Introduction
Pay per click (PPC) is one of the most popular and effective SEO techniques that is practiced globally by big corporations as well as local business owners. It is a continuously evolving marketing practice that will make changes based on, what the end user is searching for. That’s why even the most expert SEO professionals have to constantly adjust their strategies and tools depending on the shifting SEO practices.
2017 was a very popular year for SEO professionals as Google dominated the landscape with Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), and this year is set to be even more exciting or challenging (whichever way you see it) as Google recently announced the retirement of its popular ADWORDS and Double Click Advertiser products, while consolidating them into Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager. This is a major announcement for all SEO agencies as Google still dominates the majority of the SEO market and a rewrite could potentially mean that all existing SEO techniques could see a bit of change.
With that said, Sridhar Ramaswamy (Google’s Head of ads and commerce) said that despite the changes, the platform will actually become accessible and easier to use and should, in fact, aid new start-ups and SMEs to get into the game.
So, which SEO trends will matter in 2018?
Rising SEO Trends in 2018
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Last year’s AMP is still one of the most dominant SEO techniques that will continue to grow in 2018. Users want their search data to be relevant and to be properly displayed on their mobile device. AMP was introduced as a measure to speed up slow websites and deliver the search data to the user. This resulted in a tremendous growth of users who could now view data from slower websites much more quickly. Although the improvements in HTML5 are constantly bringing down slow loading websites, AMP will most likely remain in place because website loading consistency isn’t equal for every website. The job of SEO specialists here is to make the website compatible for AMP acceleration, even though the server loading speeds maybe sub-optimal. The back-end of your website must be configured for AMP in order for your site load quicker and run smoother for the searcher. A slow loading website will have a negative effect in your rankings.
- Rich Snippets: Rich snippets actually play a major role in attracting visitors to the websites. Rich snippets aren’t actually a recent SEO trend, but nevertheless, its importance has only grown over the years. The role in that these snippets will play in 2018 has to be competing with Google’s own knowledge graph, where it provides the users with a much more condensed answer rather than having the user visit each individual website to find the answers they are looking for.
- Mobile-First Indexes will continue to rise:Google’s experiment with a mobile-first index initially started back in 2016 where it started to fetch data from a website’s mobile site, and then, rank it accordingly to then later display as quick suggestions on search results. Many analysts presume that this could be the year that Google launches it with full effect, and with the increasing evidence of Google revamping its search algorithms with AI, it might be entirely possible. So, if you haven’t already optimized your website for Mobile-First Indexes, it might not be too late after all.
- Website UX and content optimization: A good looking and well optimized website will invite viewers and index itself higher in the search results. For many years now, search engines have begun to index and display websites that feature an easy to use UI and quality content. This is precisely why the most popular and well-visited websites spend so much money on making their sites more appealing while featuring quality content. The ranking mechanism in search engines ranks both relevance of content as well as the ease of use for the visitor. So, even if you have quality content, it still doesn’t guarantee visitors unless your website is user-friendly and clutter free for the end user.
- Hyperlocal search results: Hyperlocal search results constituted a big part of the search results for local queries back in 2017. This year this trend will continue to rise even further. Hyper local searching basically produces results based on the immediate proximity of the user (usually within the immediate vicinity or nearest blocks). Businesses targeting local customers might want to further tweak their localization info if not done already.
- AI might start stepping in: Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is currently the code that ranks your websites. While that in itself is a very powerful search algorithm, it is still a part of a computer. In an interview, Google actually introduced the RainBrain AI, and this is supposed to replace the current algorithm very soon. This means that websites will need to pay special attention on their SEO optimization techniques like keywords, backlinks, and even get specialized SEO optimization tools to help in this regard.
- Backlinks: Google’s current search algorithm loves backlinks as it acts as an endorsementof the quality and verification of the produced content in your website. This year, it is about to get even more serious as Google’s SEO algorithm actually judges the backlinks and keywords in your articles based on relevancy and freshness. So, poorly sourced backlinks with keyword rich optimization might not only give your site negative rankings, but may also cause you to be penalized. So, in other words, link building strategies should consist of reliable and fresh backlinks from different sources as well as concise and cohesive content so that it doesn’t get flagged as being manipulative.
- Voice search: It was one of the biggest SEO optimizations from 2017, and this year it’ll get even more aggressive. Voice search has reached such immense popularity with devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant that almost a quarter of the searches are made by voice search according to Google. Voice search is a relatively new platform and even new SMEs have a chance to get higher on search results with proper SEO. Also, voice searches can be longer as compared to typing info in a box, sometimes almost stretching to sentence. This gives organizations a lot of headroom to evolve their SEO’s early on by incorporating long-tail keywords into their SEO strategy.
Those were a few areas where SEOs could potentially play a bigger role in 2018. Of course, this isn’t the whole list as there are countless other parameters that will change even this year and to predict them is really difficult. Nonetheless, SEOs aren’t deviating from their traditional means but rather evolving to become more efficient as time passes on. Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
