One of the inherent traits of technology is that it’s constantly changing. While this is beneficial in many ways, it can feel difficult to keep up sometimes.
This can be especially true for virtual marketers, who constantly reconfigure their webpages and social media outlets to comply with Google’s ever-developing algorithm. For a long time now, SEO has been the name of the game. By updating SEO tactics, marketers have continually tried to make their websites seem more attractive to search engines. Since this tactic is nothing new to marketers, some people beg the question: Is SEO dead?
Change Isn’t Death
The short version of this frankly appalling question is no, SEO isn’t dead. The long version requires a more comprehensive understanding of the tactics that marketers use every day to ensure a company’s virtual success. Since SEO came on to the marketing scene, other methods like PPC have become popular as well. These types of paid marketing methods generally work in tandem with SEO, not as a replacement.
What many people are worried about now is the looming presence of Google’s new Core Web Vitals. As they roll out this year, the UX-centered standards will certainly change how search engines prioritize pages. However, this doesn’t mean that SEO is old news. It simply means that, along with strong SEO tactics, marketers will need to also pay attention to FID, CLS, and LCP. Think of it as Google raising its standards for what constitutes a good website.
How to Leverage Your SEO
With Core Web Vitals on the scene, marketers have a lot to think about, and SEO remains at the top of that list. There are ways to make your SEO work harder for your website and ensure that your site will receive the hits it deserves along with good Core Web Vital ratings. Here are some ways to make sure your SEO is working at maximum capacity.
Find Out What People Like
Before you even look for ways to improve, take a look at what’s already working. Use your preferred analytic tools to determine your site’s content receives the most attention and sees the most traffic. This should give you a roadmap of what type of content you need to add to your site to improve SEO and what might not be working so well.
Discover What People Search For
SEO doesn’t work at maximum capacity if you’re putting it on pages that people aren’t looking for. Once you’ve discovered what works for your own site, research what people are actually looking for when they head to Google. It might be different than you think and may give you even more focus for your SEO efforts. Pay special attention to keywords, and be as specific as you can.
Keep Your Enemies Close
Okay, maybe they aren’t enemies, but your competitors have a lot you can learn from when it comes to SEO. Dive into top-performing websites, see how they word their information, what kind of picture tags and links they include, and take notes.
Raid Your Own Search Bar
Your in-site search bar is a wealth of information about what people want. If the commonly searched information is somewhere on your site, the search frequency will tell you that it should probably be more readily accessible by a tab or button. If the content they’re searching for is not on your site, you have work to do. Either way, your in-site search function is a goldmine when it comes to SEO insight. You may want to check your sitemap clicks as well. Lots of people go there when they can’t find what they’re looking for.
All in all, SEO is certainly not dead. Marketers and designers alike just have to adjust to the idea that it’s going to take even more effort to make your website count; that’s just the way of life. What’s the age-old saying? There’s no crying in…virtual marketing?
