You can expect 2018 to be another year of big changes for SEO, being a quickly evolving online marketing strategy. Just like the previous years, these new updates and/or techniques are surely going to significantly impact website owners like you.

You need to know the SEO trends in 2018 to keep your website competitive. As more businesses ramp up their SEO efforts this year, staying at the forefront of these changes and making the necessary adjustments can sustain or even improve your website’s profitability.

What Are the Important SEO Trends in 2018?

Mobile-First Indexing

As Google announced in 2015, more people are now doing searches on mobile phones than on desktops. With this shift in user behaviour, the search engine giant started rolling out initiatives to improve user experience on mobile devices. Last year, Google intensified its efforts in making mobile-friendliness and responsiveness the standard for website owners. This year, mobile-first indexing is expected to be on top of the agenda of the tech giant.

What is mobile-first indexing? Search listings on Google are now going to be based on the mobile version of the content. This is going to be standard even for desktop users. Simply put, ranking signals that affect mobile searches are now going to impact all searches.

With the expected launch of mobile-first index this year, you must see to it that your website works  well on mobile devices. Gear up your efforts to have a responsive website. Otherwise, your website’s ranking may suffer a big blow.

Personalisation

Search engine companies are working towards presenting more personalised search results for users. How? On top of the traditional ranking signals, they take into consideration the user’s interest, location and search history. With this shift, how can you continue having good traffic? The key is to have excellent content.

This trend should serve as additional motivation for you to create high-quality content that’s going to help you land on top of the organic SERP. The idea is still the same – get the user to click on your listing and give him/her a great experience. Once the user visits your site, it becomes part of the user’s history. Hence, on his/her subsequent queries, the likelihood of your site being included in the top result increases.

Additionally, as user location is taken into consideration in delivering personalised search results, you may want to invest on local SEO to make your website relevant in a particular country or location.

Voice Search

It was predicted last year that voice search would gain traction and it did. A Google report indicated that one in five mobile queries were voice searches. The report also stated that 40% of adults and 55% of teens utilise voice search each day. The numbers are expected to go higher this year, especially with the continuous rise of smart speaker sales. Furthermore, experts say that voice searches are eventually going to surpass type searches. In fact, the forecast is that, by 2020, 50% of online queries are going to be voice searches.

What does this mean for your business? You must focus on creating useful content for voice searchers. Majority of voice searches involve normal, conversational questions.  Create articles that answer the questions voice searchers will most probably ask.

Furthermore, as most results for voice searches are displayed as featured snippets, strive to get featured snippets for your site. Pay attention to how your content is structured; make sure it directly and clearly answers the question. Moreover, provide other valuable information about the query.

Want to stay on top of these SEO trends in 2018 and make your website rank higher? Please call us now at 019609023.

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