With every new year accompanying innovations, new marketing and SEO trends start to question your previous year’s bulletproof strategies.
This is why it is so important to stay up-to-date and train your mind to accept and adapt to changes.
Moreover, with Google adopting new ways to collect user data, the accuracy of the search results had never been so perfect.
Yes, you can now get more personalized, precise and timely search results; however, this has made the SEO job more challenging as well.
This is not something out of the blue.
Ever since the introduction of search engine and search engine optimization, every passing year has witnessed several changes, and the year 2018 is no different.
Experts on The Top SEO Trends
To get into the depths of this topic and know how SEO trends could affect the digital marketing industry in 2018, I sought the responses of some of the industry leaders.
A majority of respondents gave thumbs up to Mobile SEO and AMP followed by featured snippets and long tail keywords.
Many respondents also anticipated User experience, user intent, link building, knowledge graph and social media to be among the major trends to influence the SEO industry in 2018.
Here are the responses, just for you!
I’d say the biggest trend in SEO in 2018 is going to be related to
This is the year where if your site doesn’t have an amazing mobile experience across the board, it’s REALLY going to hurt.
The most important element in 2018 is page speed.
Users are ever more impatient.
If your page takes more than 2 seconds to load you are losing business.
And the search engines know this.
So, your site has to be small and fast.
Super fast hosting alone will not do the job.
With most customers on mobile data connections, you can’t possibly know the quality of their connection so page size and technical optimization is a crucial factor.
Of course, the fundamentals of search engine optimization are still important and we outline a series of tips business can follow to get the basics dialed in here.
But for 2018, ensure you are focused on site speed or you may well get left behind!
Winning SEO in 2018 will require marketers to continuing honing their focus on user intent and topical authority.
Last month, we saw Google starting to experiment with multiple featured snippets for nuanced user intents.
And last summer we noticed some experimenting with multiple featured snippets on mobile.
Google is getting better at user intent, which means our content has to get better (on every kind of device) as well.
My number one trend of SEO in 2018 is focused on mobile SEO.
Google introduced the concept of mobile-indexing first a while back when mobile users had officially surpassed desktop users.
With mobile usage not slowing down anytime soon, we should expect that Google is very likely to be placing further emphasis on mobile user experience.
Websites that are not optimized for mobile may very well be heavily devalued moving forward.
Websites that provide stellar mobile UX and are well optimized will surely be rewarded.
SEO is really heating up in terms of brands and businesses competing for backlinks using well-crafted custom content that tries to solve a certain problem that people may be searching for.
Backlinks are the name of the game right now – the more backlinks you can for your relevant keywords the higher you are going to be pushed up in the search rankings.
SEOs should focus on the right and wrong way to do this though as it is much more difficult to create good, legit content that it sounds.
I feel like this method is only gaining steam this year and will probably continue for a few more years at least – so get some writers and start making great content!
Technical SEO is going to be one of the major SEO trends in 2018.
Nailing this required advanced skills and those who can do it right will reap the benefit of Search engine traffic in 2018.
The biggest trend I see in SEO is a strong push towards optimizing for better user signals and engagement.
I’ve personally been watching Google split testing SERPs quite a bit more than previous years as they are trying to determine exactly where results should be landing on the page.
With updates such as extended length of meta descriptions, we should be seeing a much stronger focus on CTR as marketers have a greater ability to really succinctly state what their page is about and why a searcher should choose to click in.
In the last few months I’ve seen most industry chatter move from the superficial side of things and start leaning more heavily towards answering the bigger question ‘what is the users intent with the query’ and how can we best satisfy this query.
The end goal is the creation of content which completely satisfies the user’s needs and therefore results in the user not returning to the same SERP or making subsequent searches.
This is the golden age of SEO in which cheap tricks, short-term tactics and all sorts of bullshit is starting to lose its power and ability.
There are many trends that are talked about but the one I’m looking forward to most is Personalization.
Personalized search results change the whole game because it’s based on a user’s browsing history, interests, and location.
