications to achieve quality results. You might even consider partnering with a professional SEO service.

If you would like to connect with an SEO strategist to speak more about implementing innovative strategies and learn more about technical SEO, contact one of our Relevance SEO experts.

The principles behind search engine optimization (SEO) make sense for businesses looking to capture target audience interest in a particular field, industry, or product type. For example, a consumer enters the phrase "brown spots in lawn" into the Google search bar, and multiple lawn services providers pop up. Their profiles feature content filled with tips and tricks as well as Google ads for useful products. This search result tactic works wonders for businesses with large audiences that address problems most everyone faces. But SEO also works well in niche markets, assuming it's leveraged correctly.

Obviously, some businesses don't have large audiences. How can SEO be as effective for them to target a potential customer? If you are operating within a niche business, read on. Learn how you can effectively leverage SEO for online success.

Understand Search Volume

Search volume is an important concern for SEO. It is essentially how many people are searching with the intent of finding and interacting with your niche.

No matter which SEO tool you use, researching search volume will give you a good idea of the size of your online audience. Scanning through Google Search Console, for example, you'll learn what terms your target audience are using to search for your industry or your business in particular.

The best way to research search volume is through Google's Keyword Planner, which you can access through your Ads Account. Here, you can find graphs pertaining to the popularity of different words and phrases used in the search. Because you are working within a niche, you are likely to discover that your search volume is low.

However, it shouldn't be non-existent.

If you do try to use a keyword phrase that is associated with little to no traffic on any search engine, the Google Keyword Planner should tell you that your keywords aren't contributing to SEO success.

Search intent is a bit different from keywords. While terms, phrases, and related keywords used in the search query factor into intent, they aren't always directly descriptive of what a web user wants in the search results.

Google is getting better at understanding and identifying intent through machine learning tools like BERT. Accordingly, you should try to work with search intent within your content to increase the number of keywords you rank for and boost your search volume.

• Related Article: Step by Step Guide to Keyword Research

Research Keyword Specificity

Usually, specific keyword phrases are better for SEO because there is less competition for them.

For instance, huge corporations tend to rank for "financial services," but smaller, local businesses have more opportunities to rank for "financial services Modesto CA." This is a great example of how to approach an SEO strategy in niche markets. Using local SEO and niche driven SEO allows smaller businesses to rise in ranking for a specified target audience.

However, there is a fine line between appropriately specific and obscure. You need to be careful not to cross that line. If you do, you'll lose whatever meager web traffic you can get.

Keyword research is difficult even at the best of times. Still, when you are trying to balance on the edge of specificity, you should consider hiring an SEO expert or marketing agency. Many specialists can provide SEO services such as keyword research, niche driven SEO, or technical SEO a la carte or provide a comprehensive package.

SEO agencies have the right keyword tools to help you track and choose the best terms and phrases to target, especially when your search volume is low, to begin with. They will start with a content audit and an SEO audit. They will conduct keyword research and help you assess your current domain rating. Plus, experienced SEOs know more about managing search engine intent with keywords.

Research Your Search Competition

It is likely that you operate within a smaller niche because you discovered a need and worked to fill it. You might be the only business of your kind. However, you will still probably have some sort of competition for your keywords. A cursory glance at your website's Google Analytics can help you see how your niche edit is performing.

To dominate in your chosen keyword categories and develop a content strategy, you first need to know what pages you are up against. The very best email marketing effort, blog post, or affiliate marketing campaign won't boost your domain authority if you are getting drowned out by your competitors. And yet you certainly don't want to waste time chasing every Google trend.

It's important to note that your competition might be firmly established in your industry. They might be ranking for your niche keywords for a completely unrelated reason. Regardless, you should look into their content and SEO tactics and work to best them in every way. Specific factors include domain speed and image quality to content quantity and relevance.

• Related Article: Why A Free SEO Tool Junkie Finally Joined The Paid Club

Develop Niche Content

Content creation is easily your most powerful tool in attracting a niche audience. The more content you have, and the higher quality it is, the better your link building will be and the higher your search ranking factor will be. That result is irrespective of the volume of searches coming your way.

You likely know your business and industry inside and out, so you can begin developing content and social media links for your target audience today. Right now.

However, creating your own content for the purpose of inbound marketing isn't a terrific long-term strategy. For one, lacking an outsider's perspective on your industry and products can be a hindrance to your business's ability to relate to and engage its audience.

For another, you might not have the time or skill to produce high-quality content on a schedule. Additionally, you might lack a network of publishers for the placement of your content to garner backlinks. Now or later, you should contract content marketing services. They will provide the expertise you need to execute your niche content properly.

It is more difficult to practice SEO within a niche market. You might quickly see your domain rise to the top of the search results. However, you might never obtain the huge influx of traffic that businesses in larger industries experience. Still, niche driven SEO remains an important digital marketing tactic. You should look into leveraging a niche marketing strategy for business success today.