Five SEO Trends to Watch Out for This Year

As an online business owner, it is inevitable that you have to employ and make good use of Search Engine Optimization. Optimum utilization of SEO increases the visibility of a website on search engines like Google or Bing.

To come up with a good internet marketing strategy, it is essential that you as an SEO manager or business owner, keep up-to-date on SEO trends to remain on top of the competition and maximize profit.

What are the SEO trends you need to watch for this year?

They are:

• Voice Search Optimization
• Mobile First Indexing
• Influencer Marketing
• Blockchain for SEO
• Targeted Content Creation

Let’s take a brief look at what these trends are and why they are trending.

Voice Search Optimization

By 2020, at least 30% of all online queries will be made through speech. As the internet grows exponentially and technology with it, users are allured by the idea of making queries through speech as opposed to typing.

Voice search allows users to say a command to a device and getting feedback almost immediately. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana already offer such services.

As of January 2018, there were one billion voice searches every month; this gives an idea of how well a business or website can rank if it capitalizes on this SEO trend. Voice search e-commerce alone generated $1.8 in Amazon revenue, and that figure is expected to rise to $40 billion by 2022.

Mobile First Indexing

Having a good grip on mobile SEO has never been more important. In times past, the desktop version of a website was used by Google’s index. Today, websites are optimized based on the user experience provided on mobile devices. Unsurprisingly, if a website has both mobile and desktop variants, the mobile variant gets indexed.

It’s common knowledge that people use mobile devices more than desktop devices when browsing the web. So, if you do not have a mobile variant of your website with great UX, Google will index content that is unsuitable to mobile users.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a form of e-commerce which sets its focus on influential people to pivot customers to a business on social media rather than seek out the target market directly.

In a business niche filled with competition, having someone with influence vouch for one’s products or services goes a very long way in getting ahead of the competition. The strategy typically involves connecting with an influencer with a massive number of followers, getting them to approve/vouch for your product by promoting the product or service on their social media pages.

Influencers generally use Instagram and Twitter, two heavily-used social media platforms that can boost a company’s fortunes if optimized well.

Blockchain for SEO

Many would wonder how a decentralized ledger system that can record, verify and store transactions is anyway related to Search Engine Optimization.

The truth is that blockchain is applicable in areas where verifiability and accountability of records are paramount.

An example can be seen in the use of blockchain to reduce Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising fraud. In online advertising, PPC is the standard and just a minute number of authorities maintain it; chief of which are Google and Facebook. The Google Display Network manages on-site PPCs by Google and makes matches between websites and advertisers.

Verifying these websites to avoid fraud is paramount because losses suffered by advertisers to fraud are in billions of dollars.

Using blockchain will enable websites and advertisers to communicate directly without authorities.

The use of smart contracts, verification and ultra-secure storage of contracts, user verification for fraud elimination will give an assurance that the business is only paying for true click-through completed by humans and not bots.

The implication of this is more traffic, time on page, conversions and other metrics that will increase SEO.

Targeted Content Creation

The more time users spend on a website, the better it is for the online business. Most people are of the school of thought that websites are ranked based on the length of the content found on the page, but that’s wrong.

What generates traffic and by extension, more revenue, for websites is how engaging their content is and how users can relate with them; the quantity of content matters but not as much as its quality.

Content that is not just long but also profoundly engaging is one of the ways of having your site ranked highly on search engines. Sites like Quora, Reddit, Business Insider use this SEO technique a lot to generate traffic and ranking.

Conclusion

While we have mentioned just a few SEO trends, there are more that will determine the direction of online businesses in the coming years.

Other SEO trends like Video optimization, Artificial Intelligence for SEO, flawless user experience and quality content development to mention a few are also significant trends to capitalize on.

It is imperative for website administrators to be aware of these trends and use them to their advantage to retain high rankings on search engines.