Essential SEO Trends To Look Out In 2018

Essential SEO Trends To Look Out In 2018
The world of technology is constantly undergoing change and so are the approaches and methods of SEO. The once foolproof methods of landing on top of the searches are increasingly becoming redundant and new practices are taking their place. The Google algorithm is also undergoing constant changes with multiple modifications brought in one month. As an online business, if one fails to keep up with the changing scenarios of SEO, the obvious result of that is the page slipping down from the top ranks of the search engines.

The year 2017 brought in the prominence of accelerated mobile pages, the rise of hypertext transfer protocols, proactive use of backlinks, and so on. While some of these trends have passed on to 2018, you can also expect to see the rise of many new trends this year. Here is a brief rundown on the top SEO trends that you need to watch out for in 2018.

Increased SERP features
The aim of any SEO professional is to make a website reach the top spot on Google in order to maintain a high volume of traffic. However, with the changing search engine features, the ranking may no longer be enough to get the desired traffic. Now, when you go through the results page, you will see that it is loaded with videos, social media links, widgets, ads, and more. Keywords still remain an important determinant but there are multiple offsite elements to think about as well. The popular search engine features, at present, include news block, featured snippets, AdWords, tweets, site links, and shopping results. You need to incorporate these features and then monitor your rank for all of these using tools such as Rank Tracker.

Careful restricting of rich snippets

Both regular and rich snippets include a URL, title, and Meta description. However, the rich snippets differ in the fact that they have condensed titles having “|” in place of dash (-). Your
way of structuring the data is important is the way of displaying the information on the search engines. The difference in format might be insignificant but it has been noted that the search results that have rich snippets get more clicks which leads to an increase in potential sales. You need to get the rich snippets in proper structure and format. There are several brand websites like Superdry India or schema.org that you can check to get further updates on how to structure the snippets.

Page speed

Pace seems to be the buzzword for the netizens today who want the information at the speed of lightning. When the page does not load within five seconds, an individual is most likely to close the page and log on to other websites to find the answers to his questions. Thus, it is a given that if your page is slow, your traffic is bound to suffer. Speed of a page is associated with enhanced user experience and that is a must for your page to land on the top searches. If you are wondering what should be the right speed, take Google’s recommendation of three seconds or less. You can use PageSpeed Insights on Google to see how the speed of your page holds up.

Emphasis on page relevance

Google is always striving to provide an enhanced browsing experience to the users. It not only considers which websites are safe but also takes into account the most relevant website according to a search query. Latent Semantic Indexing is Google’s way of assessing the relevance of the content. Thus, Google will crawl to your page to check the relevancy of the content according to the query. You can begin by researching the content of the top pages in your industry to get an idea about the content, keywords, and the page layout of their websites. You can also avail the free trails that are offered by various website auditors to check the relevance of your page.

Voice search picking up the pace

Voice search will continue to rule the trends of SEO in 2018. The convenience of speaking is preferred over typing by most consumers at present. This is because they get the results faster and the queries are far more detailed. The advancement of voice recognition software has ensured the customers can trust it to make sense of their normal way of speaking. The increasing details of the search queries as enabled by voice searches means that you will have to look beyond using simple phrases and keywords to rank higher. The focus needs to be more on the phrases and terms that people can naturally say. People do not speak as they type and the SEO strategies need to be built keeping that in mind.

The potential of link-less backlinks
Backlinks have been the life and breath of SEO for years. Using backlinks to improve the position of a page in the eyes of Google was something that was being constantly abused by many pages. This led Google to come up with the Penguin algorithm in 2012. Due to all of these changes, a simple link is no longer going to make the cut for the websites. The search engines have the ability to associate any mention of institutions, brands, organizations, and people without having to link with the corresponding pages. Links are going to carry some importance but you also need to place emphasis on the other content around that hyperlinked text. SEO is an ever-evolving industry and you can expect more changes to come forth as the years roll by and Google brings in more changes to its algorithms. The surest thing that you can do is improved the content of your page and make the page easy to load and navigate.