It’s hard to believe that there are just a few weeks left in 2017. How effective were your SEO strategies and initiatives? Were they better or worse than expected?
Similar to other areas in the tech industry, SEO is constantly changing. The once fail-proof method of consistently landing atop SERPs (search engine results pages) became irrelevant within a few months. SEO practices that once dominated the industry quickly fell out of favor.
The Google algorithm itself changes constantly, sometimes with multiple changes happening within months. On top of that, the technology available to SEO professionals also constantly evolves, allowing us to stay abreast the seemingly daily changes of what it takes to dominate search.
While 2017 has brought about the dominance of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages), the rise of HTTPS, the importance of backlinks, the precaution of the overuse of 301 redirects and reformatting of rich snippets to accommodate the increasing popularity of voice search, some of these trends will continue into 2018 and some will fall away.
On the other hand, we expect many new trends to emerge in 2018.
While Google makes it near impossible to completely crack its page ranking algorithm code, constantly adjusting to accommodate a thousand different nuances will be the challenge for SEOers in 2018 and many years to come.
Whether you want to do away with 2017 and start anew or you want to build on the success of your 2017 SEO campaigns, here are some SEO trends to be on the lookout for in 2018:
1. Increased Search Engine Results Page Features
It is the goal of any SEO professional to achieve and maintain a high volume of traffic to a given website. Ideally, this would be the result of reaching the top spot on a search engine results page. Not only is it important to achieve this coveted position, but to also maintain it as long as possible.
However, with the latest developments in the search engines, achieving this #1 ranking may no longer be enough to get the traffic you desire.
Gone are the days of the ten search results listings, highlighted in blue hypertext, and a couple of clearly marked ads. Now, when you look at a SERP, it is cluttered with images, videos, links, social media mentions, in-depth article listings, various widgets, and ads. It has become easy for a #1 result to get lost in the busy jumble of other page features.
While keyword and key phrase optimization are still important, you now have other offsite elements to consider.
Popular search engine results page features include AdWords, news block, featured snippets, local packs, reviews, tweets, video, image pack, shopping results and site links.
How can you rank and monitor your rankings for all of these? There are tools such as Rank Tracker that allow you to track your ranking and to show you possible keywords that are holding back potential traffic.
2. Rich Snippet Will Need Careful Structuring
There are rich snippets and regular snippets. Both include a clickable title, a URL, and a meta description. Rich snippets have more condensed titles that include “|” instead of a dash (-), reviews and an image. How you structure the data, however is important in how search engines will display the information.
While the difference may seem insignificant, it has been shown that search results with properly formatted rich snippets receive more clicks and have a higher click through rate, which in turn increases potential sales.
If you’re not sure what properly structured rich snippet structure looks like, you can check out Schema.org which features a step-by-step data structure guide.
3. Page Speed
In today’s fast-paced, on-demand society, people want things, including information, immediately.
Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a website that appears to answer your question exactly, only to have to wait for the page to load. If the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds, you’re off onto another website that can hopefully give you the answers you need.
People don’t like slow webpages. If your page is slow, your site traffic will suffer. Page speed is a user experience feature that is expected for all websites.
If you’re wondering how fast is fast enough, take Google’s recommendation of 3 seconds or less.
To see how the speed of your website stacks up, you can take Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Speed has been a critical component for years, but moving into 2018, we’re going to see even more emphasis on it in the future.
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to see how your site it performing.|
4. Increased Page Relevance
Google continues in its quest to provide the best web browsing experience to users. Besides offering users websites that are safe, Google searches for sites that best match the user’s search intent – even if that’s a little different from their actual query.
This means that search engines will evaluate the relevancy of the content on your website. One of the ways that Google assess the relevance of a website’s content is with Latent Semantic Indexing. Through Latent Semantic Indexing Google can gather content from billions of websites and parse through the content, scanning for related terms and words.
Latent Semantic Indexing also enables Google to determine whether the content on a website is “comprehensive” and flows well.
Google also has the ability to analyze top ranking pages as identify similarities and shared features among them.