And it’s very difficult to win this game because you cannot control personalized results.
But marketers cans still manage to secure higher rankings by understanding searcher’s intent and creating content hyper-targeted to that query only.
This content should be of high-quality and should answer searcher’s question.
Valuable content is the chief SEO trend in 2018.
Bloggers are moving away from hacks, strategies and manipulate approaches littering this discipline to focus on what matters most; helping human beings.
If you help people effectively with valuable content Google treats you well.
Even if you don’t have all the details down as far as SEO nitty gritty.
CTO & Co-Founder at Capsicum Mediaworks LLP
With a shift to mobile-first indexing, the biggest SEO trend we’ll see in 2018 is the adoption of accelerated mobile pages.
With a view to improving user experience on mobile phones, Google has introduced AMP which helps optimize and improve the speed of web pages.
It also helps in faster indexing, which will help boost your search ranking and drive more traffic to your website and as such, if you want to ace the SEO game in 2018 then implementation of AMP is extremely important.
Apart from this, keywords, too, play an important role in SEO.
However, here you need to focus more on LSI search terms and phrases in order to improve visibility in the search result.
It’s almost impossible to narrow down a single trend with SEO, so I’ll mention some important things I’ve seen changing recently.
Gone are the days of just optimizing around a single keyword.
You now have to think about long-tail keywords a lot more due to the fact that people are typing in long queries.
With voice assistants becoming popular, this will only increase, as many people are now asking Google Home or Alexa to find what they are looking for.
You also have changes happening almost on a weekly basis with how “featured snippets” work.
Optimizing for these can definitely increase your traffic as you could potentially have 2 spots on page one of Google if you score one.
Technical SEO is another aspect that will never go away.
Optimizing titles for higher CTR, ensuring your on-page content is structured correctly, and frequently doing an audit of all your content is crucial.
Another thing I don’t see a lot of people mentioning is just how big of an impact social signals have on rankings.
I’ve seen stale content jump to page one after going viral on Twitter or inside of an FB group.
There’s definitely a strong correlation between the two.
As advertising costs go up, I expect SEO to become a higher priority for marketers.
That said, we’ll probably see more people trying their hand at it, more focus on targeting topics than highly competitive keywords, and more outreach to secure backlinks.
Unfortunately, I’m seeing a lot of outreach proposing low-quality, irrelevant link exchanges.
That’s a shame, because it a lot of brands may fall for it, thinking they’re helping their brand’s SEO when they’re actually hurting it.
Feature snippets will have more priority and the typical rankings will have less prominence, meaning even less clicks for the lower rankings.
This also means fewer people will be clicking away from Google’s search results, as the answer has already been displayed.
Videos will also gain more value, as well as localized search, especially when it comes to voice search and integrating with ‘smart’ products & services such as Amazon’s Alexa.
SERP features will become more prevalent
Google has consistently engineered the search results.
In 2017 and 2018, they made featured snippets appear more often.
If you are not aware of featured snippets, they are anything like these:
This was also mentioned by Cyrus Shepard during his talk in an SEO conference here in the Philippines.
The way I see it…
…Google wanted to lock the searchers on their website instead of losing the clicks and giving them out to websites who are ranking in the organic search results.
Google is already showing up the answers in the search results so why would you (as a searcher) click on a particular website for an answer when you’ve already found out the answer at Google search result?
SEO has been diverse now more than ever.
If you don’t know how to engineer your site on how to get your pages on SERP features and just solely depend on ranking in the top 10 spots of the organic, you will definitely lose those searcher clicks.
While mobile-first indexing and voice search will be hitting the headlines, I feel creating RankBrain friendly content will have a greater impact this year and beyond.
If you think on-page optimization is just targeting keywords in content, you may need a rethink.
Of course, keyword targeting still matters but as Google’s A.I. becomes more powerful, SEOs and publishers need to think more on task completion — where the task is the underlying intent of a keyword.
So there is a shift from being the best keyword optimized result, to just being the best result.
Google has been saying it for years, “write high-quality and relevant content for people, not robots”.
