START TODAY: How SEO Works
– 2022 has been a roller
coaster year for SEOs. Is 2023 gonna get any easier? I'm gonna prepare you
for all the possibilities that SEO in 2023 has to throw at us so you don't get thrown
out of the coaster. Let's go. The first thing to look
out for in the next year is AI content writing. It's supposed to be a robot. Now, we've been testing AI content writing at Exposure Ninja for a few
years now, and to be honest, it's always sucked, until fairly recently. Now, it's actually pretty reasonable and can be useful if
it's driven correctly. To give a bit of background,
the AI language model GPT3 has allowed marketers
to use AI to do things like come up with basic
outlines of articles and come up with ideas for content titles. Now, it is useful and
it does help speed up things a little bit, but it still requires an experienced human
copywriter to drive it, and a lot of human intervention to get really useful high quality content.
But the release of the Next Generation AI Language Model GPT4
should increase the quality of the content that
these AI tools produce. And therefore, increase its
usage amongst marketers. All right, what does this
mean for SEO and you? Does this all of a sudden
mean that your competitors are gonna be churning out
vast volumes of super content about every single topic under the sun, swallowing up all your rankings and leaving you deserted, sad, and naked? No. And in fact, Google's
helpful content updates sort of penalised sites
that basically do that, publishing huge amounts
of content about topics that they have very little firsthand knowledge or experience in.
Now, my personal take is
that the helpful content Google algorithm update
was actually designed to strengthen Google's
position and get it ready for a world where AI-generated
content proliferates. AI-generated content is coming, and Google needs to make sure that its ranking algorithms
aren't too easily gameable, particularly by lazy, naughty marketers who just wanna press a button
and have software do their job so they can go to the beach
and earn passive income. We know that lazy and naughty
marketers cannot be trusted with any shiny new tool
like AI content generation.
They will use it to just
spam their way to oblivion. But luckily, Google is
aware of this tendency too, and has worked hard to neutralise
basically every version of spam that naughty lazy
marketers have come up with. They neutralise the
threat of spammy links. They neutralise the threat
of scraping content. And they will neutralise every spam tactic that marketers come up with. AI content generation
will be no different. And by the way, this isn't to say that AI content generation is doomed. Quite the opposite. I fully expect AI content tools to become a part of every
market's workflow over time. AI content will have a huge
impact on search and SEO, but rather than completely
changing the game, what we expect is that this
will merely raise the bar.
It will raise the average
quality of content that is being produced
and force those of us who really want to rank
for the most competitive, most profitable phrases
to work that bit harder. As it is currently, the
winners will be the ones who are able to produce the
highest quality content, whether they're writing it or using tools like AI to generate it. As for AI content generation's
impact over the next year, only time will tell. We're still waiting for GPT4 and to see the impact it will have compared to the previous generations.
So stay tuned. But one thing's for sure, it's a fascinating time to
be in the world of content. When you used to search on Google, you used to get 10 blue links. Now, when you search on
Google, you get all sorts. You get videos, you get maps, you get local store
product's inventory levels featured snippets, business
profiles, product listings, weather, show times,
journey times, times tables. The Google search results pages feature more types of media than ever, and we expect this trend to continue. Now, of course, all of this means that you might be seeing
a lower click through rate from search results to your website. So how do you take
advantage of these changes? Well, you need to understand
the different types of content that are showing up for your customers and the people that you're
targeting in search, and then you need to make
sure you're playing that game. For example, if you're
not creating video content for your business, then you
really wanna consider it. For a while now, Google
has been using video in the featured snippets
for some searches.
