As you continue to put work into optimising your website’s SEO, it’s important to remember that while its core principles remain the same, there are always new updates to the algorithm that can be learned and ultimately influence the way you execute optimisation across your web pages.

So what new trends have been introduced this year that you should focus on and how should you update your strategies? An SEO company in Melbourne like Newpath Web would be able to offer ways to capture all new trends in the algorithm, and below are some of the top new strategies to pay attention to increase your traffic and improve your rankings.

Optimise for Google Passage Ranking

For the past few years, Google has now been utilising what is called ‘passage ranking’ where alongside the ranking of keywords, they have also been ranking individual passes on webpages. What this entails, is Google puddling out sections from your content, and displaying them on the search results page even if none of your optimised keywords is included in it.

This means that if you were to write a blog post designed to target one or two specific keywords or phrases, your page might still be able to be included in the rankings for a completely different keyword even though you have not optimised for it, this is because Google will see a relevant passage about the other topic, and display that passage on the search results page.

Optimising for Google’s Passage ranking is quite simple. Your focus should be on creating an easy-to-read blog post and user-friendly experience, with extra work put into creating clear sections within posts and incorporating keywords as headings for these sections. Having these smaller, focused portions in your content means that they are more likely to be targeted by Google for display on the search results page, so ensure that these sections are relevant to your main topic, but also make sense contextually if they were to stand alone.

Put Focus on Images

A lot of businesses forget how much searching is done through Google Images, and spend so much time focused on keyword targeting that they miss out on targeting images as well.

The first step is to ensure that any images you have on your site are high-quality and relevant to your keywords. Individuals should be able to tell what your website’s content is about based on the image alone.

It’s also going to be beneficial to compress any images you are using before uploading them to your site. This is because, even though having high-quality images is important, you also need to optimise your website’s speed as this is another one of Google’s ranking factors. Even just one overly large image can slow down the load time of your webpage, so if you aren’t sure how to do this yourself, consider speaking with a digital agency in Australia that can assist with the process.

Utilising the ‘People also ask’ function

In most Google searches, a ‘people also ask’ function appears to display similar search topics to the one that is currently being searched. This section always appears on the first page of the search returns and is a great way to get more visibility for your website.

To get your business to appear in this section, you need to provide answers to common questions in your content. Take some time to identify long-tail question keywords among your audience, or what kind of questions are often asked about your industry, and then provide comprehensive answers to these questions. This is a great way to acquire more visibility for your business, even if you don’t exactly meet the keyword search the individual is making.

Long-form content

Google likes to rank high-quality content, even though the length of content itself is not a ranking factor, longer form content is more likely to meet the qualifications that google associates with quality and legitimacy of content. In-depth writing, original research and quality authorship all have strong effects on how your content is treated by search engines.

As Google continues to improve its algorithms, it will keep getting better at recognizing quality. So hiring a digital agency in Australia to manage your content writing to ensure you are providing comprehensive information on the keywords you’re targeting will help move you towards higher keyword rankings and higher average positions.

So to keep your business ahead of the curve, you should put some extra focus into these new strategies all while still focusing on your usual SEO fundamentals. If taking the time to optimise your content doesn’t fit into your schedule, consider contacting an SEO company in Melbourne like Newpath Web who can work to manage the complex areas of targeting for you.