How can you make your content relevant and comprehensive throughout 2018? You can start by researching the content of the top websites in your industry and look for commonalities among them. This, however, can take a long time, especially if you’re looking for particular terms or words. To speed up the process, you can make use of some of the free trials available with different website auditors.
5. Voice Search is More Real Than Ever
Just like in 2017, voice search will continue to pick up steam. Many consumers prefer the convenience of speaking over typing. Not only is it faster, but the queries can also be more detailed.
More importantly, voice recognition software has reached the point where users are comfortable trusting it to understand their normal speech.
The increased detail of search queries means you’ll need to go beyond the simple keyword and phrases to rank and focus more on terms and phrases people are naturally going to say out loud. People speak differently than they type, so your SEO strategy should try using conversational terms and sentences.
6. Mobile Will be Even More Important
Smartphones dominate the landscape and more and more web browsing is occurring on mobile devices. In fact, the amount of people using their smartphones to browse the Internet is higher than the number who browse on a traditional desktop computer.
It is no longer optional to have a mobile-friendly website. It is now required and expected by the search engines and the users.
In fact, mobile friendliness is now a search ranking factor.
This is nothing new, and something you’ve probably heard about in many other years, but as each new device comes out and includes some kind of voice search function, you are going to have to really think about it going into 2018.
7. The Rise of “Linkless” Backlinks
Backlinks have been the bread and butter of SEO for many years. In the past, this linking from another source to bolster a webpage’s authority in the eyes of Google was abused, prompting Google come up with the Penguin algorithm in 2012.
Since then, it has become the best (and most ethical) practice for websites to try and get links from more reputable, outside sources.
While links from authoritative, outside sources gave websites some search ranking juice, the further sophistication of Google search robots are slowly taking away the coveted power of backlinks.
It’s not just about who and where your links come from, anymore. A simple link just isn’t going to stand out of the crowd.
Search engines now have the ability to associate mentions of brands, institutions, organizations and people without the need of linking to their corresponding webpages. While links are going to still carry some weight, the other content around the hyperlinked text is going to also be very important.
8. SERPs Will Continue Getting Personal
Besides the traditional search ranking factors, such as page speed, content relevancy and page authority, search engines are also using information about the user, such as interests, browsing history and location, to provide a personalized search results list.
Google, along with some other search engines, have been utilizing personalized SERPs for many years.
An SEOer’s goal of getting to the top of search results will have larger implications. Pages that succeed in dominating search will not only get more initial traffic, but when a user clicks to their page, that business’s page will subsequently appear in future searches by that user.
This will give you a greater opportunity to dominate that user’s SERPs in the future.
There is nothing one can do to land on the top of a user’s personalized SERP except making sure your traffic data is accurate and testing your page’s rankings in private or incognito mode for unbiased results.
Optimize Your Strategies in 2018
SEO is an ever-changing industry. In 2018, Google will continue to enhance the web user’s experience by scanning the relevancy of a page’s content, using personalized search engine results and faster page speeds, and include additional results page features. It will also want to ensure that websites are mobile-friendly and full of normal, conversational terms and words.
It takes a lot of time and effort to stay up on all the updates. It also takes time and long-term care. If your company is small or new and it doesn’t have a designated internet marketing professional, SEO.com can help.
Our trained and knowledgeable SEO professionals can set up and monitor a customized SEO campaign specialized just for your business’ website. Contact us now for more information.
Download your online marketing ebook to learn more about setting strategies for the new year:
What’s the best way to compensate for an ever changing search engine algorithm?
Jori,
The best way to compensate is to have a full marketing strategy that definitely includes SEO but doesn’t rely on it exclusively. You need to engage with your target audience across several platforms, both paid and free, to increase brand exposure and traffic to your site. Some of these marketing strategies will directly and indirectly impact your rankings in the SERPs. Make sure to keep SEO in mind when marketing to get the most out of all campaigns.
Also, the SEO basics will always stay the same so don’t get too worried about the ever changing algorithms. The search engines are always going to rank sites that provide value to visitors. Google and Bing are always going to look at on page optimization factors and brand mentions and links from relevant sites.