But 2018 may be the year when its algorithm truly rewards such advice.
I predict the biggest SEO trend in 2018 will be companies and individuals diving into video as the written content space gets more competitive.
There is still a lot of opportunities to rank in many high and low volume video keywords, while to rank for an individual piece of content you need to put much more into the creation and promotion of that content.
I think that featured snippet placements will continue to get hotter and hotter in 2018.
As it stands, right now, snippets are the new #1 position on Google.
These snippets appear at the top of search results and give searchers instant answers.
Needless to say, it’s prime SEO real estate right now.
Sites that manage to get featured don’t even have to rank #1 to be on top.
Instead, Google pulls text from your content to provide the answer and links to your page – above the number one search result.
This also ties into another hot SEO trend – voice search.
Almost everyone is asking Siri or their Android device to search for something.
Voice search results are mainly pulled from featured snippets.
Focus on getting your content in featured snippet spots early in the year.
Because voice search is getting bigger, expect featured snippet spots to get pretty competitive, too.
Here are a few ways you can do that:
I think the #1 trend for 2018 in SEO will be Google Voice.
Since the technology for Google Voice is becoming more and more popular, the voice queries have been going up tremendously.
So with that said, you need to prepare your website and your content to be “voice” friendly, with queries such as “What is the best XYZ…” or “What to do in XYZ…”, etc.
I think the biggest SEO trend in 2018 would be voice search optimization.
Being a content creator, we will have to understand the user intent when he/she performs a voice search query on Google.
Making it relevant to those search queries and optimizing the blogs to align with those search algorithms would be a big win in stay ahead of the SEO game in 2018.
AI will shape new SEO trends in 2018.
Google RankBrain algorithm is already in progress where Google is incorporating machine learning to understand various search queries, patterns, and objects to make their search engine a one-stop destination for everything.
Mobile-first is something which is on Google radar since 2016.
They are encouraging webmaster to make their site mobile-first indexed so that mobile user can access the content as quick as possible.
So this has become a must-implement-feature in 2018 to stay ahead of the SEO game.
I’m a publisher of large niche sites monetized with display ads and affiliate promotions.
Because the niches are fairly broad, I’m fortunate to have a lot of keyword opportunities (as opposed to doing SEO for a local business).
My approach to SEO in 2018 focuses on two things:
Long tail keywords and topics; and
Attracting links to unique content naturally via data-driven content and graphics.
I spend an inordinate amount of time doing keyword research looking for less competitive keywords.
I then publish quite a bit content targeting a high volume of keywords. My aim is to rank this content with no links.
I include in the content custom graphics, illustrations, charts, diagrams, and data to attract links naturally, I do this in content targeting high competition keywords as well as low competition keywords.
Over time, as I publish plenty of this content links trickle in and content advances in the SERPs.
Many emerging SEO trends could infuse big difference to future SEO strategy of businesses.
To start with, User Experience (UX) affects the search results heavily, hence requiring you to have more user-friendly web content.
Likewise, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology could make the online searches more personal, thereby tempting the businesses to include engaging content.
Moving over, since a big internet audience prefers doing mobile search nowadays, the need for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) could also take the center stage in the coming times.
To sum up, it is important to invest time in sculpting and adding value to your website so that it could keep pace with such future trends in SEO.
My biggest trend of 2018 will be how brands and companies go back to basics and begin to understand how voice search can be applied to their content, products, and services.
A lot of generic advice looks at interrogative queries, users asking “how”, “where”, “when”. While we don’t have specific voice search data in Google Search Console (yet), we know that voice queries and results are related to featured snippets, so we can apply similar theories to voice search.
This all starts with going back to basics on keyword research, and disregarding search volumes given by Google (as those numbers are AdWords data, not organic search data) and using common sense as to how people speak, and if they ask question A, what potential follow-up questions could B, C and D be?
And how competitive is your content for those?
My outlook on SEO is slanted towards local because I work exclusively with businesses with a local presence, They might be international or a shop in town, but they all have local in common.
