What are the best new SEO techniques to be known by every online business owner this year?

Here are probably the best new SEO techniques and fresh approaches to online search optimization that are definitely worth investing your time and effort throughout this year. Below I’m going to quickly outline all you need to know about the following trends for better rankings in 2018, such as Optimizing for Rich Answers, Google’s Featured Content, as well as Improving User Engagement, That being said, let’s delve into each element in greater detail.

Optimizing for Rich Answers

Given that targeting for the main relevant keywords and their long-tail variations is still very important in the Search Engine Optimization, the lion’s share of new SEO techniques is now revolving mainly around optimizing for Google’s rich answer sections. Basically, Rich Answers are organic search results that are shown towards the top of the list of organic SERPs. Since Google is doing best to provide additional value to the users behind the search, rich answers are meant to provide the most accurate and relevant information according to every given search query. That way, there is a good cause to conclude that their influence will only gain in power over time. So, here is a brief instruction to make most out of this fresh SEO opportunity:

• First and foremost, rank your website or blog for that specific search query.
• Try to start more sentences with so-called “command words,” such as discuss, evaluate, examine, assess, compare, account for, relate, review, indicate, etc.
• Next, make sure to write only clean & concise headings.
• Polish your short sections with the HTML.
• Elements to represent your items in a clear order. For example, make them as an ordered list, unordered list, or a menu – and you’re done.

Google’s Featured Content

I recommend tracking the world’s leading SEO reviews for the other types of Google’s featured content to plug in with your own content. Among the others, you can find Rich Answers referenced as “featured snippets” or “related questions,” as well as many other better-known ways of gaining click-through in the relevant SERPs, such as images, videos, infographics, and other compelling multimedia content.

Improving User Engagement

In fact, user engagement isn’t related to brand-new SEO techniques or the most recent approaches to Digital Marketing. Nevertheless, the thing is that online marketers have always been exploiting user engagement as a quite strong ranking factor on its own. Basically, user engagement covers the following online metrics, such as the average dwelling time (otherwise, time on site per user visit), bounce rate, “pogo-sticking” (i.e., a more specific variation of good old bounce rate, which is arguably the worst ranking signal showing immediate user’s dissatisfaction), etc. 

At the same time, however, from the viewpoint of conversion-generating potential – user engagement is a definitely strong factor that depends on the effective use of your call-to-action, therefore giving you better chances of successfully interacting with the user and leading more people through the marketing funnel. So, it becomes clear that when taken in the broadest sense, user engagement will need your precise attention anyway. And I recommend the following checkup tools to give you some practical insight and help you improve user engagement as a ranking factor – try Heatmapping, SumoMe Heat Maps or CrazyEgg online tools to analyze your tracked site pages and optimize every CTA link and button you have, relying only on the actual data and accumulated online metrics. That’s it!