At this point, the question must also be asked what role Google will play as a traffic provider in the future and to what extent SEOs will still have a direct influence on rankings.
The introduction of BERT and MUM is bringing about radical changes to the industry similar to those of Panda and Penguin. Natural Language Processing is driving forward semantic search , based on Hummingbird and Knowledge Graph , much faster. SEOs need to think more in terms of entities and topics in relation to EAT than in terms of keywords .
Technical SEO still has the task of ensuring that search-relevant uruguay phone number data content is crawled and indexed. But technology does not make you relevant, nor does it create authority or expertise. With regard to trust (https) and UX (page experience), technology has a few small levers to influence the ranking. However, these levers are not a guarantee of a top position. Technical tasks such as marking up with structured data will become increasingly obsolete, as Google needs less and less structured information for understanding through natural language processing.
Content and links remain the most important influencing factors. In addition to links, there are other important factors that underpin authority. Co-occurrences in search queries and content ( text , videos, audio, images) are important signals of trust and authority. Google has access to significantly more data sources and information through MUM. In addition, Google can use language-independent data mining to collect and combine all the world's information on entities and topics. The previous data silos are being broken down.
This allows Google to answer questions even better and convey truly in-depth knowledge.
Content managers should be less concerned with the frequency of keyword use in their content and instead consider the perspectives from which a topic should be addressed. The good old TF-IDF analysis is still a proven method for identifying important terms that describe the keyword corpus of a topic. Researching W-questions and MAFO complement the tools to find out what needs and questions your users have along the customer journey. Here, too, the focus is on user centricity. Focus on your target groups!
Content offers the answers to questions. But simply producing content will no longer be enough in the future. Google wants to accompany users through the entire customer journey with answers in order to gain valuable product-related commercial traffic and transfer it to its own shopping world. In this way, they want to win back market share.
From an SEO perspective, it is becoming increasingly important for content managers to provide content marketing along the customer journey in order to provide the user with as many content touchpoints as possible during research.
Depending on their level of knowledge, users go through a research process over a shorter or longer period of time. They are looking for solutions and as their knowledge on a topic grows, they face different challenges and questions that require answers.
Someone who is new to search engine optimization will probably ask themselves the question "What is SEO?". Next they will ask themselves the question "How does SEO work?" and then realize that the topic is quite complex and the question they will ask themselves is "Who offers SEO services?" On this journey, companies should provide the answers.
Content must be thought of in a user-centered way and anticipate the needs and questions along the customer journey, just like Google does with MUM. Detailed SERP analyses help to anticipate current and future search intentions. A rough classification according to the classic search intentions transactional and informational is not enough, as no clear recommendations for action for the content can be derived from this. That's why I have divided the classic search intentions into further micro-intents, which I always notice in SERP analyses.