Google Local
Google will continue to develop the Knowledge Panel (KP).This is the info Google has determined people want to see most.
This KP will continue to be developed, with new public-facing features, making the SERP almost like a home page of your website for brand searches.
The end result will be fewer visitors needing to click through to your website, but interactions with the business should stay the same or increase ( if you’re working to optimise the KP).
The review section of the KP will continue to frustrate business owners.
I don’t yet have a sense that Google yet comprehends the impact (good or bad) these reviews can have, nor the extent of fake reviews out there.
Google Organic
Google is increasingly integrating the AI into search results.
In my experience, the AI is biased for the most common use of a word or phrase.
The AI attempts to guess what is meant by a search phrase, sometimes completely ignoring clarifying words.
While this can be handy for sloppy typing or best-guess spelling, it can be a nightmare when a searcher knows specifically what they’re after and the algo keeps interpreting it incorrectly.
If you’re working on a brand or phrase not well known by the masses, the algo often treats the query as though it was a mistype.
In these situations, SEO is only part of the solution.
Branding is even more important because of the AI.
Products or services branded with a word commonly used for something entirely different can become essentially invisible online.
One of the biggest SEO trends in 2018 revolves around the featured snippet.
Or perhaps, the search engine results page (SERP) and how you can create/format content to effectively attract attention there.
Optimizing for the featured snippet is especially compelling because it’s “position zero”—above the official “position one result” and even paid ads.
Of course, once an SEO trend is identified, SEOs jump on it and it becomes harder and harder to be successful with that tactic.
So I think the lesson here is not necessarily to focus on the featured snippet (although it should definitely be a consideration) but to do what you can to stand out on the SERPs. For example:
One of the biggest trends in SEO in 2018 will be the continued expansion of the Knowledge Graph and the growth of Featured Snippets.
Google wants to provide quick and easy answers to searchers, and they’ll keep doing so by pulling relevant information from websites into their search results.
Depending on the answer, those websites pulled into the Knowledge Graph and Featured Snippets will either see an increase in clicks or a decrease.
Either way, the spot will be coveted and Content Strategists will shoot for getting their content to appear there.
Relevancy in SEO is like a never-ending tail.
After the google rank brain update, we all know that you can’t just rank a page with thousands of words and hundreds of backlinks.
Google is smart enough to identify the user’s intent behind a search query and will only show results that will solve user’s problem.
The latest algorithm update (Maccabees) on December 2017 also proves that.
Although we can’t directly attribute this update with Links or content.
Rather, I’d say, it was an update towards user experience where thin content and keyword targetting but poor UX content got the hit.
So, what to do?
I can clearly say that In 2018, Smart SEOs and even data-driven company will focus more on Searcher intent and less on keyword volume, difficulty and links metrics.
And, to help this, there will be new tools-metrics to give us a clear picture of searcher intent, user behavior and how Google ranks a page after RankBrain. (e.g. TF*IDF by Nick Eubanks)
Successful SEO in 2018 is going to depend on personalization.
The best SEO plans will integrate video (specifically, YouTube) as part of the marketing mix.
At the same time, SEOs will need to pay more attention to Long Tail Keywords.
Consumers are getting overwhelmed with content, but the video is the least saturated channel and Long Tail Keywords show the highest user intent and qualified traffic.
LTK + YouTube = $$!
I don’t think we could ever fool Google…
Even back in the day when we would stuff the footers of our home page with invisible keywords…
they knew what we were doing.
And in 2018?
They have the sharpest coding wizard working 18 hours a day to produce an algorithm that is sharper than a steak knife in a michelin starred restaurant.
So what do we do?
We have to play their game. We have to do what they want us to do…
We have to create GREAT content.
Not only because this is the best thing to do for humanity, but because Google will know… and then will reward us.
I see a couple of existing trends that will continue to dominate SEO in 2018.
1. Guest Posting – Link building will be a huge SEO practice in 2018 and beyond, as it has been for quite some time.
Guest Posting is one of those link building techniques that is very difficult for Google to combat and as a result, will remain a high-quality list building technique in 2018.