In particular, what you'll
see is Google pulling out sections of a video to
recommend to searches. That's why you'll see
us using chapter markers in our YouTube videos, because this gives Google
a really clear indication of which sections it needs to show to searches searching for that query. We can also expect Google to
show more short form video, particularly YouTube
shorts in search results. Of course, one of the most beneficial ways to rank on Google is through
the classic featured snippet, and this year will be no different. Featured snippets are where
you get short bits of text ranked for informational searches, just as we have for our
client here for the search, "What is a smart office?" So how do you get featured snippets? Well, the first step is to get your content ranking in the first place. The vast majority of featured
snippets are from pages that are already ranking
on page one of Google. Then it's about giving
Google a short paragraph, which answers the question
that you're targeting in the featured snippet.
You can also use things like
unordered lists and tables as sometimes, these will show up as featured snippets as well. Of course, the downside of
all these search features is a lower click through
rate from search results. So when searches do see
your website on Google, you want to make sure as many of them click on your link as possible. And this is all about having
a compelling page title, a meta description so they're tantalised and can't help clicking on your site. The third thing that
you need to be aware of is the continued rise of Google Discover. There's no relevance to these two. I just think they're really cute. I mean, yeah. Ugh, rankings. So basically, when you use the Google app or you use Chrome on a mobile device or you use Android on your home screen, you'll see content that
Google is recommending to you based on your interest, your previous search
history, and your location. Now, as a business,
this can be a great way of getting free qualified
traffic to your site. Let me give you an example. So I previously bought
the latest Apple Watch, because I'm just one of those losers.
And I started my product search on Google typing in Apple Watch Ultra. Now, as soon as I'd done that, every time I opened my
Google app on my phone, I started seeing Apple
Watch Ultra-related content. Things like reviews or
tests or information about where you could get
it or that type of stuff. Now, what's going on here? Well, Google has decided
that I have an interest in this particular topic
from the knowledge graph.
It's then serving me up content, which is also about that topic, and it's gonna be testing that content on all the people that are interested in the Apple Watch Ultra to see what gets the highest engagement level. It will then push that content
to more of those people. It's basically like free retargeting, or like free in-market
audience YouTube ads where you can run ads to people who are in the market
for buying something.
So it's really high quality traffic, because it's shown interest
in your topic previously. All right, all right, so
how do you get your content featured in Google Discover? Well, one of the main
things that you need to do is optimise your content
for both search and browse. So we're all used to
writing blog posts articles, which are optimised for search, right? You use your target
keywords in the headline, you use your target keywords throughout. You make sure it's really engaging on all that type of stuff, but you also need to optimise
your content for browse. So what about targeting browse traffic? Well, in order to be able to target browse traffic effectively, you need to be able to get clicks from people who haven't just searched for what your article is about. They need to see your article and say, "Oh yeah, that's about something
that's interesting to me." And click on it.
So usually, there needs to be some sort of curiosity element
that gets them to click. You also need to make sure
that there is a compelling high resolution image in your post, at least 1200 pixels wide. This is going to be the
year of voice search. Wait, what? No, it's not. Again? Okay, Google, what is a smart office? – On the website
merriam-webster.com, they say, "To say rude and irritating
things to someone, ignore her.
She is just smarting off again." – Okay, Google, stop. – Do you want a little more context? – People have been saying this
is the year of voice search since 2018, 2017, 2019. It doesn't really matter. The point is the jury is still
out on the commercial value of getting your business
featured in voice search. Sure, it's a nice gimmick to
be able to tell your clients so they can ask their smart
speaker what is a smart office and hear their name back to them, but how does this turn
into commercial benefit? Where's the money? Nobody knows.
Now, of course, it doesn't hurt ranking for voice search queries. It's basically just featured snippet. So if you get ranked
for a featured snippet in position zero, usually,
you'll also be visible in the voice search version of that query. But to be honest, the only
company really benefiting from voice search at the moment is Google. So those are some of the new trends to be aware of in SEO over the next year. So what should you really be focusing on and prioritising this year if you wanna improve your rankings? Well, before we go through those, I wanted to tell you a little bit about how we at Exposure
Ninja can help you with your SEO annual digital
marketing more broadly. If you wanna increase the rankings of your website and generate more leads and sales through it,
we have a free service called the Exposure Ninja Free
Website and Marketing Review. All you need to do is go to
our website, exposureninja.com, click the big button,
and you'll see a form which asks you a bunch of questions about your business and your marketing.
