By this time, everyone in the online business has heard of SEO and should know that optimizing your site for the search engines is a hard and time-consuming job. This is because the searching tools are always changing the way of how they decide which pages to show first on their results and you should always be aware of how you can stay at the top.

Below you can check which are the current SEO trends. You will not see any codes here, since SEO has changed a lot in the last year. Therefore you should change as well.

We will not get into details about everything - just the important stuff.

1. Go Mobile!

If you haven't already done that, you are late for the party. Last May, Google confirmed that they had more searches on mobile devices than desktop in 10 countries, including USA and Japan. Also, since then, there is more internet traffic coming from smartphones and tablets than computers, so you should really consider having a mobile version of your store.

Let alone the fact that your customers will feel more comfortable browsing a mobile-friendly store, you will be placed higher in the search results.

Google reported that they will place mobile-ready websites above the ones that do not have such option in the SERP:

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

– Google

You can find the original statement here.

PS. You can always check if your website is ready for smartphones & tablets from the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

2. Unique images are the way to go

There is no way that you started reading this article without already knowing that unique content is probably the most important part of your online presence. However, this does not apply only for the written content (text) in your site’s pages.

The most popular search engines (Bing and Google) are pretty good at finding images and can easily distinguish the unique images from the ones that are used on many other websites. Keep this in mind when you are publishing your content on the Web.

Don’t get me wrong here. There is nothing wrong in the use of stock images. The unique photos, however, combined with useful and helpful information, will make your articles stand out and lead to a better experience for your customers and potential clients.

3. Your site should be fast

This should be on the top of your to-do list along with the mobile-version of your site.

Page speed is a ranking factor just as much as the keywords, content, images and anything you might think of. If your site is faster than the competitors’, the customers will prefer to browse and buy from you. It is a little known fact, but Google’s bot is allocating specific time to browse each site, so if your site is slow, lesser number of pages will get indexed from Google and later on displayed on the result.

Also, keep in mind that your site’s speed performance is not only a factor on your rank in SERP but also on your revenue:

"If an ecommerce site makes $100k in revenue per day, a 1 second load delay equates to $2.5M in lost revenue annually."

- Adam Audette,
SVP Organic Search at Merkle

Any investment in your page load speed will be accounted for because the customers will surely recognize that. So, don’t get the money slip through your fingers and take action.

4. Social sharing is still a “thing”

And it will be for a loooooooong time. It is pretty simple actually. People now spend most of their online time in the social networks and you should be taking advantage of that. The social signals were a big thing in the last couple years and they will continue to be so.

Every time someone shares page from store or tweets a URL from your website, they are creating a social signal. Those signals can be tracked from the search engines and amount (and quality) of content which is shared on Google Plus, Facebook or Twitter, can boost your rankings by a big margin.

How can you use that? Make sure that your content is liked, shared and tweeted. You can also ask your visitors to do the same if they agree with the information in your content. The social signals created from these actions should boost your SEO ranking and also increase your visits from the social networks. It is basically a win-win.

And last but not least...

5. Take your time

There are tons of things you can do to increase your presence in the search engines. However, keep in mind that doing everything in a short amount of time is suspicious for Google and also prone to mistakes.

There are different types of mistakes:

• Typos
• Wrong information
• Images not relevant to the content
• Content not relevant to the whole website

These are just part of them and some may seem very unusual. Like, how are the typos affecting your SEO presence? Well, most probably they will not. However, they will make a strong impression on your users and Google’s algorithms are now extremely focused on tracking how your customers react to your content.

To put it short - yes, content does matter. However, only good content matters.

Don’t rush it, take your time and check your content carefully before publishing.

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