2. Writing For Your Audience – There has been a major shift in SEO from writing for the search engines (Google), to writing for your reader.
Gone are the days of specified keyword density and keyword stuffing.
The Google algorithm has gotten very good at determining the focus of your articles without relying on keywords.
I still use keywords to some degree, but they are much less important than they were in the past and this trend will continue in 2018 and beyond.
The biggest overall trend I see becoming important in 2018 is search intent.
Getting this right affects everything you do in search, and really helps with things that are becoming big in SEO right now like: voice, answer boxes and topic-based content (instead of the old-school keyword focused stuff).
So, if you are creating content right now, have a serious think about how it addressed the search you are trying to rank for, how you can get that post/page or part of it in answer boxes or similar, and how perhaps it could also address a specific (related voice search).
SEO is becoming far more complex, but also in some ways, simpler.
Keep the searcher in mind at all times (what are they looking for) and it all becomes easier :>
The biggest SEO trend in 2018 is voice search queries.
On mobile is much easier to ask a question vocally than to type it.
Thanks to Google RankBrain and Hummingbird now Google’s algorithms are capable of understanding and provide results for complex queries so the user doesn’t need to focus on identifying the right keywords to get relevant results.
Most people use voice searches when they want to find out a quick information, like the address of a restaurant, or how the weather is going to be today.
Now is the time to pay more attention to long-tail keyword phrases and to local SEO.
Also, make sure your site is optimized for mobile, it loads fast and that your content is focused on solving people’s problems and providing them clear solutions.
Founder & CEO of AudienceBloom
The biggest SEO trend of 2018 is the rising difficulty and cost of link building.
Links play an enormously important role in the ranking algorithm, so it’s critical to have plenty of strong, relevant inbound links if you hope to compete for top rankings.
However, the industry is seeing a steady shift in publications using nofollow links, or removing links altogether in an effort to appease Google.
At the same time, the old methods of content marketing to earn links naturally (ie, publish great content and then promote it, hoping it attracts links on its own merits) are becoming more difficult by the day as well, because content marketing is essentially saturated across most industries.
With so much content being produced and published, it’s more difficult than ever to rise above the noise and get your content noticed.
That means advertising rates to promote your content are seeing more competition than ever before, increasing the cost of just getting eyeballs on your content in the hope it can attract inbound links.
Businesses are learning to adapt to these challenges and finding every element of the SEO puzzle more difficult and expensive to execute — but none more so than the all-important tactic of link building.
The biggest trend for SEO in 2018 is evergreen, long-form blog content.
It is the only way to generate significant organic search engine traffic to a website.
Now, to be clear, it is a top of the funnel strategy that won’t get sales in the door today.
It is all about giving away tons of free and truly valuable information on topics related to your industry and building a relationship with people that will eventually translate into fiercely loyal, lifetime customers.
It takes time and resources to create and promote 2,000-5,000 word blog posts based on solid keyword research.
But when done well and consistently over time, you will reap strong long-term rewards through genuine thought leadership, broad reach, organic traffic from Google, and increased brand recognition and loyalty.
When the upfront investment of evergreen content is viewed through the lens of paying off over time, the cost-per-acquisition or a lead or customer is actually lower compared to traditional or even digital ads.
Yet most people don’t invest in this strategy since it takes years to pay off.
You can discover how to avoid the herd mentality and build traffic and sales for the long-term via my how-to/case-study blog post (which ironically is an evergreen, long-form blog post itself).
The biggest trend in 2018 for SEO is to have really deep content…
you have to anticipate what people want to know on the topic for which you are writing and ensure you cover those sub-topics.
Doing so can even possibly get you at the coveted “position 0” or have your information read aloud to a person using a home device such as Google Home or Amazon Echo.
The biggest trend in SEO in 2018 is less talk about SEO.
Personally, I’ve migrated from SEO specifically a while ago and transitioned to holistic marketing that just works in all channels.
