The Future of SEO – What Should We Expect from Google Search?

Last Updated on August 31, 2021

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a constantly changing landscape and we need to keep up with it if we want to be relevant.  As such, what do we think the future holds for SEO?  Well, we can be sure that Google will be around for the foreseeable future and they’ll have more algorithm shifts.  Seriously though, the future will still contain basic SEO practices, fulfilling search intent, pruning thin and low-quality pages, using Google Search Console for keyword ideas and opportunities, and creating good content.  Other SEO practices will become more relevant as we move forward such as cultivating more or better engagement through visuals and various types of content as well as focusing on better customer insights. A white label SEO company can help in the process as they are able to help with all aspects of SEO for your online presence.

SEO Basics – These Will Still Be Relevant to Google Search

The SEO Basics will still be a part of the future of SEO and Google Search requirements, so you need to make sure that you take care of the meta descriptions and titles and add your alt text.  Don’t forget to make sure that you use headers and remember that Google doesn’t care if you have more than one H1 as it’s more important to make sure visitors understand your page.  Make sure your site speed measures up as well.  There are a few tools that you can use to check your site speed and they cover different metrics.  Last but not least, you want to make sure that your robots.txt, site maps, and any tracking tools such as Analytics are all set up properly.

Fulfill Searcher Intent

While keywords will always be a thing, we must focus more on what the intent is behind those keywords when people perform a search.  By focusing on intent, we can better optimize our content for the users so that they can find what they’re looking for.  Also, we need to understand that a search intent may be multi-intent, meaning that there are multiple intentions for a particular search.  Delve into your keywords, commonality of your pages, and figure out what the intent is behind people searching so that you can optimize your site to answer that intent.

Prune Thin and Low-Quality Pages

Some sites have a lot of content on them or have been around for a while, so it’s easy to have a lot of weeds growing in your content that makes showing up in Google Search difficult.  When this happens, you need to go through and weed out the weak, low-quality pages and to prune those thin pages.  If you have thin pages, you should either consider combining the page with a stronger page or add to this page to make it more relevant.

For the low-quality content, you want to either remove it or update it so that it’s more relevant for whatever the page’s initial intent was.  Don’t be afraid to go through and remove pages if you feel they aren’t good quality pages.  That is more beneficial than leaving it and creating new content.  Google wants to see that your site is improving as a whole.

Google Search Console

Google’s Search Console has come a long way over the years and they’re most recent change allows you to delve into your site in ways the old Search Console, and even older Webmaster Tools, couldn’t.  Here you can export a lot of data around the various search queries as well as find information on issues with indexing pages.  Use this data to really home in on where you can optimize your website.  Find where you may have high click-through rates but not a high-ranking position.

Dig into the keyword opportunities here as it can be incredibly valuable.  The ability to see what Google’s issues are with some pages can also be extremely helpful when troubleshooting a site.  Is Google having issues indexing a page that’s important to you?  That could be why it’s not ranking even though you’ve optimized for searcher intent and other SEO features.

Create Good Content

As always, you want to make sure that you’re creating good quality content.  However, you want to optimize content for voice searches just as much as mobile and desktop searches.  Voice search is becoming even more popular and so it’ll be essential that your site caters to it.  Software is also coming along, and so natural language processing is making strides at understanding content better.

You want to make sure that you keep that in mind when building content and thus, focus more on your users and making sure that you’re writing is clear and precise.  Also, you want to make sure to repurpose your content into various media such as slides, audio, and videos.  It may be easier for someone to listen to a podcast over reading a blog or they may prefer to be visually stimulated with slides or videos.

So, What Is The Future Of SEO?

There is still so much more to the future of SEO and we can be sure that there will be new things on the horizon for us.  SEO is a constantly changing landscape so it’s imperative that we follow it into 2020 and beyond.  The last thing that you want to be is left behind.  Make sure that you stay on top of your SEO basics and update yourself on changes with what Google is and isn’t interested in so that your focus can be on what matters.  Make sure that you’re not just optimizing for specific keywords but optimizing for specific searcher intent as it can make a difference to searchers who may find your site.

Clean up your website’s thin and low-quality pages so that Google sees that you’re working to fully improve your website and that you’re not just trying to hide it by just creating new content.  When you do create new content, make sure that you’re working with different media types so that you can reach a broader audience.  Finally, make sure to utilize the various tools at your disposal like Google’s Search Console.  By taking advantage of such tools, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding over your competition.