While fully immersed within a technical world, you would think SEO would constantly change and innovate by huge strides. The rest of the tech landscape seems to be doing just that. Yet throughout the last 2 decades, when marketers have worked in search and treated it as its own discipline worthy of lofty teams and budgets, we haven’t had much innovation at all. No new SEO tricks, aside from periodic Google algorithm updates and industry standard responses to these updates.
We’ve all spent time adjusting our tactics to keep up with small changes that decide rankings. But, the alterations to our SEO strategies haven’t been because there has been a fundamental shift in the way search works. Rather, it’s been our necessary role in an action-reaction relationship between Google and marketers, which hardly justifies as innovation. Will this change any time soon? Is search stagnant, other than the tweaks to best practices and optimization for new platforms?
Are there new SEO tricks to implement in anticipation of major change in search?
First, it’s important to understand that change doesn’t always come exactly where you’re looking. We’re on the brink of something fresh and exciting in SEO, but it’s not found in ways we should be linking or approaches to creating content.
Change Won’t Be What We’re Used To
Marketers are used to adjusting strategies to keep up with Google updates and even varying client needs. This necessary part of the job has seen us reach into our bag of SEO tricks continually over the last couple of decades to anticipate and react to trends. But generally, our outlook on search has stayed consistent. We may have found ways to work the system to our advantage, and some great minds have pioneered brilliant strategic plans for getting to the top of the SERPs. Completely new ideas or a reworking of search methodology, however, has yet to be seen.
We’ve become pros at SEO basics.
Even when it seemed like we had to respond to major change like when Google released its Panda and Penguin updates, it was all pretty minor in comparison to shifts other industries have had to deal with. We’ve learned that indexing to ensure inclusion in Google’s search rankings has always been essential and likely will be in the foreseeable future. The good marketers have focused on their tech specs to stay in the game. High-quality content was essential from Day 1 and now we can follow Google’s cues to show up as relevant. Not much has significantly changed around content creation, though.
Link building to gain authority has been a critical part of SEO for more than 10 years and it hasn’t varied much conceptually. Google did make it mandatory for companies to use white hat link-building techniques or else face a penalty. But, again, this wasn’t anything that required SEO shifts by leaps and bounds.
Prepare to Implement SEO Tricks Related to New Technologies
As Google continues to ever-so-slightly tweak how it ranks websites and displays those rankings, and as marketers do what they’ve always done to adjust, the smart SEO strategist will place some focus elsewhere. On new technologies. This is the bag of tricks you will want to be playing with in the future of SEO.
We’re already seeing some of these technologies make an impact on search. Unlike SEO strategies to employ, the new tech tools at our disposal are within easy grasp of all marketers and they’ll assist in positively affecting SERPs placement. Like Google Search Console, previously called Webmaster Tools, for instance. This tool constantly updates with fresh features and it gives marketers great insight in how users view their websites. Moz Keyword Explorer is another innovation in search technology. It doesn’t change how we look for low-competition, high-volume keywords, but instead it helps us search for these keywords more quickly.
Analytics tools are innovating at an exciting pace. Google Analytics, in particular, presents marketers with more tools on a constant basis and more intuitive navigation when evaluating a campaign. All of the ways we use automation, to market our companies and clients online, are signs of innovation in SEO. We’ve never before been able to schedule social media posts, boost ads and blast email marketing messages so fast and to such a targeted audience.
Perhaps the most important SEO tricks a marketer should implement right now are those that deal with the tools tech companies give us to make our jobs easier. The technologies that let us achieve high-level campaign management and precise measurement of our efforts.
To learn more, contact Galileo Tech Media.