One of the most crucial components of digital marketing is Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO. If you have even the slightest of knowledge about marketing and business, you are probably aware of this term because ever since internet marketing has started playing an important role in business, SEO has always been the top priority. In very basic terms, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to pull it on top of the search engine results when relevant keywords are entered.
The Uncertainty With SEO Ranking
Optimization, be it on-page or off-page, is done via an algorithm that Google uses and this algorithm decides which website should be placed on top based on various factors including, but not limited to, quality of content in a website, links to other websites and keyword usage. The uncertainty that lies in this process is due to the changes in the algorithm that Google frequently introduces and SEO experts need to reshape their optimization strategy accordingly.
This uncertainty can only be avoided if you are able to predict the next move by Google in changing the algorithm. But is that even possible? While nobody can exactly reveal what the next move would be, Google Patent can be of some help here. These patents can help us identify the most essential factors affecting the efficiency of SEO and analyze the SEO landscape for this year.
Crucial SEO Areas to Focus on in 2019
To make the journey of SEO experts and digital marketers easier and to help them improve SEO ranking of the websites they manage, we have identified the following SEO factors as crucial after studying about 20 Google Patents:
- Multilingual sites: A number of Google Patents suggest that the algorithm is likely to attach higher weight to multilingual websites. The logic behind this theory is that a large part of this world is still deprived of basic internet services and as the internet is gradually hitting their towns, they are usually not aware of English Language.
- Speech recognition: Something relevant to the previous SEO factor, speech recognition will probably matter a lot this year. It has been recorded that around 320 million internet users search using speech which, despite being a huge number, is likely to rise in future. A Google patent reveals that keywords within speeches will be recognized by the algorithm.
- Content relevance: An algorithm named PageRank, or PR, used to rank pages previously based on their relevance and importance but developers studied the algorithm in detail and started misusing it, leaving honest SEO experts at a disadvantage. While PageRank is still somewhat used internally by Google, the company has evolved the procedure after realizing the need for more relevance.
- Social media activities: The next SEO factor that you should focus on is related to mobile apps and social media. A Google Patent focuses on the number of social mentions of applications that are on the app store and ranks those apps accordingly. Since the algorithm is made by Google, it may only be effective for Google Play Store but as an SEO expert, you must focus more on social media activities to boost the app’s social mentions.
- Optimizing images: The future of SEO does not only lie within relevant text but also in speech and images. The next important factor according to Google that we will talk about is image optimization for which a Google Patent on contextually disambiguating queries has been filed. With this patent, you are allowed to inquire about an image that you are currently watching on your device.
It is for this reason why you see giants like Google and Apple have started focusing on multilingual apps and search. So if you want to develop a strong SEO strategy, focus more on the multilingual aspect of SEO for better optimization.
A patent is awarded to Google that allows developers to create an including option for human translation. While machine-based translations are gaining popularity, their quality is not of sufficient standards so Google is likely to shortly introduce some technology to improve human translation experience.
Amazon, Apple, and every other tech giant are prioritizing speech recognition now for this very reason. The fact that Amazon sold over 4 million Echo devices supports the fact that users now prefer voice search instead of manual typing. So designing your SEO strategy favoring speech recognition can be a great move this year.
Significant time has been spent by Google to work on technologies that are able to assess relevant correlations between pages. A relevant SEO concept here is that of content clustering whereby the algorithm creates multiple subtopics based on a specific topic to find a correlation between pages and rank websites based on that. So the Google Patent on content clustering is a hint for you to consider this in your SEO strategy this year.
Improving SEO ranking requires a combination of optimizing techniques because we cannot say for sure how the users would search. They might use a one word text or go for an image so your website should be optimized for everything and this patent is a hint to SEO experts to start focusing on images that are being used in websites. Especially for e-commerce websites, this could be a great SEO factor to determine SEO ranking if the images are used correctly within the website. Edit images to make colors more obvious and make them clearer for a better match.
- Personalized search results: You may have observed that even if you and another user enter exactly the same keywords in the search bar, the results vary slightly. This is because of the Google Patent to serve content based on user engagement that enables SEO ranking to be personalized and based on user interaction with websites.
How this works is that the algorithm reads a user’s search behavior, analyzes it and remembers it. The next time that user searches for something similar, the website they visited before would be on top of the search results but this would not be the case with another user. You can test this on yourself by searching for the same thing on an incognito tab!
The path for SEO experts to walk on here is to make them visit the site only once after which it would appear on tailor-made search results for users. This can be done via paid marketing of website to generate traffic and clicks. However, make sure the target audience is relevant and you do not rule out filters completely to gain more traffic.
- No third-party or copyrighted content: Last but not the least, SEO ranking can be improved if you can incorporate originality along with relevance in the optimization process. Text plagiarism is easily detectable and the algorithm is quite strict about it which is why SEO experts make sure the content uploaded is not plagiarized. On the contrary, using copyrighted music or multimedia is not that easily detectable but Google has improved its systems in this regard as well.
The Google patent to identify reference content containing third-party content reveals a method through which this copyrighted content is identified and the owner is given the credit.
To avoid weakening your optimization strategy and use original content, be it text or multimedia. You can also purchase stock videos and audio files or just seek the permission of the original artist to use their work. This is likely to affect SEO significantly this year!
While these are some of the most important SEO factors, you can identify many more via the patents that Google either is working on or has implemented it. Nevertheless, with these factors in mind, you will be able to devise a great SEO strategy that will boost the SEO ranking of your website(s).
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