Have you experienced the power of SEO yet? Are you aware of any SEO trend that has hit the current market recently? Staying at the top of the rankings is vital for survival and the changing algorithms and trends can actually work in your favor if you keep pace with the evolving algorithms and upgrade your strategies accordingly.
Digital marketing is a vast field and has many verticals besides SEO. But the fact is that a huge part of the world population relies on the electronic media and the Internet, and especially Google for looking up information on any subject. That is why being on top of the Search Engine Results Page is important.
“Search Engines highly affect a consumer’s buying patterns”
Google is famous for improving the user experience by any means possible. And each improvement or upgrade brings about a mini-storm in the marketing and SEO world. Irrespective of whether your business has an in-house digital marketing team ready to take on the challenges of trending SEO strategies or you prefer to outsource the service of an agency for the task, you must make your platform highly responsive to the end-user as the sites that are gonna thrive will be the ones who will gain the competitive advantage.
Infographics, video marketing, link building, etc. are now a thing of the past. Here are a few trends that will be determining the strategies for higher SERPs in 2018.
1. Voice search
The voice search feature has been on the map for quite a while now but it didn’t affect the webpage ranks as much back in 2002 when it was released. However, with the increase in the number of smartphone users, this feature started affecting the SERPs. It wasn’t until 2014 when Google introduced voice search in multiple languages, that the search engines began incorporating voice search results into determining the page ranks.
SEO trend watch:
Include keywords that are searchable on Google voice search and optimize your page for loading faster. The option of closing the selected page when it takes too long to load and moving on to the next page is influencing the user behavior. People use Google to search for looking up anything and everything. So the simplest way to grab their attention is by optimizing load speed and infusing a conversation format in the blog page, social media and even the FAQ section, which will include some colloquial terms that are easily looked up online. Adopt the Rank Tracker to pick up Google Auto-complete keywords. These are known to have higher rankings. Also, you must ensure that you use high-quality images only and that your page quickly loads the video or images. You can also register with Google my business page.
2.The Mobile-first Index:
“Mobiles and tablets overtook desktops as the primary device for internet usage”- StatCounter Global Stats
Mobile sites are also important when working for the top ten ranks on Google. But merely responsive sites that show up on mobile search won’t be enough to stub the competition. According to Google’s guidelines about mobile-first Indexing, you may not have to do anything differently if your website is responsive or even identical to the desktop version.
But the experts believe that prioritizing the mobile page speed and optimizing the dynamic elements is worth the time, as the mobile-first indexing will be focused on improving the mobile user’s experience. That said, mobile first indexing will not treat collapsed or hidden tabs’ content any differently than the visible content, as this type of screen space management is actually the mobile best practice.
SEO trend watch:
Content, structured data, metadata, social metadata, hreflang, XML and media sitemaps, search console verification, app indexation, server capacity and switchboard tags are some factors which will certainly affect your page rank for the better if done right. Using a separate domain along with an AMP page (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) or a responsive website design with AMP version of the content to amp up your SEO game is up to you.
3. Visual search:
Tech giants like Bing, Google and Pinterest are leading the way in the development of more powerful visual search engines which is reshaping the way people search.
“The Internet landscape is increasingly dominated by visual content”.
Until last year, the visual search was extremely undervalued in the SEO sphere. But with the increase in visual content, SEO pros are trying to understand how users are consuming the visual data and how the recent developments in this field will affect the way people search and hence the SERP.
Moreover, the Visual search is redefining the limits of language in terms of online search.
While the three giants are competing against each other to win the title of best visual search portal, it is expected that the websites will soon be fighting to mark their own space at the top of the search results. The coming of age of this technology will definitely redefine SEO techniques and strategies for those associated with e-commerce transactions in 2018.
4. Long tail keywords:
Keywords have been the focus of SEO tactics for a long time now. But now, the SEO professionals are working on narrowing down the generalized SEO keywords to the specific wares or objects. This is to target the consumers who are usually looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. This is particularly a hit with the conversion rates for popular products on any website. Long tail keywords are the phrases, which contain three to four words and are less competitive than generic keywords.
SEO trend watch:
Use the search snippet title of Google, which is dynamic based on the search query to target potential customers and those using voice search. This also helps you to advertise your unique selling point automatically by using Google’s AdWords Planner and autocomplete feature on the search tab.
There are many different trends that are being followed by many websites, but you must look out for the ones mentioned here to get the best rankings.