Hi Jori, that’s a great question. Google rolls out hundreds of updates and changes to their search rank algorithms. Not all these are major. The ones that tend to make the news are the big ones that entail significant changes. It is hard to keep up to date on all the changes, but there are a few ways you can investigate and learn what new algorithm changes are coming out. A simple way is to Google “search results algorithm updates” or similar terms. There will be pages that come up that will list the most recent changes. There are also plenty of authoritative SEO websites and blogs such as Moz and Search Engine Land that are always quick to offer insights on major changes to Google’s search algorithms.
Hey Sarah
thanks for sharing your insights. I think mobile and voice search will dominate in 2018. What do you think, how AI will affect the SEO industry in 2018 and beyond?
Hi Charlie, I think AI will greatly change the way SEO is done. The introduction of Google’s RankBrain is the beginning of humanizing SEO. No longer will SEOers carry out SEO tactics to fit into and satisfy a mechanical, distant, impersonal robot. Going forward, Google will continue to emphasize AI and make search engines more humanistic. In the future, SEOers will need to write more for the web user, which the search engines will begin to mimic.
The crackdown on spam, excessive links and keywords and dirty link building techniques will continue to be punished harshly. SEOers will need to be creative in how they write content. The interest and quality of web content will grow in importance and become an even greater search rank determinant.
yes Sarah I will agree with you , But AI is an artificial thing , so as we created it , we can develop our manual approach more effective than it.
Hi Surajbaanu, yes, artificial intelligence will enhance how we manually do things when it comes to SEO. While machine thinking will be able to do monotonous, repetitive tasks more efficiently and be able to quickly come up with information, machines can’t feel or think like humans can. Humans, not AI robots will be the ones entering search queries and while Google robots can get sophisticated at ranking search results based on things like keywords, the intent of the user will become an even more important ranking factor, something that AI machines can’t do.
Great article. SEO helps to get a brand recognition in search engine by getting ranking of a business websites at the same time it improves the traffic of a website.
Thanks Andrea. Glad you found the article helpful.
What is the effect of Machine Learning and AI in SEO in 2018?
Hi David, that’s a good question. Google has already begun tinkering with AI in its search engines. The goal of Google’s algorithm updates is to give the web user a more enjoyable web search experience. Using AI and more semantic search engines, how SEO is conducted will change. It won’t any longer be geared toward exactly matching keywords or phrases, but instead it will be based more on the user’s intent behind their search query.
Sarah, our industry is so thrilling that it is a constant change. 2018 won’t be any different. When it comes about SERP getting personal, what would you say about tracking our website separately: mobile, local, nationwide and so one?
Does slower website speed affect ranking?
It is a ranking factor now so it is a best practice to speed up your site if at all possible. Keep in mind that it is one of hundreds of ranking factors so it may not do much for your rankings to go from a decent speed to a little bit better speed given all the other factors at play. But for sure, if your site loads slow, you need to get it fixed.
Yes, now website speed is also a ranking factor.
Hi Sarah,
With regards to “the rise of HTTPS” as a novice administrator I am concerned with duplicate content. In late November I enabled the free service of SSL certificate on our hosting portal. That allowed my site to be accessed as https://example.com and the original http://example.com
When I recently did a domain authority check my DA dropped several points. I have been manually adding links over the past few months and had a citation service done too. In addition to the https:// and http:// site url potential problems my site pages could also be accessed with and without the forward slash.
IE: https://example.com/page1/
or https://example.com/page1 will be redirected to the above url with the /.
I have since cancelled the ssl certificate as to eliminate the potential duplicate pages that could cause penalties and divided juice.
Basically it would be super helpful to have detailed article on just the url structures and what to watch out for since there are so many combinations today.
Hi Bill, thanks for the post topic suggestion. URL structure issues around duplicate content is a common problem that comes from creating a https:// versions of webpages. There are a few things you can do to resolve the duplicate page issues you’re experiencing. The first is creating 301 redirects. This will involve some development work on your server. In essence, you place a 301 redirect on the duplicate page and link it back to the original page. 301 redirects redirect Google search engines to crawl the original webpage instead of crawling both pages. Similarly, you can also insert a “rel=canonical” tag into the heading HTML tag of each page you don’t want Google to index. This is less labor intensive than a 301 redirect, but it tells Google robots the same thing: these pages are duplicates, don’t crawl or index them. A third option is to insert a content=”noindex,follow” meta robot tag into the HTML of pages you don’t want Google to index.
