“Best practices” can lead to checkbox mentality, which limits tactics to a list of unimaginative tasks. We don’t want to minimize our innovation and transparency by being SEO checklist checkers, but we also don’t want to discard all best practices. Best practices are a complement to experience, not a substitute for it. When we’re starting from scratch on a project, we should follow best practices.
I really dislike these blogs because they typically cover the same dozen hyped-up subjects that aren’t applicable to the general public. Voice quest was expected to be the next big thing in 2017, but only a few brands still need to build Alexa Skills.
In any case, SEO activities shouldn’t vary all that much from year to year. Google already controls the online search market, and E-A-T is just a different term for what we’ve been doing all along.
Instead, the focus of this article is on how to improve our SEO strategy in the coming year by integrating recent and upcoming Google SEO updates. We don’t want to have the right boxes to check; we want to make our SEO practice the best.
Now is the time to consider mobile-only indexing.
While we’ve been hearing Google’s recommendation to “consider smartphone first” since at least 2011, I’m sure most of us still check websites using laptop resolutions. This is going to have to improve!
Google recently announced that mobile-first indexing would only cover the mobile edition of the site beginning in March 2021. For indexing and rating purposes, Google will disregard our content’s desktop views. Mobile pages with the “M-dot” will become the standard rather than the exception, potentially creating problems for websites that haven’t embraced responsive design.
This move, in my view, makes it smoother because we no longer have to think about the relative value of web and desktop content functionality. The only question right now is how mobile content renders. What matters is what the smartphone Googlebot sees as it renders the website.
We must think in terms of mobile-only when constructing new websites, doing mockups, auditing websites(Best Site Audit Tools), writing H1 tags, testing key navigation connections, and so on. It will be inconvenient at first to constantly emulate a handheld computer with our browser, but we’ll have to get used to it.
Answer the User’s Question Clearly and concisely
The definition of “relevance” has shifted significantly over time. The first step of determining relevance in a keyword search was to see how much a text contained the same words as the questions. This is the kind of simple metric of interest you’d find in a library’s keyword scan. Google has progressed to evaluating how well passages of text in our content can answer a query, dubbed “passage-based Indexing.”
The technology behind how passage-based indexing can be used in ranking is most likely based on BERT, and it’s somewhat similar to how Google finds candidate passages for featured excerpts. In other words, our pages are more likely to rank higher for a given question if they contain passages of text that are quite “answer” for that query.
Render Content Quickly and Smoothly
Rendering success isn’t just a ranking phenomenon; it’s a factor that affects everything. How well pages load for users has an effect on any platform and each of their conversion metrics. This is supported by research. There is a slew of metrics for measuring page efficiency, including at least a dozen for page speed. Organic search advertisers didn’t know which ones mattered the most for a long time.
Fortunately, Google included some in their Lighthouse reports for us to customize for. The metrics were revised in 2020 and are now known as Core Web Vitals, and they gave us a deadline for when they will be included in the ranking.
SEO companies in Dubai and around the world do a site success assessment and hammer out your Core Web Vitals. Websites with low scores will be demoted, whereas high-scoring sites may earn a badge in their search result snippets. We have a comprehensive guide to site speed optimization that will assist you in getting started.
Make Snippet Descriptions Your Own
Our meta description tags aren’t used in snippets very often by Google. For first-page rankings, our tags are skipped up to 71 percent of the time!
Google seems to believe that they are very good at selecting text samples to replace our hand-crafted meta explanations. They might be for queries that our tags didn’t target, but I’ve seen them use some strange text instead.
Use data-nosnippet with caution and double-check its implementation. We can prevent a lot of meaningless text from showing up in fragments by selecting a tag with a lot of text, but we might also make an error and block the entire page’s main material. Cover the target text in unstyled tags and put data-nosnippet in it if there isn’t a decent tag for blocking meaningless snippet text already on the page.
The goal of web search remains the same, regardless of how many new search features and resources Google introduces: to provide expertly created material to address the user’s question. With improved web performance analytics and natural language processing, we’ll be able to do it more easily this year. It’s also become more difficult because mobile isn’t the easiest medium to deal with, and the target isn’t easy to achieve.
Learn: A Definitive Guide to SEO in 2021: 12 Trends and Best Practices to Follow
SEO is ever-evolving and due to the introduction of different devices, it gets hard to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. If it is too overwhelming for you, you can write to Prism Digital, Best SEO Agency in Dubai, and get the website rank higher.
