These statistics give us a good idea of where SEO is headed in the coming months and years. The specter looming over most SEO-related conversations in 2025 is AI. When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools burst on the scene in late 2023, many predicted that the death of SEO was imminent. Search engines would wither away, with people turning to AI answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini to answer all their queries. Lucky for all the SEO pros out there, that prediction has not yet proved correct. Instead, nimble marketers have discovered how to employ AI to improve their SEO tactics.
Domain authority score is a compound metric used for measuring a domain’s overall external SEO performance. The algorithm includes many data points to measure the final score but all of the metrics are about the external links pointing to your website and their quality. To build your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and stand out in the eyes of both your visitors and search engines, you will need some social proof. Especially if you are creating content around YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics such as legal, medical, and finance; it’s critically important to show your expertise. Search engines work by crawling, indexing, and ranking the Internet’s content. Then, indexing analyzes and stores the content in the search engine’s index.
This represents the long tail of keyword research, and it can represent up to 80% of all search traffic. You want to capture as much of that long tail as possible, while doing the same SEO Anomaly amount of work.Think of it as the difference between fishing with a spear, versus fishing with a net. Fishing with a spear, we might capture a single fish – or none at all if we miss. But fishing with a net might catch dozens of fish with a single throw. With this knowledge in hand, you now know how to improve your search rankings.
- To easily check your website loading speed in WordPress, you can use the MonsterInsights Site Speed report.
- Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a website to determine its ranking.
- Lastly, ensure your shopping cart checkout has minimal steps and is easy to use.
- Including a table of contents (TOC) in your content will improve user experience and help Google understand the structure of your content.
Improving Website Speed and Performance
After you claim your listing, you can improve its visibility by adding as much information as possible to it. Photos capture the attention of people who are seeking out a business like yours. This will make them more likely to click your listing and learn more, and can give them a better sense of whether they want to become a customer.
In the past, many website owners tried to improve their website’s ranking by repeating or including various keywords on their pages without any context or additional value. The search engine tries to understand the content on your webpage and determine whether or not it might be relevant for some particular search query. Relevance of the content is one of the most important ranking signals for Google’s algorithm. At this point, we can confidently say that internal links and inbound links are still considered a ranking factor. It’s worth considering that there are many reasons why Google would downplay the importance of links, such as to reduce link spam.
Content relevance
And much of it boils down to using best practices to manage your online reputation. The goal of this change was to ensure that users weren’t just getting the highest quality content but also getting the right information from that content. For now, it’s enough to know that all the factors listed above go into Google’s algorithm and help to determine SEO ranking. But keeping your website ranking on Google isn’t just about making the most out of competitive keywords. And that helps us to better understand how to kind of frame that piece of text, how to frame the images that you have within those blocks.
The lower bounce rate also confirmed that the post met user needs. Organic traffic is often the starting point to evaluate overall SEO performance. Watching that improvement in rankings confirmed that our content updates were effective. I monitor them to understand how my site compares with competitors for specific, important transactional keywords.
I also made sure to give the strategy a name to make it easy to remember. A hook is an angle, a data point, or something controversial that will encourage people to naturally link to you. Our analysis of 900+ million blog posts found that what and why posts (along with infographics) got more links than other types of content (like video). If you’ve tried to learn SEO before, you’ve probably heard about the importance of “high-quality content”. But if you want to get the most out of internal links, I recommend implementing these tips.
A NAP citation mentions your business’s name, address, and phone number online. They usually appear on business directories and social media profiles. Getting reviews on your Google Business Profile and elsewhere builds trust with Google and customers.