The trend of doing SEO cannot be ignored

This Viet SEO article covers the most important SEO trends this year. But you will also find new strategies that are now working very well. The article gives you the best view of SEO this year and predicts SEO trends until 2025.

If you are looking to improve your SEO in the coming year, read this article!

1. Focus on On-Page experience

According to Google, starting in May 2021, on-page experience will be an official ranking factor.

In the following section, we'll dive into how you can effectively prepare your website for the upcoming Google updates. This includes a real-life example of how Backlinko significantly improved the on-page experience of their main site.

a. On-site Experience: What You Need to Know

Core Web Vitals are a set of three key website experience metrics that Google considers essential:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The ideal content load time should be 2.5 seconds or less.
• First Input Delay (FID): The time it takes for your site to respond to the first interaction. The optimal FID should be under 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The degree of unexpected shifts in the page layout during loading. An ideal CLS should be less than 0.1.

Google has made it clear that on-page experience will play a direct role in determining your site's ranking.

However, Google also emphasizes that on-page experience isn’t the sole factor in rankings—meaning, you can still rank well even with a subpar user experience.

That being said, there's no excuse not to optimize the user experience on your site.

So take a moment to implement these optimizations.

b. How to improve the On-Page experience

The steps you take to improve Core Web Vitals-related factors can vary depending on several factors.

For instance, a page hosted on Shopify will require a different approach than one running on WordPress.

Here’s the process you can follow to identify areas for improvement:

1. Open Google Search Console and go to Core Web Vitals.
2. Review how your pages are performing.

You can temporarily ignore the desktop metrics for now, as Google’s mobile-first indexing means mobile performance is what truly matters.

Hopefully, none of your URLs fall into the "Poor" category.

According to the author, Google is likely to penalize underperforming URLs rather than reward the good ones. Therefore, you should prioritize moving your URLs out of the "danger zone."

The way you address this largely depends on the specific Core Web Vitals metrics your site is struggling with.

For example, if several pages have poor CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) scores, the focus should be on improving page stability during loading.

You might also be interested in:

• The relationship between User Experience (UX) and SEO.
• How the author improved the experience on Backlinko's website.

When Google announced its upcoming site experience update, it became clear that changes were necessary.

Take Backlinko's site, for example. Its loading time was painfully slow. Despite using relatively lightweight WordPress themes, optimizing images, and applying other optimization tactics, the issue persisted. The main reason was that Backlinko's pages were massive, packed with content and high-resolution images. Some posts even contained over 40 high-res screenshots. On top of that, there were embedded videos and animations.

This didn’t seem to affect Backlinko’s rankings, which aligns with a search engine ranking factor analysis that found no correlation between page speed and rankings.

But with this new update, things are different. Google is not only focused on page load speed, but also on measuring user experience directly. Therefore, optimization has become a necessity.

To address this, Backlinko hired an agency to optimize their website code, which now runs on Next.js. While this was a costly and complex move, it greatly improved their on-page user experience and Core Web Vitals scores.

The good news is you don’t necessarily need to overhaul your entire site code like Backlinko did. Their situation is unique, which is why they had to take such drastic measures.

In most cases, you can improve your site’s experience using the strategies outlined above.

2. Google passage ranking

Google Passage Ranking is a feature introduced by Google to improve search results by ranking individual passages within a page, rather than just the entire page. This update allows Google to identify and highlight specific sections or paragraphs that directly answer a user's query, even if they are buried deep within a longer article. Here's an overview of how Google Passage Ranking works and how you can leverage it for SEO:

1. What is Passage Ranking? Passage Ranking enables Google to treat individual sections of a webpage as stand-alone pieces of content. For instance, if a user searches for a specific question, Google might find a relevant paragraph or passage within an article that answers the question, even if the full page is not an ideal match for the search query.

2. How Does It Work? Google uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the content of a page more deeply. By breaking down pages into individual passages, Google can more accurately match parts of a page with specific search queries, rather than relying on the overall content of the page. This allows for more precise and relevant search results.

