SEO seems to be unstoppable following the notable increase in the practice of SEO, for digital marketers and website owners. Developers are coming up with newer approaches and technique for SEO, which makes Serpbook an essential resource for every website. SEO has since become important even for audiences, given that they are the reason website owners need to optimize their sites.
Still, SEO should be expected to keep changing to incorporate newly identified audience needs and match up to the search engine algorithms. Every year, SEO experiences improvements and adjustments, and 2018 is no exception. Follow through with this article for insights into eight trends that are game changers in 2018.
Mobile-first indexing
You must know by now that the mobile audience is increasing by the day. Google tops the list of search engines that advocate for mobile-first indexing. In fact, studies show that over 55% of traffic is from mobile users, which means mobile searches have already outdone desktop searches.
It is therefore highly likely that going forward, Google and other search engines will display rank results based on the mobile versions of the site, meaning, if your website is not sensitive to mobile devices in terms of sharing relevant and comprehensive information that search engines can crawl and index, you might be doing yourself a great disservice.
Linkless backlinks
You know how much importance people place on link building for SEO? Well, in 2018, things are yet to take an exciting turn. Linkless backlinks consist of the brand mentions spotted online, whether on social media platforms or within web pages. It can be hard to get websites to add links of your site on theirs, but not so much for linkless backlinks.
The number of times your brand gets mentioned or conversations sprout referencing to your product or service, count as backlinks. The strategies for gaining linkless backlinks are similar to those of link earning. Focus on increasing audience engagement on social media and sharing quality content deserving of mentions, quotes, and links.
Related: How to Improve Your Website Ranking with Blogger Outreach
Artificial Intelligence
For a while now, people have become well conversant with Google’s RankBrain to process results and handling all of Google’s search queries. Google has a fondness for Artificial Intelligence which has seen to it that the Cloud Vision API technology, developed by Google, can identify a massive number of objects.
Google will keep advancing on Artificial Intelligence refining it to details, which calls for site owners to be more deliberate in providing adequate descriptive information that can be favored by search engines’ machine learning technology. In 2018, expect that search results will behave in less predictable ways due to this technology, hence, optimize for your target audience first, which is the initial goal of the machine-learning algorithm.
High-quality content
Even in 2018, content is king. Search engines are developing stricter techniques of indexing content, meaning that is becoming harder to hide behind SEO techniques with poor quality content. The emphasis is on audience optimization.
As Artificial intelligence takes the front seat in 2018, it is increasingly of value to be consistent in providing quality content for your target audience. The best way to keep your content relevant and comprehensive for search engines to index is to research on the top-ranking pages on your websites to identify the similarities, just like Google’s RankBrain does.
Voice search
It is already clear that mobile technology is taking over the world. Developers have hence gone further to increase the sophistication by including voice search technology. Google’s voice search, Google Home, and Amazon’s Alexa are taking the lead in enhancing the user experience of their audience.
For your keyword research, you may now need to consider voice search results as you do typed-in search queries. As studies suggest, one in five mobile searches is from voice search, which is bound to increase as this year kicks in. Change the way you develop your content, specifically to address user intent, other than specific keywords.
Page speed
Google recently announced that page speed is a ranking factor for websites, specifically mobile results, but you cannot blame them. People want to meet their needs fast, and that is why search engines are an instant solution to their problems.
In fact, research conducted shows that people will not wait to load a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This implies more pressure on you as the website owner to ensure your site is highly responsive and takes as little time as possible to load.
Featured snippets
Featured snippets are one principal source of information for search engines, particularly for voice searches. While you can still rely on organic search listings and rankings, with the pace at which technology is evolving, you might need to adjust your SEO strategy to make room for featured snippets.
Video SEO
A video is a type of content that has gained a lot of traction and is yet to keep growing with time since people would rather watch a video than read through long-form texts. With the rapid changes in technology, it is predicted that video SEO will grow up to 80%, outshining all types of content. For this reason, incorporate videos in your website to elaborate your content or as the content itself.
There you have it! These eight trends will most definitely change the world of SEO in 2018 and the years to come.
