Keeping up with the latest trends is essential for any busy marketer, but the most important SEO technique to remember is to optimize for people. Stop trying to write content for search engines and focus on improving page 2 positions. Recent research has revealed that 91.8% of all searches are for long-tail keywords, which is a huge change from the early days of the Internet. Alternative text, or alt text, is a brief description of an image and still has a significant impact on Google's ranking, according to MozCast.
Page loading speed is another factor that affects dwell time and bounce rates. An analysis of more than 5 million desktop and mobile pages found that the average time it takes for a web page to fully load in 10.3 seconds on desktop computers and 27.3 seconds on mobile devices. The first 5 seconds of a page load have the greatest impact on overall conversion rates, with every additional second reducing conversion rates by an average of 4.42%.
Audio is also becoming increasingly popular, with the average consumer spending more time listening than reading. Most SEOs believe that every blog post should include at least 2 to 5 internal links, and people spend the same amount of time on their internal and external linking strategies. Unfortunately, 91% of all pages never get organic traffic from Google because more than 50% of those pages don't have a single backlink.
Since the late 2000s, Google has been placing more emphasis on brands. They look for brand signals to eliminate misinformation and provide more reliable results for each search, making it a critical ranking factor. When a brand is consistently represented across all its platforms, revenue can increase by up to 23%. Additionally, 54% of decision-makers say they spend more than an hour a week reading thought leadership content relevant to their business.
However, 71% say that less than half of what they read provides them with valuable information. A study by Ahfref that analyzed more than 1 billion web pages found that 66.31% of them had zero referring domains and 26.29% had only one or three referring domains. Less than 0.1% of the sites had more than 100 referring domains.
To avoid this issue, it's important to keep keyword density at 2%. This applies to the main keyword as well as related keywords in the topic. For example, if the target keyword is “meringue” and you create a post on “How to make the perfect meringue” and another post on “X common mistakes when making meringue”, you should create a larger publication that includes both titles as H2s - this is known as pillar content.
The goal is that only 10-20% of all referring domains are linked exactly or partially. Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital and has been recognized by The Wall Street Journal as a top influencer on the web, Forbes as one of the top 10 best sellers, Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the 100 brightest companies, and by President Obama and the United Nations as one of the 100 best entrepreneurs under 30 and 35 respectively.
According to Safari Digital, approximately 61% of marketers believe that SEO is key to online success - which is why modern companies allocate an average of 41% of their marketing budget to it. Taking the time to map out a proper SEO strategy can revolutionize not only your online traffic but also your overall business.
Google's algorithm continues to get smarter every day with constant human input and align better with our thinking - so there's no clever escape or magic formula to outsmart it. Write first for humans and then for search engines - while motivation should always be humans first, search engines second.
Keywords are at the heart of everything you do - they get to the heart of what visitors and Google are looking for by isolating common search terms, but SEO also generates 1000% more traffic than organic social networks which dominate more than half of all online traffic.
We talk a lot about link building in our 10-step SEO audit - check it out! An increase of 118.91% in organic traffic was seen when one page was optimized correctly - so which of these 19 SEO techniques are you going to try first?
It's important to mention your target keyword once in the first 25 words of your content - according to SEMrush this page also has 630 different keywords.
Instead, I recommend reviewing these 3 reports on a regular basis: organic traffic report; backlinks report; keyword rankings report.
In the past you could publish a 1,000-word blog post and surprise people - today? A 1000-word blog post isn't anything special. In fact, a blog survey by Orbit Media found that the average blogger now spends more than 3 hours on...
