With the popularization of the internet, becoming visible in the search engines by investing in digital marketing has become paramount these days.
As the year is coming to an end, in this post, we will talk about the main SEO trends for 2018 and how you can gain more visibility for your site.
SEO Trends for 2018:
Voice Search
The way users search for information online is changing and with the arrival of voice search on both mobiles and tablets. Chatbots such as Siri, Google voice, and Cortana are now widely used by users, and it is expected that in 2018 this trend will continue to grow. To adapt your SEO strategy for voice searches we recommend:
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Think about the types of questions your customers may ask.
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Create pages of frequently asked questions focused on long tail keywords and conversational keywords.
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Instead of putting phrases like “restaurants in Dublin,” include questions on your pages such as “Where can you eat well in the centre of Dublin?”
Link Building
Backlinks will still be effective in 2018, but it will be more important than ever to rely on quality over quantity. It is better to have a single link from a very trustworthy website than to have many low-quality ones from spammed and shady websites.
Treating quality guest blogging as an integral part of a link building strategy will also continue to be an SEO trend next year.
User experience
User experience will become even more important in 2018. Having a fast, responsive website with a good navigation structure and a lot of useful and quality content is essential for providing a good user experience. It can help increase the traffic to your website, reduces bounce rate and also increase the time users spend on the site and their interaction with your content.
Mobile-First Index
In 2018, brands and companies will have to give greater importance to mobile devices, because Google may decide to implement its first mobile-first index this year.
With this, local SEO will become more popular, since users of mobile devices look for content while on the move; so your SEO strategy should facilitate the search experience through relevant and personalized responses.
The demand for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a system that optimizes the content of a website for faster loading on the mobile device will grow in 2018, helping companies improve their upload speed and user experience.
Importance of the Visual Search
The importance of visual search will gain prominence in 2018. Your SEO strategy should take into account the way in which we now consume visual content and focus on the optimization of this content.
Companies such as Bing (with Bing Visual Search), Pinterest and Google have already invested in developing powerful visual search engines.
Google’s Featured Snippets and Quick Answers
These are small prominent pieces of information that are displayed on the top of the SERPS. Google extracts this Snippet in the form of a summary response from the website and users can read the content without having to open the link:
There are three ways Google can present the quick answers:
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Paragraphs – format of answer to questions like “who is …”, “why …” and “what is.”
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Lists – answer response formats such as recipe and DIY instructions.
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Tables – response format to searches such as comparative prices and data/result.
Google determines programmatically whether it is likely that a page contains a response to the user’s question and most of the time the pages that get into the featured snippet are those that already rank first page for the query.
According to a study performed by Ahrefs, more than 12% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results and this percentage will likely grow in 2018. Correct optimization is the key to get access to this extra traffic.
HTTPS
This is another of the 2018 SEO trends that we discussed earlier on our “Non-HTTPS Not Secure Google Chrome Warnings” blog post. However, this will be the year in which Google marks as unsafe all pages that ask for personal information to their users, and do not have installed an SSL certificate even if they are not an online store.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) allows algorithms and voice searches to understand the user’s intention better, thus being able to understand the context of queries to offer better results.
In this way, artificial intelligence and machine learning systems like Google RankBrain are changing the way search results are classified and will continue to do so in 2018.
In conclusion, SEO will continue to evolve, and although being number one in the rankings will still be the primary objective, there will be more opportunities to increase search traffic without only focusing on the top positions. The Featured Snippets, voice searches, PPC and local SEO can also offer good results.
These are the main SEO trends for 2018. Are you ready to optimize your website? If you need help, do not hesitate to contact us.
Author: Paulo
