The idea that more than 4 billion people worldwide share the same source of information is astounding. Yet, with more than 3.5 billion searches per day, Google has retained its spot as the largest search engine, with a market share of a whopping 84.08%, as per Statista. These numbers are what motivate marketers to always stay on top of global trends and try to predict where the market will land in the coming years.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains one of the most elusive marketing strategies of our age, as entire websites and businesses hinge on updates from Google’s search policies, marking the need for an all-in-one SEO guide that has all the answers. Google is designed to solve user queries, and it continues to do so, sometimes trampling a few ignorant businesses along the way. For example, Google’s helpful content update shook the world of SEO when it declared keyword-stuffed content as the worst of its kind, allowing SERPs to rank content based on the value they provide over content written solely for SEO intent.
With the introduction of ChatGPT, the gap between AI-generated and human-produced content continues to shrink, and Google has made it its mission to tighten its grip on black-hat SEO practices. Google aims to improve user experience by discerning search intent and emotions from queries, providing users with precise, high-quality content that matches the searcher’s intent down to the last detail – or at least so much so that the difference becomes negligible.
At Advertyzed, we had our team of data analysts and SEO specialists analyze the data from 2022 in order to recognize rising patterns and trends that possess the most latent potential in terms of SEO practices. In this blog, we’ve listed down our top 5 picks.
Google… Shopping?
Google has played a vital part when it comes to connecting shoppers with their desired products, and now it wants to take things up a notch with the help of its AI-enhanced model, the Shopping Graph, among a few other features whose collective function is to improve users’ shopping experiences.
Google has taken it upon itself to take users directly to the product, underplaying the part of paid advertising. In an attempt to encourage manufacturers to make the transition, Google has completely eliminated commission fees, making it free for businesses to host their products on the platform.
On the consumer side, Google’s Shopping Graph is a hyper-intelligent AI model whose sole purpose is to scan and analyze products and brands to improve user satisfaction rate. The Shopping Graph ranks products based on a number of factors, such as price, website, reviews, stock keeping units (SKU), and videos.
Apart from categorizing products and brands on the basis of their relevancy to the searcher’s query, Google is also promoting its new Lens feature that has the ability to scan and find a certain product on the internet using nothing more than an image.
With so much happening in the online shopping space, one often wonders what they need to do in order to rank on Google. The answer lies in creating keyword-rich product listings that are relevant to the user’s intent and using appropriate imagery with unique alt tags to help google read what your listing has to offer.
As a plus one, following these instructions will make your products eligible for Google Lens, which will play a vital role in the days to come.
Understanding the Human Language
As 2022 came to a close, Google is moving towards voice search and conversational queries to simplify users’ search experiences further. In the past, the difference between written and spoken language often left Google flabbergasted, hence the need for a machine-learning model that could tackle the complexities of human language. Thus LaMDA was born.
LaMDA focuses on understanding human dialogue and uses it to interpret what the user is looking for. For example, a user might type, ‘best boots for snow.’ However, as the command is carried over voice search, the same user might use the phrase ‘what are the best boots for snow?’
This small deviation can make all the difference when it comes to ranking on Google. As Google is opting for more inclusive search experiences, it has also taken into account people who are visually impaired, marking the importance of verbal search queries.
In order to jump on the voice search bandwagon, you need to optimize your website or products for voice search queries, either by target phrasing or through vernacular. But we suggest both.
The Video Front
Video marketing is set to cover some major grounds in SEO. How do we know? Our data scientists pored through our website’s data banks and discovered that users spent a significant amount of time on web pages with videos compared to pages with none. We believe the sudden rise of video marketing can be attributed to the growth of multimedia features on social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the latest addition, Twitter.
Google has also noticed this fluctuation and has already started tweaking its algorithm to account for video content. This can be seen in some of its latest features, such as clip markup and seek markup, both of which the search engine giant reads, allowing it to link to certain points in your video.
Gearing Up Your EAT Signals
You must be wondering, ‘EAT signals have been around for some time. Why would they mention this?’ You’re right, but at the same time, wrong. Google has stated the significance of EAT signals countless times. But this time around, the change was not a part of the plan.
With the rise of AI (cough* cough* ChatGPT), Google has had to make some unwarranted changes to its plans. Thanks to ChatGPT’s neural network architecture, it is one of the most advanced language models in the world today. Moreover, its ability to learn patterns and relationships through raw data has allowed it to imitate human speech better than other AI models, making it a thorn in Google’s side.
Since Google has already made it painfully clear how much it detests AI-generated content, it has launched its own countermeasures, one of the first being EEAT.
Google took EAT and jacked it up on steroids, turning it into EEAT. Now, apart from Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, Google will also consider any given content piece’s Experience.
What does that mean? Google has realized that AI can only produce baseline content, which means it lacks the necessary experience to talk about certain tools and strategies in detail – something that experienced individuals excel at.
In conclusion, should you decide to add high-quality content along with social proof to your website, such as testimonials, badges, authoritative links, and awards, Google will identify it as a credible source and thus put you on its highest shelf for the world to view.
Semantic Keywords?
There’s no doubt that Google has become sophisticated in more ways than one, which means that it’s able to discern buyer intent and show results based on it. How? We believe that Google’s latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model, aka MUM, has a role in it. MUM is able to base the results that SERPs show on the searchers’ intent and emotions in over 15 languages.
So the question is: How can you use it to hop aboard Google’s first page? Instead of focusing your SEO efforts on a single keyword, try focusing on a cluster of related keywords. You could also try to write content that covers broader topics and use appropriate keywords. We suggest creating buyer personas that will place you in the searcher’s shoes and focus on phrases and semantically related keywords that users could use.
These are just 5 of the countless SEO strategies that will help your website stay on top of your competition. But the marketing world is a diverse playground where there’s plenty of room for experiments, so you’re allowed to go off-road every once in a while.
As for why you should go through all this trouble, users want platforms that can keep up with modern trends and practices, especially ones that have a finger on every latest development happening in the marketing world.
But you don’t have to worry about this because, after all, we’re just a call away!
