In the digital marketing landscape, trends can make or break website performance, and if your site and strategy don’t keep up with the times they’re at a high risk for losing leads and lowering search ranking. Fortunately, with a team like the SEO experts at DLM, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with each technical change that affects your site, since we’re staying on top of it for you. As we look to the coming year, here are the important trends in SEO and digital marketing we see having a significant impact in our strategy.

Being Mobile-Friendly is Key

Ever since updating their core algorithm in 2019 to be “mobile-first” in analyzing website content, Google has been rewarding pages specifically designed to look and work well on mobile devices like smartphones. Aside from having the correct code that automatically adjusts website format and design to various screen sizes, so-called mobile-friendly pages should be written in a way that’s easily readable on handheld devices.

This means avoiding large paragraphs that can become intimidating blocks of text on a smaller screen, as well as including descriptive headers that makes it easy for users to skim through content to find what they’re looking for.

Don’t Be Afraid of In-Depth Content

Studies show that longer pages, those with 3,000 words or more, tend to perform better than short ones, particularly those that are written well and engage users. This is opposed to the conventional thinking that the length of new content doesn’t matter as much as the speed or regularity with which it’s produced. Don’t feel bad if you have a majority of web pages that don’t have a ton of content, but do set a strategy in place to combine pages, update them, or remove them to give visitors the best experience possible in the long term.

Prepare for Google Core Updates

The world of SEO (and yours, by extension) experienced quite a shock recently. On November 17, 2021, Google released a “core update.” Although Google updates its algorithm on a near-daily basis with no interruption to website rankings, its core updates can have a slightly — or substantially — larger impact on where certain pages on your website rank for certain keywords.

Core updates are usually announced ahead of time, although we in the SEO world don’t always know what they consist of, and therefore how these updates could affect our work. We don’t necessarily worry about every update because we help clients create robust, resilient websites that aren’t “tossed around” by changing algorithms. Google recommends an E-A-T (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) strategy for creating content that will rank reliably well throughout many core updates.

Partner With DLM’s Medical Marketers

You’ve spent years becoming an expert in your craft, whether as a physician or office manager, and you deserve a marketing team that’s spent the same time and energy becoming experts in their own right. Our teams of SEO specialists, content creators, and web developers spend every day immersed in their respective field, ensuring our clients don’t have to. We look ahead to emerging trends in SEO and steer our clients through what can be tumultuous currents in the field of digital marketing. To find out how Digital Limelight Media and our versatile Insight website performance dashboard can help your practice generate more and higher-qualified leads, contact us today to schedule a call with us.