SEMrush has been analyzing the most important SEO factors for the current year and thus provides important impulses for the orientation of the SEO strategy in the new year. True to the motto “What gives good results today can not be wrong tomorrow” is being investigated, what results in good rankings and the weighting of individual factors in the on- and offpage optimization. Even if something else can be heard from Google, it can be seen that some optimization measures are far more promising than others.
For the analysis, SEMrush looked at 600,000 keywords and evaluated the first 100 positions. These were then examined for the various factors of onpage and offpage optimization (content, backlinks, keywords, etc.) and also included other factors such as user signals. All in all, there were 17 factors to look at. From this, the Random Forrest method was used to create the analyzes that, on the one hand, produced a lot of old familiarity and could also give some incentives for changing the SEO strategy.
First of all, backlinks are still important and therefore the link profile should always be kept in mind. Keywords in Title, Description, etc. are of course important, but this is widely known and thus you can not just make big leaps forward in the SERPs alone. Even with the conversion to https you can expect no improvements (except in really unknown niches), because this is now widespread. Of course that does not mean that these things should be neglected – but they are much more a base to build on.
It gets interesting in completely different places. For example, Google rates it positively if websites have a lot of direct traffic that is not from search engines. Of course, brands have the advantage, but there are also some ways to use this positive impulse for ranking lesser known websites. You should also keep an eye on user signals of a website. How many pages does a user visit? How long does he stay on the site and what about the bounce rate? Those who work on improving these numbers also improve their ranking!
Even if that looks quite good for most people at first glance, there is still a lot to do in the background and it is usually not possible to constantly improve the length of stay and page views by making small changes. So there is still a lot to do for most of you here.
