You may have helped many websites to get rank on Google’s first page in the past, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get success in doing that in future as well. Hardly any industry has gone on a roller-coaster ride like SEO. Some of the changes have been so radical that many online marketers are yet to get a full grasp over them.

It's 2016 now, and SEO is no longer defined in terms of technical jargons. They were once used to fool clients. But now the clients have wised up. They no longer hesitate to say “I’m least bothered about the report that you sent at the end of every month, what concerns me is when my website will appear on Google’s first page.”

In such a changing scenario, if you want to turn the tide in your site’s favor, you first need to understand the changes that have silently taken place. In this article, we can help you in this endeavour.

Redefining content

"Content is the King" - haven't you been hearing this from last one year? Well, it holds true to a large extent, primarily because today’s SEO is heavily dependent on content. But, to understand its role in SEO, you, as a marketer first need to redefine it.

Earlier, content meant blogs and articles that were used to generate links. But now, content has gotten an all-pervasive form. Content can be in text, graphics and audio-visual format. A blog is an example of content, so is an infographic and a video. Using content for link-building should be the last thing you want. Instead, use content to create engagement. Never allow your focus to digress from this and you’ll become a master in creating the so-called ‘New Age SEO” content.

Technicalities are dead, God saves technicalities

Don’t interpret the last paragraph wrongly. The importance of technicalities has shrunk, but they are still relevant. There are some technical areas that you need to take care of in order to help your site get top ranking on SERPs. Some of the relevant technical considerations are;

• Elimination of duplicate pages and content.
• Keeping a decent number of internal links on the site so a user moves from one page on the site to another page.
• Allowing your site to curate content that is already created.

These technical considerations are highly crucial because they account for user-engagement.

Visual branding

The idea was endorsed chiefly by Zach Kitschke. He explained the benefits of emphasizing on visual branding. In a time when everyone has access to social media, it’s difficult to separate useful content from their useless counterparts.

Through visual branding, a marketer can produce meaningful content. He can add meaning to what has so far been meaningless, such as colors. Visual branding stresses on the use of colors because colors resonate human emotion and actions too. See the infographic below:

Sources

Infographics are best examples of visual branding. Through an infographic, a marketer conveys a bucket of information and users feel receptive to obtain such information as they like the format in which they are presented. The best brands rely heavily on images and visual efficacies as they trigger likes, sharing, comments, curation, etc.

Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO is becoming mainstream as the number of mobile users has been steadily on the rise. A report from ComScore shows mobile users account for more than 52% of total digital engagement. Observing such rapid growth in the number of Smartphone/Tablet users, Smart Insights have released new mobile marketing statistics for 2015. The key aspects of the report deal with the percentage of customers, who use mobile devices, how they research products using mobile search and many other related statistics.

Being a web marketer, you’ll never want to take the risk of avoiding mobile SEO for your site because that’d result in the site lagging behind its peers in the race. So make sure the site has a mobile friendly CSS. If your site has a responsive design, then it’d be easy to render it across all devices. But if its navigation only suits desktop devices, then mobile users would have a hard time accessing it smoothly. So work on all areas of the site so it offers users a seamless browsing experience, irrespective of which device he’s using.

Last but not the least, you need to keep yourself up with the pace of the web marketing industry because missing out on Google’s updates could be risky for your SEO campaign.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com