SEO comes as a result of solid web development (site speed, markup, AMP, etc.) and content marketing (keyword research, 10X content production, skyscraping, etc.)
which today are the responsibilities of separate teams who should be at the top of their own game.
Organic visibility is the result of doing many things right, and I think those individual inputs will be the focus from now on.
The biggest trend in SEO that I’m tracking is the use of AI to bring back keyword tracking.
Many SaaS companies are using AI to pull in and assess multiple unstructured data streams from many sources in order to track topics and themes.
It’s surprisingly accurate and very valuable for SEOs to use.
The biggest trend of SEO 2018 according to me is the use of Artificial intelligence by the Google and the increase in the number of character in the meta description.
Both are going to play an important role but I said meta description because We all have to update our older posts meta description text to stand out in the Google SERPs.
The biggest trend of SEO in 2018 is adding in social media into the mix, in particular with Facebook comments for example.
Search engine marketing isn’t declining however people are using social media a lot more to search for content.
So make sure any content you create has the ability to share on social media, as well as optimizing for SEO.
The biggest trend that Zen Media sees when it comes to Search Engine Optimization in 2018 is the continued growth of voice search driving queries.
When you look at the forecasts saying that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020, the urgency for brands to update their strategies is higher than ever before.
We are seeing consumers moving away from the conditioned behavior that search engines had elicited from them, where they were using keyword phrases with extreme brevity.
Now that personal digital assistants are becoming more integrated with every aspect of our lives, the connected consumer is moving back to more natural speech patterns.
If brands want to meet them where they are searching, they need to be focusing on long tail keywords that are constructed using those natural speech patterns.
If you aren’t adapting your owned platforms and your content to address this shift, you are going to be well behind the power curve come 2019.
The most important SEO metric in 2018 will be the organic reach.
Search engines like Google are losing their interest in how good you are at building backlinks.
They want to see how good you are at building relationships with people.
Real people.
Keywords will continue to be important because that’s how the SERPS index your content.
But if you want to rank high, focus on building relationships with real people via social media outreach, website comment threads and yes… live stream video.
the most important thing for SEO 2018 is to have useful and actionable content.
“Great content” is a vague term.
Content should allow the reader to apply what they are reading.
Though the content length is an important factor when it comes to SEO, you should make sure your content doesn’t contain any “fluff”.
Think of a 6,000-word blog post cut down to 3,000 words rather than writing a 1,000-word blog post and trying to fill it up with 3,000 words of junk.
There are so many trends to choose from but if I had to choose one, I would say expert roundup posts.
I mean, look at the ego-bait this creates and the great linking opportunities.
There is no better way to build links in 2018.
Voice Search and Feature Snippet will Grow Together
Voice search will change the normal keyword research forever.
Five out of ten people do voice search instead of typing the keywords.
We can witness more feature snippets because increasing voice search results.
It has been already proved by a study of Stone Temple Consulting; they are presented 30% times with the featured snippets out of the 1.4 million queries they tested.
If it will continue then feature snippets might go toe-to-toe with the organic results.
Artificial Intelligence will be more powerful
It’s been over two years since RankBrain is around us.
RankBrain is a Google’s machine learning AI system that process search results by understanding its own.
It doesn’t need any human touch to process the search results.
In fact, AI is responsible for 15% of search queries that might grow in 2018.
As Google showing more love towards Artificial Intelligence, it will change the traditional ways of keyword research.
You’ll have to think more like a human while doing keyword research for your SEO campaigns.
Don’t take AI lightly since it creates its own algorithms to provide more qualified results to the users.
Therefore, you have to use those terms in your content that caught the eye of Google’s Artificial Intelligence.
AI to help SEO’s make sense of Big Data
Google integrated voice search into its Analytics platform, giving website owners an effortless way to ask questions about traffic and landing pages.
Coupled with intuitive Artificial Intelligence, will give search marketers a quick way to find underperforming pages and find plenty of optimization opportunity.
This may not seem like a big deal to smaller sites but being able to pinpoint pages via voice search when working on million-page websites is a blessing.
