What is SEO?
Known as Search Engine Optimization, what it does for your website/blog is it optimizes it and improves your search engine ranking. It also improves the quality of your website/blog by making it easier to navigate and more user-friendly.
How does it work?
Any search engine (like Google) has a crawler, and this goes out and searches information about all the content they can find on the internet, it then brings it back to the search engine to build an index.That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
Why is it important?
If you don’t optimize your website for search engines, you risk losing potential customers to your competitors because their websites/blogs appear higher in search engine results than yours!
What are the SEO trends one can expect this year?
It is believed that SEO’s role today is more than just keywords backlinks and metadata optimization. It’s more than just content. It’s the assurance of frictionless user experience while delivering the right information at the right time—and promptly.
Some trends to look out for this year are:
Increased SERP (Search engine research page) features
The priority of any SEO Specialist is to maintain a high volume of traffic, and ideally, this would be the result of reaching the top spot on a search engine results page.However, today, achieving this #1 ranking may no longer be enough to get the desired traffic.
While keyword and keyphrase optimization are still important, there are other offsite elements to consider, like AdWords, news block, featured snippets, local packs, reviews, tweets, video, image pack, shopping results and site links just to name a few. There are also tools like Rank tracker, that can help you keep track of your ranking and also show you possible keywords that are holding back potential traffic.
Expanding the Knowledge Panel
Google has announced three new search updates around featured snippets, knowledge panel information and suggestions for related topics. According to a post on Google’s The Keyword blog, a selection of featured snippets will now include more images and related search suggestions within the box displaying the featured snippet content. It is also expanding the information displayed in the Knowledge Panel to include related content.
Increased use of voice search and featured snippets.
Did you know one in five mobile search queries currently comes from voice search? As voice search grows, we can expect to see an increase in featured snippets too. In fact, a recent study shows that featured snippets are on the rise, appearing for roughly 30 percent of the 1.4 million queries. If this trend continues, featured snippets may even begin to rival the top organic listing as the place to be if you want to get noticed.
Mobile first index
With the rise of voice search, over half of Google searches coming from mobile devices, the impending mobile-first index, and mobile-friendliness being a ranking factor, you just can’t afford to ignore mobile SEO anymore.
Machine learning and AI
It’s now been over two years since we were first introduced to RankBrain, Google’s machine-learning AI system which helps to process its search results. Since its introduction, it’s gone from handling 15 percent of search queries to all of them.As Google continues to embrace AI and incorporate more of it into their search algorithms, we can expect search results to start behaving in less predictable ways.
These are the top SEO trends to look out for in 2018 – keep them in mind if you want to get the most out of your online business. Check out more informative posts on the Tenovia blog!