SEO in 2018
With 2017 almost at an end, it’s time to turn our attention to 2018 and what the future holds for SEO.
We know it’s important to have a multi-faceted approach to your digital strategy; establish which avenues you are going to work in and make sure that they work together cohesively to deliver results.
SEO more than any other digital strategy is constantly changing and evolving. With new technologies, ideas and techniques to consider we look ahead at what we think will dominate in 2018.
Voice
How users use the internet is changing, increasingly users are using voice search or voice assistants like Alexia or Siri to find the information they want changing the way users communicate with search engines.
According to Google over 20% of queries are carried out using voice search with a real focus on “how to” questions. It’s important to consider how you can tailor your content to be answer driven, make sure that you can help the end user find what they are looking for.
People speak and type differently, so your strategy needs to include both traditional search terms but also conversation terms and sentences.
Mobile First
Mobile always seems to be on the agenda and with Google switching to a mobile-first index in the not too distant future, now more than ever it is vital that your website performs on mobiles. Responsive websites are commonplace these days and if you are not giving your end user a positive experience on mobile your rankings can suffer.
With over 60% of searches now on mobile do you really want to isolate the majority of your audience by having a poorly designed or functioning website?
User Experience
Attention needs to be paid to the user experience of a site. Users want to be able to find out the information they need quickly, so we have to think about page speed and load time; techniques such as above the fold rendering, browser caching, minification and image optimisation can all help your sites overall performance.
With Google placing a high level of importance on user experience, and more users moving away from desktop it is vital that your website performs well.
Ensuring your site offers good UX will help not only with rankings, it can increase repeat visits and increase brand awareness.
Content & User Intent
As always quality content is important, but you need to turn your attention to user intent and try to create content that answers or addresses a specific user question.
With search results showing more content to its users via answer boxes, knowledge panels and featured snippets. Think about the content you create, is it useful? Does is answer a question? Creating content and content strategies that align with predictive and suggestive search can help you gain a competitive edge.
Featured Snippets
The popularity of featured snippets has grown year on year and increased the competition to try and feature in position 0.
Recent changes to the Google algorithm now means a selection of featured snippets will also include more images and suggestion boxes giving even more prime real estate in the SERPs to featured snippets.
To be able to land a featured snippet top spot you need to create valuable content which answer the questions users are asking. Build your content in ways that will provide a better answer to your users, tables, lists, graphs are all ways you can structure your information.
In Summary
The ever changing world of SEO means we, as SEOs, have to adapt and have an agile approach with our digital strategies. Traditional tactics as backlinks, focus keywords, on-page optimisation are all still at the core of SEO and will continue to be important, however our attention needs to turn to new techniques; focus on voice search, user experience and mobile optimisation to help deliver better results to the end user.
Need help with SEO? Why not get in touch and see how we can help you!