As we have entered the New Year i.e. 2018, it is high time to start thinking about the business year ahead and expect something logical from SEO in 2018.
There are countless search industry trends experienced by us in the very beginnings of this year which is definitely going to come in great reputation in 2018.
Here are some major trends that you need to keep an eye on so that you could stay ahead of the curve.
Digital Assistants and Voice Search
Developing voice search technology presents the biggest opportunity to change the way we communicate and process the information. In fact, it is the rise of digital assistants that has presented a growing market that can exactly change the way search queries come into execution. As per Google, this is a proven fact that 1 out of 5 searches is the result of voice queries.
This literally alters the search market and we can expect to see an even bigger shift towards the voice search in this year. When we talk about setting up an SEO strategy, the increase of voice search brings out the requirement to pay attention to the long-tail search keywords and a very natural language which often matches the conversational tone of the users.
There is just a little need to perk up the digital assistants and there will be a lot of people using voice search from the mobile devices, finding out to quicken the related answers. It actually becomes important to research the voice user intent and offer the accurate results. This actually works by assisting the algorithms that offer the best answers.
In addition to this, voice search is literally expected to grow as it is integrated with smart home hubs, assisting companies to have the new data while users enjoy a seamless experience via everyday devices. With this,0020zwhen digital assistants go beyond the smartphone devices, there is a very great opportunity for both, content as well as SEO to take the benefit of an advancing market that actually connects the brand with a user in an exclusive but still relevant and a very useful way.
Mobile Indexed
This year brands are more likely to realize the potential of putting the mobile first instead of catering to the mobiles as a second priority. This is basically true because Google has decided to deploy its mobile-first index.
But the point here is this even if Google doesn’t come first in this, businesses actually need to put mobiles first. As per recent studies, more than 57% of traffic comes from the searches performed on mobile devices. In addition to this, there is a chief difference between the way the keywords rank on mobile and on the desktop. Thus mobile-first content is required to have the best opportunity of marketing the business at local level.
Proper mobile optimization for the local users together with the increase of voice search can offer an excellent way to design a successful SEO strategy in this year by providing the search experience through the personalized answers.
Since competition is increasing, more number of companies are acknowledging the power of a visual search when the brands actually have to pay attention more to the optimization of visual content for SEO purposes.
Link Building
Link building is definitely not going away anywhere in 2018, but there’s something that needs to be taken care of in this now. In 2018, it is going to be more essential to create a strategy that look for quality results. There’s actually no need to target for new links if they do not add value and contribute to building an authority in the targeted niche.
With this, it definitely does not mean that the best backlinks originate from the most popular sites, but it is still very much crucial to look for the coverage from sites which are related to your industry. Referral traffic can still be a great contributor to the organic search rankings, while it is also important to start thinking of link building as a long-term process.
A successful SEO strategy in 2018 is sure to move you towards relationship building which helps a brand build up powerful contacts and links. Such links are actually beneficial in the long term.
One of the biggest challenges in 2018 will be handling the guest blogs and the way of involving them as an important part of the link building strategy without letting the brand reputation suffer from any angle. We can also expect Google warning its publishers who depend too much on the guest posting for link building that there will be a closer look at the guest blogs so as to check out if there is some spam or links to be questioned.
This is what brings out the need for a more systemized link building strategy, targeting to have a complete backlink profile instead of single links that can offer successful outputs.
User experience
As per 2018 marketing trends, the user experience will become even more important in this year. Google has actually made it clear that the prime focus will be the user and this would insist more sites to deliver a smooth and properly functioning UX to the visitors. A good user experience actually multiplies the chances of people getting engaged with the pages that they visit. This will let search engines make out which pages are useful and proving to be helpful over the others.
To make it happen, the foremost step is to perk up the site’s speed, its navigation structure, and readability in order to examine how these can be actually improved through the perfect changes. This can be done while paying a closer look at the visitor’s browsing habits that can help you have the helpful insights. For instance: if the visits last just 30 seconds or even less, this obviously means that user experience is hurting due to the content or appealing factor which is the biggest bar in bringing the conversions to your platform. In addition to this with more people consuming content from the mobile devices, there is a need to offer an excellent user experience across all the devices.
This will bring out the requirement for more number of companies to learn more about the search intent and how the content can be actually optimized to show up in an answer box. Therefore a carefully designed answer box strategy can add to the site’s authority and in brand’s conversion too.
Conclusion
It looks like 2018 is going to be an interesting year for SEO. Classical SEO techniques are still very much effective, but there are a lot of trends that could significantly change the practice e of optimizing for search.
So what is important to understand when proceeding towards practicing the SEO in 2018? It is important to be concerned about the changing trends and getting updated as per requirements. With the search engines evolving, there are a lot of opportunities to increase the search traffic without actually focusing on the organic SERPs.
As a conclusion, this can be stated that voice search, PPC, and featured snippets can usually offer the better results than the organic ranking. This is the reason it is useful to keep pace with the latest trends and find out how your brand can actually maintain a perfect SEO strategy for the year coming ahead while blending the already established and developing trends.