What Is Around the Corner for SEO in 2018
The world of technology is ridiculously fast-paced. Where some careers take decades (sometimes centuries) to implement changes and adopt new practices, Google algorithms apply small changes in policies on a daily basis, and drastic changes on a yearly basis.
This creates an ever-present challenge for online marketers to predict the next factor that will count for or against building a web presence through SEO. There is an ever-growing obstacle of web designers and online advertisers struggling to answer the same questions from clients “How are you going to put my website on the front page of Google?”
I am not going to claim to know everything about the subject. After all, we are a small Alabama SEO company that has been building websites for about a couple of years. There are people with more resources who have been watching the trends for much longer than we have. However, just because we are a small Alabama SEO company, doesn’t mean that we don’t take pride in our research skills. We also want to equip our clients and other up and coming online marketers with the latest Google Updates and SEO trends.
That’s why, today, I am going to be covering the up and coming SEO trends for 2018.
Website Staying Power
For a long time, Google counted how many clicks to your website towards your website ranking. However, there are many “Web Gurus” who have opted to cheat the system in order to grow their ranking quickly. This has been done by the use of clickbait headlines on social media and hiring the use of “Click farms“.
Naturally, after the clickbait became rampant in the last few years, Google decided to transition away from counting just clicks towards web rank. Instead, they added an inclusion towards its algorithm.
Dwell time, is the amount of time visitors stay on your page after the initial click.
Google has had algorithms in the past that point toward the implementation of favoring dwell time over clicks, but with major social media sites, like Facebook adding it to their own algorithms, chances are this will be a stronger implementation for SEO to come.
Mobile First Formatting
It is no secret that the number of smartphone owners is rising every year. And they are not showing any signs of slowing down.
Worldwide, the number of smartphone users are on the rise in both developing and advanced economies. They are even used and owned by refugees from places like North Korea and Syria for its map function and other important reasons.
So, there’s little surprise that mobile friendliness is going to be an even stronger factor for ranking your website. In fact, when building a website, experts recommend you design with mobile phones in mind, not the desktop computer.
If you aren’t sure if your website is mobile friendly enough, then you are in luck. Google has provided tools that can test your site, and judge it on its mobile-friendly qualities.
Voice Search Optimization
This one is a little less apparent compared to most SEO trends. Nonetheless, it is predicted to be a huge part of upcoming SEO trends by influential members of the tech and advertising industry. Voice command technology is a relatively new and has seen its fair share of setbacks. However, as of at least last year, voice-activated search engines are becoming more integrated with consumer technology.
Alexa, Cortana, and several other devices were created solely as a voice-activated machine that are attached to things like Google, Youtube, Amazon, and MapQuest. Sort of like a more compact and limited form of JARVIS from Ironman.
Naturally, that means that Googles ranking will come to favor less from what someone will type down as a keyword and more from organic queries that people speak out loud.
When typing down something, humans have a sense of self-monitoring. We are trained in schools to type things quickly and accurately, in lieu or typing down organic thought. When it comes to speaking, however, unless you are in a formal setting, we tend to blurt out what is on our minds immediately. So instead of speaking to Alexa like someone with pure keywords such as “Cheap Alabama Web Design” we instead ask it full queries, “Alexa, Where is the Cheapest Alabama Web Design company?”
If you take the time to pose and answer a direct question on your content, you are going to get more results and most likely indexed by Google through both voice-activated and organic queries.