3. What Does This Mean for SEO? Passage Ranking places more emphasis on the quality and relevance of specific sections of content, rather than just the overall page. This means that even if your page isn't perfectly optimized for a particular query, a well-written and informative section of the page can still rank for that query.

4. How to Optimize for Passage Ranking:

   • Focus on Clear and Concise Answers: Provide well-structured answers to common questions or topics within your content. Use headers (H2, H3) to break down content into digestible sections.
   • Use Structured Data: Implement schema markup to help Google understand the context and relevance of specific content.
   • Write for Snippets: Aim to have your content featured as a "position zero" snippet, as passages often appear in this section.
   • Improve Content Depth: Make sure your content is comprehensive, offering both broad overviews and detailed sections that address specific queries.
   • Optimize for User Intent: Understand what your audience is searching for and align your content accordingly, ensuring that passages answer specific, long-tail queries.

5. The Impact of Passage Ranking on Content Strategy Passage Ranking highlights the importance of content structure. By making your content easier for Google to parse, you increase your chances of having individual passages rank for relevant search queries. It encourages SEO best practices like writing clear, detailed sections and optimizing for specific user queries rather than just focusing on broad topics.

Google Passage Ranking marks a shift towards ranking individual passages based on their relevance to search queries. By focusing on creating well-organized and informative content, websites can improve their chances of ranking for a wider range of search queries, especially long-tail ones.

3. Double up on long-form content

4. Optimized for featured snippets

According to SEMrush, 6.83% of all search results have Featured Snippets – Featured Snippets Featured Snippets are earning a LOT of clicks.

So how do you get your content to appear in Featured Snippets? Let's find out with Viet SEO!

Take a look at Backlinko's example, when they prioritized ranking for Featured Snippets, it helped them go from a handful of Featured Snippets ratings to over 390 Featured Snippets.

Here is a step-by-step guide that Backlinko has applied to achieve the above figure.

a. Create special snippet

Like most things in SEO, the first step is keyword research including: keywords you already rank for and keywords with Featured Snippets.

Why is it important to focus on keywords that you already rank for?

99.58% of all Featured Snippets are from pages that rank on the first page for that term.

So if you haven't already ranked in the top 10, you won't stand a chance of ranking in Featured Snippets.

How do you create Featured Snippets?

Ahrefs’ “Organic keywords” report will show you which keywords you rank for… also Featured Snippets:

b. Add “Snippet Bait” to your website

“Snippet Bait” is a 40-60 word block of content specially designed to rank in Featured Snippets position.

Why 40-60 words?

SEMrush analyzed nearly 7 million Featured Snippets. And they found that the most Featured Snippets were 40-60 words long.

And this helped to rank their content in Featured Snippets position with a lot of keyword definitions.

HubSpot takes Snippet Bait to a whole new level.

They add small snippets to their posts to look like Featured Snippets

c. Format your content for other types of Featured Snippets

Snippet Bait works best for code like this:

While paragraph snippets make up 81.9% of all Featured Snippets, it's not the only format.

And that will bring us to the next topic.

* Optimizing Featured Snippet is also part of the SEO process of Viet SEO. This method is applied to all customers and in practice has achieved many successes

The Growth of Visual Search – Image Search

Is visual search an SEO changer? Not necessarily. But based on the trend of things, visual search is ready to take off so you can catch SEO trends to be more effective.

Image search is trending

More and more people are doing visual search, you just need to look at the following stats to know for sure:

5. Visual search technology is extremely good

Visual search is a stub, but it's already working really well. If you don't believe it, open Google Lens on your mobile device and start scanning things around your room. You will probably find that it can identify pretty much anything.

Today, Google Lens can identify 1 billion objects. And that number is growing every day.

The author tried using Bing's visual search on the phone and it worked very well.

a. People want to search by image

Once you start using it, you will quickly find that visual search is extremely useful for:

• Shopping
• Determine the direction
• Identify landmarks
• Local business reviews
• Translation
• Cooking recipe
• Nutritional information

That's probably why 62% of young consumers want more visual search technology:

b. How to optimize for visual search

Earlier this year, we conducted one of the first studies on visual search ranking factors.

