Upping Your SEO Game In 2018
With every New Year that comes, we tend to evaluate the year that has passed, and look forward to the year ahead. When it comes to SEO, this is something you should definitely be doing. Whether you hire a website optimisation consultant or handle your SEO in-house, you need to adapt your strategy to ensure you’re including the trends that are set to dominate the industry in 2018.
The way in which many rankings are calculated will change due to individual customisation. Google has been pushing for more personalised search results to be developed for quite some time now. The search engine relies on a plethora of information, such as browser cookies and search histories, to provide better and more customised SERPs for users. With greater technological sophistication, the increased convenience of search, and the advent of smart speakers, the personalisation factor is guaranteed to play a massive role in 2018. You will need to adapt your search engine optimisation strategy to accommodate this. This is where hiring a website optimisation consultant comes highly advised, as this level of personalisation makes it even more challenging to predict what your business will rank for and how it will rank. We are also expecting to see a huge increase in voice searches due to the rise in sales of smart speakers. This is going to have a drastic impact on the kinds of queries we say, and it could reshape the way companies think about SERPs, as they may not always be visual going forward.
Not only will voice search make waves in the industry, but also we’re going to see improvements with regards to both image and video search. Over the past few years, online interactions have gradually become more visual. Visual online interactions have surged due to a public desire to interact with more videos and images, as well as more visual-friendly social media platforms and faster Internet speeds. With this in mind, it is only natural that search engines are going to change the way they treat videos and images in an online environment, and this is something that website optimisation agencies are going to need to respond to. We are also going to see search engine optimisation services expand beyond Google and Bing in 2018. Companies will start competing more for ranking space outside of Google. Of course, the search engine giant is still going to dominate this sphere, and it is unlikely that anyone will knock Google off the top spot, but third parties like Amazon and Yelp are receiving increased attention. Aside from this, other trends to look out for include hyper-local results finally taking off and the traditional search algorithm updates coming to an end due to machine learning.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding regarding the SEO trends that are going to dominate in 2018. If you’re unsure regarding the trends that apply to your business and industry, the best thing to do is contact a website optimisation consultant who can ensure your SEO strategy is perfected for the year ahead.