One of our team will
then analyse your website and your competitors and
your digital marketing, and they'll map you out a six
month prioritised action plan that you can follow to generate more leads in sales within your site. This service is completely
free and it's been requested by some of the largest
brands in the world. And when I say that, I mean like top three or top five largest brands in the world. You need to focus your SEO
attention in the next 12 months in order to improve your
rankings and traffic. Well, there are fundamentally
three principles that you need to obey
regardless of the trends. Fundamentally, Google works
and it works for businesses and it works for users because it sticks to these three principles
and doesn't deviate. These three things will matter always. So if you stay on the right
side of these three things, you will always see your rankings improve. The first of these is relevance.
You need to be relevant for the phrases that people are searching for. Of course, the best way
to do this is to use the exact language that they are using when they're searching. This is about keyword research. This is about target
audience identification. This is about knowing your customer. Also important for relevance is context. Understanding what people
want when they're searching. If they're searching for
information, you need to be sure that the pages you're trying
to rank are informative. If they're searching for tutorials, you need to make sure
that they're tutorials. If they're searching because
they want to buy something, you need to be targeting commercial pages that have something for sale. The second thing to focus on is quality. Now, quality matters. Quality will always matter, and with AI content
generation coming through, the bar is only going to get higher. The quality of the
content required to rank in the top positions of Google
is just gonna get higher. So as well as publishing
the best information that your business possibly can, this is about having a
truly world class website.
Make sure that you deserve to rank for the phrases that you're targeting. Make sure your site's mobile friendly and stay on the right
side of core web vitals. Optimising your website for
speed of loading as well. The third area to focus on is authority. Google is getting better
at understanding authority, and we expect this to continue. So boost your visibility online, not just your business' visibility online, but your visibility online,
particularly if you are listed as the author of the
content on your website. This can boost your expertise,
authority, and trust, EAT, and could help boost the ranking of content attributed to you.
One of the focuses of many
of our award-winning SEO and content marketing
campaigns is digital PR. And often, this is to
promote thought leadership, basically boosting the visibility
of a company figurehead so that we can improve the
perception of their expertise, both in Google's eyes and of course the eyes of their customers. Now, if you want some more evidence that EAT is only gonna become
more important on Google, then let's have a think about how Google actually trains its
algorithms to rank websites. So Google has over 10,000
search quality raters, and these are humans that rate the quality of search results on a page. And what Google does is it gives them this search quality rater guidelines book, this report thing that they have to learn, and this gives them very clear guidelines on how to measure the
quality of a website. These search quality
raters learn this guide, and then they're given
lots of websites to analyse and they have to score them
on how useful is this website, how well does it match the query that you've typed into Google search? Now, that guide has a
really heavy emphasis on who is behind the website, what's the expertise and
the authority of the author of this site or the
company that is behind it, and what sort of trust
signals are visible, whether this is qualification or third party indicators
of trust like reviews.
So let's think about this. Google sets the criteria that it wants these search
quality raters to use. It then uses those search quality raters to train its algorithms. So its algorithms are
learning how to analyse the quality of websites based
on the expertise, authority, and trust of the companies
and people behind those sites. The more training data
those algorithms have, the better they will get
at replicating the analysis done by these search quality raters. EAT will only become more important. Now, earlier on, we talked
about the importance of video in search
results, and in particular, making sure that your
business is producing videos to rank in Google and on YouTube. In this video, we break down
a video marketing approach that you can use to get started with this, even if you're brand
new to creating videos. So go and check it out. If you've enjoyed this
video, drop us a comment. What trends are you most excited
about in the future of SEO? And of course, subscribe and click the little bell notification icon so you're notified every
time we post something new.
Until next time, see you soon..