* An example of a customer of Viet SEO who has optimized an article to make it easier for users to use visual search is to add visual videos to the article, to guide users through the steps more easily.

Here are some highlights from that study.

Mobile-friendly pages are at an advantage

9 out of 10 Google Lens results come from a site that has passed Google's mobile-friendliness test.

Basically 100% of searches on Google Lens are done on mobile devices, so it's understandable that Google would prefer mobile-friendly sites.

c. Traditional image SEO still applies

Our research shows that traditional image SEO techniques (like optimizing image filenames and alt text) also seem to boost Google Lens rankings.

And those high authority pages and sites are more likely to appear as Google Lens results.

d. Google Lens results tend to come from content-rich pages

We've noticed that Google tends to pull Google Lens image results from pages with a lot of text (1600 words on average).

At first, this may seem surprising. But when you realize that Google specifically states that the text on a page is important for image SEO, the finding makes complete sense.

6. Building Domain Authority 2.0

a. Be transparent

Google can focus on off-site signals to find and evaluate your site's E-A-T criteria.

As quoted in the guideline, your website should have:

• Detailed information about the page
• Easy-to-find contact page
• References and external links to sources
• Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
• Authors signature on each article

b. Quoted

7. Video popularity keeps skyrocketing

Online video is very developed. In fact, according to Cisco, online video will account for 82% of all online traffic. And that may still not meet the world's need for video.

Despite the fact that there are now more videos than ever before, HubSpot claims that 43% of people prefer video content.

In short, if video isn't part of your digital marketing plan, you're missing out. Here's how you can use video to improve your SEO this year.

a. Featured video snippets

You may notice more Video Featured Snippets in the search results.

In fact, Google has highlighted Featured Video Snippets in its “Reintroducing Featured Snippets” report.

And the author hopes to see more of the featured videos.

According to what the author has seen, here are the 3 most important things to do to get your video content into Featured Snippets.

b. Organize your content into different sections

This is important because clear sections help Google understand what's in your video.

This makes it easy for Google to use different clips from your video in a single snippet.

c. Optimize your videos for SEO

Google uses your title, description, and tags to figure out what your video is about.

So besides publishing videos with clear sections, you also want to make sure that your videos are optimized for SEO.

In fact, a small HubSpot study of 165 Featured Video Snippets found that 80% of them contained a keyword in the title.

d. Provide translation

The subtitles that YouTube automatically generates are REALLY good.

But it's not 100% accurate

So, to increase the likelihood that YouTube and Google can understand every word in your video, upload your own translation.

e. Grow your YouTube channel

YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world and YouTube is still growing.

(In fact, according to a study by JumpShot and Moz founder Rand Fishkin, YouTube's search engine is 2 times more popular than Bing.)

In short, more and more people are searching for content on YouTube.

So, if you want to get more traffic from SEO, I recommend creating and optimizing YouTube-specific content.

It's a very effective search engine that you can't afford to ignore.

For example, the author's channel has a total of 39 videos. And those 39 videos generate more than 228k views per month.

(And as you might expect, a good portion of those viewers convert into website visitors, leads, and customers).

It will get better when you publish SEO optimized YouTube videos, you will own more “real estate” on Google.

The reason for this is for starters: 55% of all Google search results contain at least one video.

f. Include videos in blog posts

If people want to see more video content, why not give it to them?

That's why I recommend embedding video content in your blog posts. And from my own Google Analytics data, I've found that this can greatly improve your bounce rate.

8. Focus on analyzing customers' search intent

Search Intent or user search intent has been a big topic in the SEO world for the past few years.

And for a very good reason: Content that doesn't match Search Intent won't rank.

As Google gets better at giving people the exact search results they want, creating content that matches Search Intent will be a must for SEO.

a. Determine the purpose of each keyword

Every keyword has an intent behind it: Maybe it's to search for something, or buy something, or compare product A with product B.

The better your content can match that Search Intent, the better it will rank.

So your first step is to figure out the Search Intent of your target keyword.