Thanks for sharing the article Sarah. Machine learning will spell the end of traditional search algorithm updates. We’ll see a greater influence of machine learning over typical search results.
Thanks Maria. Machine learning will (and has) changed Google’s search results algorithm. With AI, the days of purely ranking for keywords are over. I think Google will continue to roll out algorithms with continued emphasis on machine learning to produce a better search experience for the user.
Hello Sarah,
All trends explained by you will be key to success in 2018 especially featured snippets, voice search and mobile marketing. But along with improving the visibility, authority is equally important to increase. Thus link earning techniques such as guest posting, broken link building, link building through relationship, infographic submissions will gain huge popularity in 2018.
Thanks Shruti. With much more information online, it is becoming more important for websites to be authoritative and trustworthy. Relationship-building through the tactics you mentioned will be an increasingly important way for brands to build their authority and credibility online.
great article, in the middle of updating our site to focus more on voice search, some faqs centered around our product offering seems a decent first step, do you have any other tips to help?
Hi Mark, glad you enjoyed the article. Yes, centering around faqs about your products are a good first step. When it comes to voice search, it helps to be in the shoes of the web user. What words would they use in a voice search and what questions would they ask? Insert some of your targeted keywords as well as location information. For example, if your business did piano repair, you’d want to rank for voice search queries such as inexpensive piano repair in X city. People are less likely to search for just piano repair. The goal is to not only get people to click to your website, but you want to get the attention of serious shoppers who know specifically what they want and are looking for. Go through your products and ask why people would be searching for your product and target those who are specifically looking for what your products provide.
Hey, your article is great.
As SEO now being a compulsion to every online business, people continuously looking forward to develop the tools and plugins to make some automation in SEO. Do you think that will replace SEOers work in coming years?
Hi App-Tech, that is a great question. Computers, robots and automation are seen as a possible threat to many jobs. There are many automation tools and plugin in the SEO industry that has surely made it easier and possible for those who aren’t familiar with SEO to implement SEO for their businesses. I think that more and more tools and plugins will come on the scene in the future and come close to replacing the work of SEOers. However, I believe that no number of tools and plugins can replace an SEOer. Google will continue to humanize the online search experience and automated technology will not completely be able to mesh with that. In the future, there will need to be a human element, which will only be found in an SEOer and not in automated tools and plugins.
Great content thank you.
I still think backlinks play an important factor esp the same Anchor text.
Hi Yash, glad you enjoyed the post. While using backlinks is still recommended, one should rely solely on them for better page rank. With Google moving more and more towards providing web users, not its robots, a better web browsing experience, more emphasis will be put on the quality of a page’s content, not on its links. Backlinks to authoritative sources to backup content, however, can help your page rank somewhat as long as the information is valuable to the reader.
Nice write-up, Sarah!
Voice search matters a lot for future and it is good to optimize for voice.
Do you have an elaborated article for voice search?
Hi Vish, thanks. I’m glad you liked the article. I wrote an article in February about semantic search that goes into more depth concerning voice search. It can be found here: https://bit.ly/2FB8vPR. As voice search continues to gain momentum and change the way search is conducted, I’m sure more articles on it will be written.
Backlink building has been around for some time now but it seems very few people fully utilize its power. I do agree that it is more important now than years past. This is similar to optimizing for mobile, it seems not many people are taking this seriously. It is worth investing money into your site if it means you will be left with a fast and responsive outline for clients or customers to browse on.
Hi Mike, glad you enjoyed the post. Yes, it’s surprising how undervalued baclinking and optimizing for mobile are. When these two are fully employed, one will generate a better user experience and improve the effectiveness of their SEO strategy.
Certainly seems that you have covered many of the main points that most internet marketing and SEO companies will be focused on for months to come. User activity seems to be playing a larger role, as does consistent modest publishing versus old style link campaigns.
