It looks like 2018 will be a promising year in marketing. For example, there are not only many changes on the agenda with the GDPR legislation coming up, we can also expect many challenges in the field of SEO trends.
Search engine optimization is growing faster than ever and for many companies remains the way to get the right visitors through the door!
In the last year and a half, Google has received a lot of criticism of promoting fake news via its search engine. Unfortunately, this is the second time this problem occurs with the known company. In February 2011, it launched the Panda update to delete spam-related and low-quality content from its systems.
Because Google realizes that fake news has a huge impact on its image, this year it will introduce an algorithm about authority as the latest SEO trend. This means that news sites must publish better content to be recognized as a high authority website, but also that brands and companies must make clear what their activity is and what relationships they have with other brands or online properties.
In the coming year, the meaning of the link building will not drop, but you will need to focus on quality. You can forget about mass-produced links that do not affect the website’s authority among users from the target group. A link that does not increase the value of our site will actually be useless. It is not about getting only links from websites considered to be the best and the most popular in a given thematic area. However, they have to be pages that are very well thematically suited to ours.
The traffic coming from the links will still be an important factor influencing the page ranking. One of the most important challenges for people involved in the upcoming year of SEO will therefore be building relationships with bloggers and influencers and developing contacts that will be important from the point of view of the long-term link building strategy. The importance of acquiring links from spam blogs and the so-called ones will drop. “Guest entries”. It will be worth placing such entries in high-reputation blogs with which we will be able to establish long-term relationships. At the same time, Google will be rewarding for a diverse and tailored backlink profile.
A second SEO trend that will undoubtedly break through in 2018 is the increase in featured snippets. This is because Google wants to change its position from standard search engine to personal assistant in the coming year. So if you type a translation or question in the search bar soon, you no longer have to click on one of the websites, but the answer will appear at the top of the search results.
This means that the chance of website clicks decreases for many companies. Where Google users used to have to search for the answer to their question, they are presented immediately.
The big challenge of this SEO trend is therefore to formulate your content on your website in such a way that Google sees it as a possible answer to a question and uses it as a featured snippet.
What major challenge does this bring for SEO marketers? Optimize your content on your website so that Google sees that this is a possible answer to a question, so that your content also qualifies as a featured snippet.
A final, but certainly not insignificant, SEO trend in 2018 is the increase in mobile traffic and voice search. Because the use of smartphones and tablets has increased enormously in recent years, Google requires that every website is now also user-friendly via mobile. Is your mobile website not user-friendly? Then from now on it will become much more difficult on the first pages of the search results.
In addition, thanks to mobile use, there is also a shift to local searches. Many people use their mobile phones to visit stores and businesses in the area. The challenge is therefore to match your content to the local search queries of the consumer.
Finally, last year Google also indicated that one in five people use voice search, or voice search. By 2020 it is expected that this number will even rise to 50 percent! In the field of SEO, this means that searches with speech not only become longer, but also different. You will therefore have to focus on full questions and long-tail keyword combinations, if you want to target consumers who use voice search.
Nobody disputes that “content is king”. But for the second king in positioning, the UX page grows – meaning “User experience” – friendliness of the site for its visitors. In 2018, UX will be even more important than before. Google has been sending very clear signals for a long time that a website that wants to be high in the rankings should be as user-friendly as possible – enable it to navigate the site freely, find information and go through the paths of purchase or contact. A good UX increases the chances of getting a high level of visitor involvement. And this in turn helps the search engine determine which pages are really valuable to users.
