With Thanksgiving around the corner, there are so many reasons to feel grateful. From gathering with our family and friends to enjoying a truly scrumptious meal, we’re so very thankful all season long.

When it comes to digital and SEO, we’re counting all of our blessings for the best strategies and fruitful tools that have meant the most to us, and really helped businesses bump up their rankings.

Some of the top ways to improve SEO are the tried and true methods we all know. A strong content strategy, good keyword research, solid analysis, regular reporting, and lots of tweaking. They’re all just as important right now as they were in the past.

Still, a few new trends and technologies are emerging and have really evolved this year. There are strategies for enhancing SEO that we simply can’t (and don’t want to) ignore. I’m listing a few that I really wouldn’t want to live without, and if you haven’t tried these yet, I hope you will.

1. Leveraging Keyword Tools

What would we do without innovative keyword tools? Many of us have used keyword research tools for a while now, but today, we rely on them more than ever. Unlike in the past, the most powerful tools can do most of the heavy lifting and intense research for you, while you focus on other critical tasks.

When I told you about the 5 best keyword shortcuts, I also shared some of my favorite Google Chrome extensions that have become total game-changers. Moz Bar, Wordtracker Scout, and Keyword Anywhere are just a few extensions to try. Once you add one to your browser, you’ll never go back to traditional keyword research tools again.

We also talked before about Google Trends and Google Correlate. They’re both tools for identifying keywords around what’s trending right now. It’s one of the smartest ways to use topics that are hot to dominate in the rankings.

With AuthorityLabs Keyword tool, you get even more comprehensive reporting and data you can use. It’s also fast. Add a new keyword and your data starts streaming in after just 30 minutes.

2. Optimizing For Voice

Using personal assistants and voice searches may have once seemed like a passing fad, but it’s now a staple in many people’s lives. You see it everywhere, from Amazon’s Alexa speaking through Echo Dots around the house, to people asking into their phones for nearby restaurants while they’re on the train.

The rising persistence of voice search tells us it’ll be here for a long time, and as I told you before, voice search will make up half of all searches within the next two years. SEO optimization for voice search helps me stay ahead of the curve and keep my site ranking and traffic flowing, even as the way people search changes.

That’s why I am so thankful for the new, smart strategies for our SEO to maximize results for voice searches and personal assistants. One easy way to start is by simply optimizing your content for local SEO.

Why?

Because voice search has made it super easy to say: “Find a coffee shop near me.”

Voice search can return incredibly targeted, local results, so it’s been extra important to stay ahead with our local SEO efforts.

We also learned to think, and write our content, much more like people speak. It sounds so easy to do, but it’s a bit of a shift for SEO. This little trick has helped us tailor searches for conversation between users and their phones.

With voice technology expected to become incredibly accurate very soon, we should all keep planning our SEO strategies to match how users speak and ask questions.

3. Thinking Like Our Users

As with voice search, all optimizing for all searches means thinking more like your users.

We’ve talked about the power of creating personas to craft killer user journeys. If you haven’t yet, start building your user personas now! For us, thinking like our users has significantly improved our results.

Thinking about building your personas, but don’t know where to begin? HubSpot makes a persona builder worth trying, and here are more ideas from User Testing.

Stepping into the world of your users is the absolute best way to create content that resonates. You want them to really drive your content strategy; otherwise, you’re just standing at a digital podium, talking to yourself. What you say needs to be relevant and useful to your audience, and search engines will reward you for it.

As for journeys, we love how they help us map out content distribution in a practical, logical way. Knowing your users means catering to their needs and where they get their information or make purchases, and that is exactly the right data to map out your journey.

Check out all these tools for building every kind of journey map.

We’re thankful for personas and the rise of businesses thinking more like their customers because it’s helps digital marketers rethink, tweak, and improve content strategy and see real results.

4. Tracking Our Rankings

Understanding how the work I’m putting into my SEO translates on search results pages is critical to my workflow and overall digital strategy. That’s why modern-day rank tracking, and all the ways it has evolved, is something I’m incredibly thankful for.

Rank tracking can also help prioritize your efforts and get a better understanding of what’s performing best across your site. Start by tracking your already high-traffic keywords to learn about their long-term longevity.

I also love that tracking rankings regularly helps me stay on top of keywords that are “low-hanging fruit,” or keywords I can ramp up easily because they continue to perform well. I can also make the most of keyword grouping by understanding how they’re ranking.

I always stay on top of our rankings, but along with everything else I’m doing, it can be a challenge. There are a whole host of tools you can use to get reports as often as you want, and customize them however you like.

With AuthorityLabs, I get daily reports that I can easily share. Another good tool to try out is Google’s Search Console.

Now, your turn! Tell us what you’re thankful for this season, or this year, as you count all your SEO and digital marketing blessings.

What tools and tech have paved your way for success? What strategies could you no longer live without? Let us know in the comments.