Hi Media Saga, glad you enjoyed the article. Backlinks and great content will continue to play larger roles in getting ranked in SERPs. However, there is less of a focus on keywords and more on building trusting relationships with web users, web user search query intent and page authority (backlinks).
Liked this content very much also the point about voice search being more real.
Hi Abhishek, glad you liked the post and found it useful.
I was very interested in this comment;
“Latent Semantic Indexing also enables Google to determine whether the content on a website is “comprehensive” and flows well.”
So how does this relate to eCommerce websites with myriads of pages listing products with what may appear as scanty details (how many ways can you describe a pendant?) – does Google take into consideration that an eCommerce site is likely to have ‘thin’ content by comparison to an information site or blog? It is always a concern for webmasters of eCommerce sites, producing ‘quality content’.
cheers, Mike
Hi Mike, thanks for the great question. Writing substantial, high-quality content for an e-commerce website that has many products can be tricky and time-consuming. Some great articles on this topic include those by Kissmetrics, Search Engine Land, Ahrefs, and Backlinko.
Regardless of whether your site is a blog or an e-commerce, content is important. A good first step is to do keyword research using Google Analytics. Long-tailed, specific keywords tend to do better than short, broad ones. Long-tailed ones are also less competitive. Once you’ve identified the most promising keywords, look at your top-performing or most popular products and start by writing well-optimized content for those first. Insert the keywords into the product descriptions, the product page URL and in the alt text of the product image.
If your page hundreds or thousands of products, like your might possibly have, it will be extremely difficult to write quality, substantial, unique content for each item. Instead, insert keywords and perform an SEO overhaul on the overarching category pages.
Hope this helps in getting you started. Cheers to your business’ success.
Hi Sarah, thanks for such a great article! SEO is very important for any business site, of course. Now many optimizers should change their tactics in a root and start almost from scratch due to recent news from Google about mobile-first indexing. But surely content and eye-catching design will continue to be of vital importance.
Hi Christina, glad you liked the article. Yes, Google is always changing its algorithm to make it more about the experience of the web user, not the search engines. With more web searches done on a smartphone than on a desktop compute, it makes sense that Google is pushing the mobile-first indexing. Good-quality, substantial content has always been an effective and safe SEO tactic that has been rewarded by Google.
Hi, thanks for a wonderful article! You have shared great comprehensive list of tips. of course, Backlinks and great content will continue to play larger roles in getting ranked in SERPs.
Hi Visiit, glad you enjoyed the article. Yes, I agree that Google will put more weight and emphasis on good content and high-quality backlinks.
Google’s head of search spam Matt Cuts has announced that Google is going to implement a version of site speed ranking factor. Matt mentioned a tool at Google to obseve the speed of mobile websites. Web sites that load really slowly will see a demotion of the search results. I assume mobile sites have to be even faster than the outlier for the deskop outlier speed number.
Hi Yooker, having a website load fast has always been a must. Google first tied page load speed to rankings in 2010 and the quote you mentioned in your comment from Matt was made in 2013, which reiterated that webpages that load quick will see higher search result rankings. Aside from having a website load fast for the sake of search engines, a fast site will also attract and retain more web users. It has been long known that web users are busy and more of them are using the web on the go. They don’t have the time or the patience to wait for a slow website to load.
It’s really great article, I want to know that, apart this topics, is their any way to get traffic to website, please tell me, I want to know that
Thank you
Hi Venkatesh, I’m glad you liked the article and found it useful. The ideas mentioned are great places to start increasing the traffic to your website. The web, along with Google and its algorithms are constantly changing. Staying up on what ranking factors Google decides to emphasize is a great way to help you make necessary adjustments to your website. I also recommend that you dedicate yourself to producing interesting, useful content that your website visitors will find valuable. Don’t try and do SEO just for search engines. Search engines are getting more sophisticated and can now do search queries that mimic voice search.
Hi, Thanks for a published awesome article and I just want to know how the anchor text played a vital role of backlinking in current seo trends.
