The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SEO Research and Study

Learning everything you need to know about SEO in order to be effective today and in the months and years to come is a difficult process—made even more challenging by the constant evolution of web technologies, content formats, search engines, web user and searcher behavior, and the landscape of the internet.

Fortunately, as the web evolves, so too do the resources for learning. Leading SEO pros regularly post their thoughts on social media, blogs, and online forums, and many speak at various industry conferences (IRL and virtual). These platforms create countless opportunities for you to interact with other professionals doing SEO at a high level, to learn from their experience, and to keep your optimization skills sharp and up-to-date.

In this chapter we will talk about how you can leverage the many resources available to be more successful in your SEO efforts today and well into the future.

SEO Research and Analysis

The process of creating, publishing, and optimizing content for digital discoverability and user engagement (essentially, the SEO skill set) must continue to develop to keep pace with the changes in content types, formats, and engagement platforms that occur so frequently in the digital economy. Search engines such as Google, and “discovery” engines such as those provided on social platforms like TikTok, are constantly tweaking the ways in which their algorithms understand content and score various signals to determine relevance ...