SEO Changes your small business needs to know about

January 31, 2020

SEO can make or break a small business, especially since the majority of marketing is switching over to online instead of print. Digital isn’t an optional extra form of marketing anymore with the majority of business and browsing happening online. It's fair to say most paper advertising ends up in peoples trash or recycling because they just don’t want the clutter. Switching over to digital marketing is a must if you don’t want to get left behind in the dust and miss out on new customers. Which brings us to some new changes to how SEO is changing and what you need to know for your business. 

Mobile page speed

You’ve heard it before and you’re going to hear it again, you need to optimize your page speed. The majority of searches are on mobile now, and if you’re not constantly monitoring your page speeds to make sure they are loading under 5 seconds you could be losing a huge customer base. And now Google is pushing for developers to improve page speeds because of frequent complaints.

Google tracks all of the websites with the worst loading speeds, or even just not great loading speeds. This is a big deal, because it can severely affect your google ranking and how many people are going to be seeing your websites. In 2020 Google is going to be cracking down on pages with slow loading, and if you want to be on their good side you need to make sure yours is optimized and ready.

Search engine result pages and dwell times

Dwell times are how long a person stays on your website before leaving. Most websites want you to spend a lot of time on their site, so they can show google they should have a high rank but also to get conversions. Websites like Facebook are a prime example, they have news, videos, pictures, products for sale. Having all of this content in one place encourages people to stick around and Google is no different. 

They’ve been finding ways to add to their appeal besides just providing results for your searches. they have a whole news section that can be catered to your interests. News in your local area, and much more. Now recently they’ve been providing more third party content directly on the search pages so you have fewer reasons to click onto a brand’s site. Key snippets form the site, informative graphs or charts, and more so you can get a quick answer without having to scroll through a webpage for it. This will require digital marketers to account for this and monitor the impressions they have both on their website and on Google’s search pages when gauging their impressions.

Google Changes BERT & EAT

BERT is Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers, it’s a method of pre training language understanding. Using BERT allows Google search to learn the intent behind complex and ambiguous questions. Which they think is the biggest leap forward in the past five years they’ve experienced. It’s going to change the way it looks at the questions we ask in order to provide better information.

This will deeply affect the SEO of websites because of the close eye Google will be keeping on the content going through. The websites that will come out on top are the ones with high quality information and detailed content. Staying on top of the SEO for your website is going to be a necessity if you want your website to continue having a good rank and show up consistency on search results.

EAT is Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness, and the principles the updates to the Google algorithm are following. It improves the understanding the engine has of a website so it can better recommend them when a search query pops up. As the algorithm evolves the websites it chooses to present to the searcher will change. As it learns which websites have more in depth information or more detailed content ranking will be affected. If you or your marketing team is worried about organic traffic you will have to focus on quality content and becoming a trusted site.

If your company has been making strides towards improving your SEO and creating quality content then you are already ahead of the curve. But just because you’re a little head does not mean you should not continue making an active effort to constantly be improving your website and it’s content. New trends in SEO are important to keep an eye on because you never know when they might become a necesity for your business.