Thank for sharing amazing post. I think mobile and voice search will dominate in 2018. i am little bit confused about the anchor text. some seo expert says that you should use the keyword as anchor text. Do you have any ideas regarding anchor text?
Hi Maya, I’m glad you found the post useful and thanks for sharing it. Your question is a good one. Anchor text is an important part of any linking strategy. There are many different types of anchor texts one can use (Branded, exact match keyword, partial match keyword, naked URL, page or blog post title, general anchor text, just to name a few). General anchor texts are the boring “click here,” “read more,” and the like. These aren’t ideal as webpage visitors want to know what the page is about to see if they want to click on the link. The overuse of exact match and partial match keyword anchor texts aren’t recommended either as too many mentions of the keywords can draw a red flag from Google as keyword stuffing. In many instances, it is great to use the keyword in the anchor text; just be sure to use the keyword sparingly throughout the webpage content. There is also a time and place for other types of anchor text as well. I would recommend trying the partial or exact match keyword anchor text with one or two other types of anchor text (depending on how long the content is) and experiment to find the best combination for your website.
I like how you cut through all the fluff and perfectly summed up the factors that matter most. I’d like to lay emphasis on relevance with googles new announcement of rank brain (googles AI that understands the meaning behind and the semantics of the words that you use in your content) to gauge how relevant your content is. With that said, linkless back links would come second followed by mobile optimization and voice search. Keep posting and cheers!
Lots of great insight here. Your article released the information about how organizations should brand themselves in a world increasingly dominated by voice search. Google has officially announced their “Mobile First Indexing” update and it’s necessary to optimize websites for mobile. Here, Glorywebs follow the update for lightning fast for better user experience and to stay ahead in the competition. Unfortunately, yes content quality and content marketing is the way to go this year.
Hi Glorywebs, I’m glad you found the post interesting and useful and that your company is utilizing mobile optimization. It makes sense that Google has announced the “Mobile First Indexing” as more and more people are browsing the Internet while they are out and about on their smartphones. Because smartphones are mobile and web browsing on them can be done anywhere at anytime, mobile browsing is quickly eclipsing desktop search. Great quality content goes hand in hand with “Mobile First Indexing” in the sense that the content will give your website better rankings while the mobile optimization of the website will heighten user experience which together increases the chance of conversions. I highly encourage your company to invest in consistently producing great content.
Thank You for Sharing this information
Digital Marketing and SEO are the most trending topics across the globe and when a things goes trending many other new and trending things get connects with it. Like AMP, Voice Search, AI and Mobile friendly website are the preferred and trending part of SEO now. So, keep an eye on these new SEO Trends.
Hi Udit, glad you enjoyed the post and found it useful. I agree that there are many areas of digital marketing and SEO that are constantly changing. A good SEOer and digital marketer will always be aware of and putting into practice the latest trends. In the near future, all the things you mentioned like AMP, AI, voice search and mobile responsive websites will come to the forefront and become more commonly used.
Hey Sarah Snider ,
awesome SEO article. It’s been a while that I actually read an article about SEO to the end. I never really thought about “strategic commenting”, but it sounds like it’s worths it.
Hi Avlyn, thanks and I’m glad that you enjoyed the post. Strategic commenting is something worth looking into.
I think the “VOICE SEARCH” will change the game in coming years, since the voice searches are increasing day by day and voice results show only top 5 results this game is going to be changes soon!!
User will soon stop searching for keywords and rather long tail questions and this will change the SEO game for ever !!
Hi Quibus, thanks for your thoughts and observations. Yes, I agree that voice search will continually grow over the next few years and become the main way people conduct their web searches. With voice search, users aren’t any longer going to search based on one or two keywords but will find it easier to ask long-tailed keywords or complete sentences. This will no doubt change the SEO game.
Hi Sarah,
Two key points stood out for me. Voice search and Linkless backlinks. With more traffic coming from Mobile devices, SEO has to adapt to this. This comes handy for Local SEO. Also have a go on question based queries within your content.
Hi Ben, glad you liked the post and found it useful. Yes, question-based, voice search queries will only increase as the use of smartphones will become an even more dominant medium through which people conduct a search.