What’s New for SEO in 2018? 4 Trends to Look For

As you’re closing up your books and are preparing for another year, be sure to include reviewing new trends to SEO on your “to-do” list. SEO and digital marketing will continue to progress and staying current with these new, ever-evolving trends is one of the best ways to stay ahead of the game. Let us here at The Finance Marketing Group keep you up-to-date on the latest trends so you can stay current. Here’s a look at 4 new SEO trends in 2018.

UX

In regards to SEO, it’s all about the user experience and this is for good reason. When UX is on par, this creates a positive domino effect by resulting in higher user engagement, higher conversion rate and lead generation, and more organic reach to those A+ user friendly pages, thus improving SEO. Google is improving UX for 2018 in the following ways:

1. Monitoring site’s navigation structure, readability, and speed: This is done through computing visitor’s browsing habits and determining based off of this data where the issue is. So if a visitor stayed on a page for 23.456789 seconds, then this is a strong indicator that the content was disengaging, creating a poor UX.
2. Providing a strong user experience across all devices: Mobile, tablets, desktops, you name it. Whatever device you are using, Google wants to ensure your experience is seamless across all accounts.
3. The switch to personalized and relevant experiences: This means more focus on engaged audiences, their demographics and what led them on their digital journey to your page. This is key in reaching an audience that is most likely to lead to a conversion, and from your audiences perspective, being led to the right product or service that they are searching for. Win, win.

Mobile, mobile, mobile

It’s becoming more clear that mobile is the way of the future. According to BrightEdge, 57% of web traffic is from mobile devices. What does this mean for Google? It means that it’s not enough to just make websites and landing pages mobile-friendly, it’s time to put mobile-first. Enter Google’s plan to launch mobile-first index.

What’s important to understand here is that there is a big difference between the way that keywords rank on desktop vs mobile. Therefore, the application of mobile-first content is necessary so that it can appear in mobile search.

Another major impact- Local SEO. There is a big opportunity for businesses here because mobile users will be searching for information while they are on the go. This means that these businesses need to provide the best result for each hypothetical question in the best possible way. It’s a contextual thing.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is another focus in the mobile-first index. Have you ever became impatient waiting for a page to load on your phone? If you’re like most people, you’ll simply move on to the next search. In order to accelerate this extremely important user experience, Google developed AMP which, compared to traditional mobile pages, is 4 times faster. Just how much of an impact does this have? According to Chartbeat, this provides a 35% improvement in engagement time.

Quick Answers & Featured Snippits

When the goal of landing in that #1 spot in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) is pretty much that of every business, then it’s time to up your competitive game. Featured snippets has further increased this competition, with close to 30% of a test group of Google search queries using featured snippits, according to Stone Temple Consulting. This presents an opportunity to further optimize the content of a site to meet the standards of Google’s featured snippits.

Enter the Quick Answer format. This is a useful way for Google to pull the right content in the form of a featured snippet. Companies can also create content that serves as a Quick Answer through Google’s Answer Box. This is also a featured snippet that has the goal of answering a question in an enticing and appeal manner.

Google’s Answer Box follows a different structure, based around “what” or “how” and is an attempt from Google to usefully organize search results from search intent.

Can you further this optimization? Yes, by optimizing featured snippets for voice search. These are two evolving trends in the search network that can further increase the chances of appearing in that #1 spot in the SERP (cheering).

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Remember when we talked about user experience? This is a big part of that. As Google seeks to maximize personalized experience, the need for machine learning and AI is becoming increasingly apparent in order to help users find the best results in conjunction with their search and needs.

While the use of digital assistants and voice search increases, so will the need for a more personalized experience. Those who are current with these trends and implement these strategies, are in turn rewarded with heightened SEO.

What else is expected to affect the digital search environment in terms of AI? Google’s RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s extensive learning algorithm which uses machine learning to derive most relevant results. However, according to Dan Taylor, RankBrain is not something you can optimize for but the number of standard SEO practices is “now more relevant than ever”.

What can we take out of this? That we can all expect AI and machine learning development and much more innovations to come in 2018.

These are a few of the many new trends you can expect to see for SEO in 2018. Staying current with these trends and implementing them to your SEO strategies will surely keep your SEO right on top.

Interested in learning about more digital marketing trends? Check out our blog: Seven Hot Digital Marketing Trend of 2018

If you have any questions regarding SEO strategies or would like to learn more, contact mdillon@financemarketing.com We look forward to seeing you in the Search Engine!