Sometimes the customer's intent will be right in the keyword.

But it's often not so obvious. So, for most keywords, the search results will tell you everything you need to know about that keyword's Search Intent.

For example, take a keyword like: “protein powder”.

Someone searching for that phrase might want to buy some protein. Or maybe they want to learn more about it.

Well, according to the first page of Google for that keyword, most people searching for “protein powder” are looking for information.

b. Create content that matches search intent

Now that you've identified the search intent, it's time to publish something that gives searchers EXACTLY what they're looking for.

For example, when I analyzed search engine results pages (“SERPs”) for “how to get YouTube subscribers,” I noticed that they were mostly listing posts.

c. Re-optimize old content for search purposes

Search Intent optimization isn't just for fresh content.

You can edit your old content to better match the new search intent. To boost your on-page SEO. Or just to improve the overall user experience of the page.

For example, this post used to rank really well for the “SEO campaign”.

But as Google got better at figuring out what the people searching for that keyword really wanted, the post started to drop in rankings.

This makes sense: someone searching for “SEO campaign” doesn’t want a case study of a random guy. They want a list of steps.

So the author converted that post into an easy-to-follow step-by-step guide.

9. Improve CTR

Organic CTR has dropped dramatically. In fact, an industry study found that organic CTR on mobile search has dropped 41.4% since 2015.

Google is narrowing organic search results with SERP Features, like Answer Box, Ads, Carosel, “People also ask” section, etc.

And to stand out in the SERP, your results need to scream “click me!”… Or else, the results will be ignored.

a. Include your keyword in your URL

In 2019, Backlinko published the results from its large-scale organic CTR study.

And one of their most interesting findings was that URLs with lots of keywords received 45% more clicks than URLs that didn't contain keywords that matched a person's search.

b. Use Emotions (Don't Go Overboard)

Backlinko's research shows that emotional headlines have a relatively high CTR.

But they also found that title tags containing “Power Words” reduced clicks by 14%.

For example words like: best, breakthrough, unexpected, sure, etc.

It looks like Google searchers want to click on catchy titles. But if a headline moves into clickbait territory, they'll click on something else.

c. Write meta description tags for every page

In other words: make sure your site description meta tags are 100% original. And will force someone to click on your site in the search results.

This is a simple 2 minute step that can increase your CTR by around 6%

10. Publishing “Research Content”

Publishing research content is a crucial part of establishing authority, improving SEO, and providing valuable information to your audience. Research-based articles and studies help build credibility, enhance engagement, and demonstrate your expertise in a specific area. Here are key steps for effectively publishing research content:

1. Choose a Relevant Topic: Select a subject that aligns with your niche or industry. Make sure the topic is relevant to your target audience and addresses a gap in existing content.

2. Conduct Thorough Research: Gather data from reputable sources, studies, surveys, and experiments. The more comprehensive and accurate your research, the more authoritative your content will appear.

3. Cite Reliable Sources: Properly reference all data, articles, and studies used in your content. This boosts trustworthiness and credibility in the eyes of both readers and search engines.

4. Provide Clear Insights: Present the findings in a way that’s easy to understand. Use charts, infographics, and summaries to highlight key points. Your audience should walk away with actionable insights.

5. Optimize for SEO: Research content should be SEO-friendly. Use relevant keywords, include internal and external links, and optimize headings and metadata to improve your content’s search ranking.

6. Update Regularly: Research is always evolving. Update your content periodically to reflect the latest findings, ensuring that your material remains current and relevant.

7. Promote Your Content: Share your research on social media, email newsletters, and relevant forums to maximize visibility. Encouraging backlinks to your content will also improve your SEO and overall reach.

By focusing on creating well-researched, data-driven content, you can provide significant value to your audience and enhance your online presence.

Epilogue

With the above extremely useful information, you probably have a better overview of SEO.

Get a quick grasp of Google's upcoming changes and new SEO trends to fine-tune your SEO campaign for the best and most effective.

If you need advice on implementing SEO, contact Viet SEO immediately to receive free advice from leading experts!