2020 is over and what many expected finally happened: Voice search DIDN’T become the mainstream way to search. In any case, search is becoming more visual, which shouldn’t surprised us since 2 years ago Google directly mentioned that 1 of the 3 fundamental shifts in how they think about search in their next chapter was going to be “ the shift from text to a more visual way of finding information ” (along the shift from answers to journeys and a queryless -predictive- search experience).
With search, 米6体育直播nba is also in a continuous evolution: although we can argue its pillars haven’t changed (crawlability, indexability, relevance, popularity), there are certainly additional layers of complexities with signals, opportunities and challenges for 米6体育直播nba success today that didn’t existed 10, 5 or even, were not as critical in some cases just a couple of years ago.
I can see how the evolution of 米6体育直播nba is driven by two group of “forces”:
Let’s go through some core areas that are more important than ever and aspects that are highly negative and should be stopped or avoided as much as possible for your 米6体育直播nba success in 2021:
These are processes that don’t align 米6体育直播nba within other marketing/growth activities nor integrate it within the company’s business/sales and features/functionalities efforts. Ultimately, these 米6体育直播nba processes have higher chances to not achieve meaningful results, especially within competitive sectors and complex organizations.
Establishing a well aligned 米6体育直播nba strategy, integrating 米6体育直播nba within the Website product triangle is therefore more fundamental than ever and should be the base for a successful 米6体育直播nba process.
To avoid losing rankings due to “content quality” issues or rank for queries while not fulfilling the user intent with poorer conversions as a result, it’s then fundamental to, on one hand identify the intent of the queries, analyze the “anatomy” of the SERP and which are the characteristics of the already well ranked pages, to better detect the queries to target.
On the other, do it so with those actually relevant queries with the content type, format and structure/organization offering comprehensive and expert validated information that will better fulfill the user intent through the search journey vs. your competitors, allowing you to achieve your services/products goals in a way that establishes your expertise and trustworthiness in the subject matter with your audience.
Most of search results for competitive queries that matter will likely be featuring a search feature, including information to better fulfill users search intent: Using RankRanger SERP Insights we can see that 9.97 of mobile search results in the US include a featured snippet, 23.3% show a FAQ or How-To, 12% a video carrousel, 25.38% rich cards.
Search features will be triggered through Structured Data (FAQs, How-To’s, Ratings/Reviews, etc.), your content structure (featured snippets), content format (video or image carrousel, Web stories, etc.) or a combination (top stories, popular products, etc.), so is critical to take into consideration when identifying queries to target and mapping with existing content to optimize or new content to create.
It’s also noteworthy that besides expanding your SERPs visibility and CTR through some of these additional content types, such as videos, products feeds or Web stories, they will also allow you to better leverage the visibility and traffic of additional platforms, eg: YouTube (videos), Discover (Web Stories), Shopping Tab (Products).
This is something important to do not only for your non-branded queries, but also for your branded ones to maximize your presence (establishing your authority further through search results) by optimizing Your Brand SERP .
Because building and leveraging your brand is likely the best way to build and scale your link popularity while following Google’s guidelines, and if you want to rank for anything competitive nowadays: you’ll need links. Of course, building links is not the reason, but a by-product of building a brand -generating awareness of your business-, which will bring many other benefits beyond 米6体育直播nba, that will ultimately allow you to be better recognized by your audience facilitating not only search, but also direct traffic and conversions.
This has a “flywheel” effect as brand building compounds: after a few successful campaigns, your brand name will be out there and recognized to be the best at what you do, you’ll be asked to for interviews, online events, webinars, testimonials, etc. that will mention and link you as an trustworthy authority to follow and buy from.
For excellent examples, take a look at Rise at Sevens BEST digital PR campaigns of 2020 and Neomam’s Looking Back On 2020: 25 Campaigns We Produced and Promoted During a Global Pandemic .
Additionally, page experience is becoming a ranking factor in May and Google is fully switching to a Mobile “only” index in March 2021.
Although in the past Google already took into consideration individual signals connected to a good user experience as speed, mobile friendliness, HTTPS and lack of intrusive interstitials, these are going to be combined with Core Web Vitals — that measures loading performance (LCP), interactivity (FID), and visual stability (CLS) — as a new “ page experience ” signal that will roll out in May 2021.
Despite this, in the 2020 米6体育直播nba Chapter of the Web Almanac analyzing 7.5M sites from the HTTP Archive, it was found that only 33.13% of websites scored Good Core Web Vitals for desktop while only 19.96% of their mobile counterparts passed the Core Web Vitals assessment. Now it’s then the time to ensure your Web experience is the best, from speed, mobile friendliness, security to lack of intrusivity.
