We’re well into 2018 and SEO is more important than ever. As website owners continue to compete for Google’s top spots, trends will become more prominent. The key to staying ahead of your competition is staying ahead of the latest trends, and we have the four most important ones below.
1. Voice Search Will Increase
As more people use their voice features on their smartphones and embrace technology like Google Home and Amazon Echo, we’ll see a sharp increase in voice searches. As voice technology grows in its accuracy, we’ll expect to see more people using it. This means that long-tail keyword usage will rise and you can create content that gets broken down into shorter sections for more precise searches.
2. Featured Snippet Content Is on the Rise
A featured snippet is the information that you get when you use voice technology to search. Over the years, this has seen a rapid increase to the point that nearly 30% of voice searches performed on Google bring back instant answers as a featured snippet. This is pushing content creators to focus on different content structures like questions and answers because this gives long-tailed searches short, concise snippet answers.
3. Guest Posting May Violate Google’s Guidelines on Link Schemes
Google released a statement in 2017 effectively warning webmasters that using very large-scale tactics for link-building goes directly against Google’s guidelines. Google warned that it could ‘take action’ on sites that continued to practice this marketing tactic. Before you place a guest post, you may want to ask yourself if the content helps your users. If the answer is no, it’s most likely spammy or an example of manipulative guest posting.
4. Optimising Your Site for Intent
Google has worked a lot over the past year to seamlessly incorporate more artificial intelligence into its search algorithm. The goal with this is to combine several factors, including historical data, intent, and present context to bring back the most personalised and relevant answers to the searches. So, your keyword intent is an extremely important SEO factor in ranking high with Google.
2018 will likely see evolving SEO rules, regulation, and content. We may also see Google changing and prioritising new things to bring a more seamless and fast user experience. Keeping up-to-date on these emerging trends is key.
