SEO Trends That Will Dominate 2018

In online marketing, few strategies are as competitive or as quickly evolving as search engine optimization (SEO). Marked by a history of algorithm updates, new technologies, and new techniques to win real estate at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), most SEO experts (like me) chomp at the bit to predict or learn the latest trends that will shape our businesses’ digital futures.

Survival of the fastest
Speed is big. Not only is it a ranking signal; it’s a major UX factor. UX, in turn, impacts rankings. It’s a loop of sorts!
But how fast is fast, exactly? Google expects pages to load in under three seconds.

Video and image search will vastly improve.

Gradually, our online interactions have evolved to become more visual. Over the past few years, faster internet speeds, more visual-friendly social media platforms, and a general public desire to engage with more images and videos has led to a surge in visual online interactions. Accordingly, I think we’ll see some changes to how Google and other search engines treat images and videos in an online environment.

User-experience optimization

Many big brands including Amazon are seen to redesigning their websites at regular interval to ensure they can respond to their user’s ever-changing needs.

Create user-specific content
Test readability for different devices
Offer visual-oriented layout
Effective link build building
Local-specific landing pages
Allow social share buttons

The Knowledge Graph will dominate.

For a few years now, Google has been steadily increasing the frequency and specificity of featured snippets—the concise answers to questions users pose in their search queries. I think this event could portend the rise and eventual dominance of Google’s Knowledge Graph, replacing a good chunk of the space currently occupied by featured snippets in an effort to provide users with even better, more consistent answers.

‘Linkless’ backlinks

For years, links have been the trust signal for search engines — one that SEOs spent the most time on optimizing (and often manipulating). But times are changing, and linkless mentions may be becoming an off-page signal of equal weight

Individual customization

It will change the way many rankings are calculated. Google has been pushing the development of more personalized search results for the better part of a decade, relying on individual search histories, browser cookies, and other information to give better, more customized SERPs for individuals

SEO will expand beyond Google and Bing.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen an increased trend of companies competing for ranking space outside Google. Google still dominates the search engine sphere, remaining the most popular search platform by far, but third-parties like Yelp and Amazon, as well as digital assistants like Siri have stepped in to become relevant search engines in their own right.

Mobile is unignorably big

Over half of Google searches coming from mobile devices, the impending mobile-first index, and mobile-friendliness being a ranking factor, you simply can’t afford to ignore mobile SEO anymore