Although is true that both Google and Bing have evolved to run JavaScript by crawling with an evergreen version of Chromium and adopting Microsoft Edge, Websites -especially big ones- will tend to face issues due to the higher number of pages, resources, rendering cost and available crawl budget, which for Google is determined by crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.
In the 2020 米6体育直播nba Chapter of the Web Almanac analyzing 7.5M sites from the HTTP Archive, disparities were found across rendered and non-rendered HTML. For example, the median mobile page displays 11.5% more words when rendered than its raw HTML, indicating a reliance on client-side JavaScript to show content.
Bartosz Góralewicz has shared in the past indexing analyses including the “ Rendering 米6体育直播nba manifesto “, showing how “on average, 10-15% of your pages are not indexed by Google. Moreover, if your content relies on JavaScript the risk goes up: 40% of an average website’s JavaScript-powered content is not indexed.”
On the other hand, Google is fully switching to a Mobile “only” index in March 2021, nonetheless even if the switch started already a few years back and they have been sharing the relevant mobile first guidelines , non-trivial disparities are still found across mobile and desktop pages, like the one between mobile and desktop links, illustrated in the 62 links on mobile versus the 68 links on desktop for the median web page, based on the 2020 米6体育直播nba Chapter of the Web Almanac insights.
It’s then fundamental when doing technical 米6体育直播nba audits to assess the content and navigation/links elements relying on JavaScript as well as content accessibility to mobile vs. desktop search crawlers, besides the “usual” crawlability and indexability analysis making sure that the different levels and areas of the site meant to be indexed and ranked are easy to be found and link popularity is passed based on their importance.
This is thankfully facilitated with JS and mobile support (and comparison features) of 米6体育直播nba crawlers as well as reports on Google Search Console ( Crawl Stats report , Index Coverage , URL Inspection Tool ) and the new Bing Webmaster Tools .
There’s a lack of resources availability, flexibility and consistency in the support of 米6体育直播nba implementation that ends up causing the failure of 米6体育直播nba processes. We need then to establish in a system that minimizes these issues by following a framework and an agile approach that minimize and identify & tackle issues quickly.
On one hand, technical and content resources availability and flexibility issues are consistently mentioned as the top reasons of why 米6体育直播nba processes fail , followed by lack of completion of 米6体育直播nba implementations and understanding/education by the involved project team.
We spend non-trivial time developing use cases, forecasting results, aligning and prioritizing our efforts along the development and product roadmaps as well as marketing and content calendars, and many times we see these efforts truncated due to delays and reliance on third party teams.
It’s then important to have an agile mindset in our 米6体育直播nba project management approach for continuous, small and quick releases, quickly identifying blockers and adapting to changes, leveraging available solutions to automate when viable to see results faster and earn the needed support to fully implement recommendations. In the last few years 米6体育直播nbas like Hamlet Batista have been showing how to leverage Python to do things like Generating FAQs with the relevant Schema , Producing Quality Titles & Meta Descriptions Automatically , or Automated Intent Classification to start “self-serving” and minimize the reliance on other teams across many use cases.
We then also have Agile/Edge 米6体育直播nba tools like RankSense (from Hamlet Batista) or Sloth (from SALT Agency / Dan Taylor) that offer something similar at a different level: leveraging Cloudflare workers to avoid Web development bottlenecks to implement from meta tags, redirects, pre-render JS, hreflang and more, to be able to show results fast and gain further “and proper” development support to implement these and much more with far less restrictions.
On the other, we also face never ending, preventable mistakes through the 米6体育直播nba implementation process, also known as #米6体育直播nbaHorrorStories , that seem to happen all the time, causing issues and delays in scenarios that could be avoidable with an effective communication, coordination as well as mix of manual and automated validation system in place across the different types of 米6体育直播nba activities, from technical configurations changes, to content updates or rankings/traffic shifts.
This is why an 米6体育直播nba Framework is necessary to tackle education, validation and monitoring activities through the 米6体育直播nba process, to align understanding and efforts through the different teams involved in the 米6体育直播nba process, while leveraging automation when viable to avoid development bottlenecks and relying only on “manual” validations that are prone to errors, using already existing 米6体育直播nba alerts solutions such as Little Warden or ContentKing .
Here’s an example of a “Healthy 米6体育直播nba Framework” and the different areas covered:
Now more than ever, 米6体育直播nba is not a one-trick pony, and needs to align efforts and support from the different involved areas (technical, content, promotion) in a cohesive way to be competitive.
It should be also driven by strategical business goals to achieve feasible, tangible and meaningful results, taking into consideration the current challenges as well as leveraging new features and opportunities within search.
The ultimate goal is to become the most comprehensive and authoritative answer that provides the best experience and fulfill your relevant audience search needs, independently of the location, device, connection or format.
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