Voice Search Integration
We’ll see websites integrate the ability to utilize voice in product search engines.
Google already integrated voice search into its platforms.
Don’t do what Google says, do what Google does.
I think if done the wrong way many websites will see their traffic drop.
Google will give voice search data, I’m still waiting.
Better UX, UI, and Engagement will drive SEO gains
This one is big for e-commerce companies, especially in highly competitive spaces.
Websites that load fast, offer a friction-free shopping experience, provide answers to pressing questions customers have at the consideration stage of the marketing funnel.
Contests, Tools (calculators, maps, comparisons charts, in-depth guides) are all good things to have on your website.
Parting advice:
Lastly, please stay away from website redesigns in 2018.
If a web development company is pitching you on a website redesign, ask them “what will happen to my URLs”.
If they don’t know the answer or tell you that they will change in any way, hang up and run away.
If you must do it, make sure that an SEO is there to prevent a disaster.
At some point, your old SEO strategies stop giving you the same and/or best results.
Due to all the algorithm changes on Google the SEO industry is constantly changing.
And in 2018, making your website mobile friendly is the biggest trend in SEO.
The number of mobile searches is increasing.
In fact, in many countries, searches on mobile devices are surpassing desktops.
Mobiles devices are the leading platform for searches, and 48% of internet users use mobiles for searching.
Also, Google generates more than 90% of search traffic from mobile.
I would also suggest that you ensure that your websites are mobile responsive.
Which means your websites should be receptive to any mobile screen size.
So if you want remarkable results and to stay ahead of your competitors, it is crucial to develop a mobile-friendly website.
The big trend I’m seeing in SEO in 2018 is collaboration.
Too many bloggers just read things and regurgitate what’s already out there.
This works fine if you already have a huge following or great domain authority.
But, if you’re not already established, you won’t be able to increase search traffic this way.
I’m seeing smaller brands collaborate much more frequently nowadays in order to grow search traffic.
Whether it’s guest posts, round up posts, joint-webinars or interactive content pieces, collaboration leads to more social shares, links and ultimately — search traffic.
What I recommend: start simply by interviewing your best customers and partners and writing their story up.
Others like them will want to read their story.
Once you start to build up a bit of a following, ask your audience to answer simple questions and incorporate the best advice and stories into your articles.
Also, partner with others doing the same to cross-promote to each other’s lists.
Following this playbook, we’ve grown our traffic from a few thousand sessions to nearly 50k per month — and growth is accelerating as we add more consistent contributors and partners
SEO is very tricky.
I think that the biggest SEO trend that we will see would be –
Google will give more weight to in-depth content. We all know that the first aim of Google is to show people good content.
Things like On-Page Time would be more crucial than ever.
I would advise people to focus more and more on the content they provide, of course, backlinks are important but if your content is not good enough it will fall in the rankings.
I think the biggest SEO trends in 2018 are the personalization of search results, featured snippets, mobile first indexing and voice search.
All of these things will enhance users’ experiences.
If you know your audience, the personalization of search results shouldn’t be a problem, as you’ll be creating your content to meet their needs anyway.
This is also the case with featured snippets. If your content is the best resource available for your audience, it will rank over time and has a good chance to be a featured snippet.
As the web continues to become more mobile friendly, so should you. In this case optimizing your content for mobile means your mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website when previously, the desktop version was considered the primary version.
There also will be more voice searches, especially as more people get virtual assistants or use devices such as Alexa or Google Home.
As is the case with the other trends, if you are doing what you are supposed to be doing by researching your audience and creating unique, valuable resources for them, this trend shouldn’t be an issue for you.
Industry Influencers on The Top SEO Trends in 2018?
The internet users are all excited to know how new SEO trends could affect their business this year.
Most of the online users are a pro in digital marketing and are well aware of adapting their strategy accordingly.
This segment comprises thoughts from all such professionals and enthusiastic members of the online community.
Michael Quinn
Like every passing year, 2018 has also unfolded an era of digital advancement.
While mobile searches have captured a lion share, the desktop searches are still in the reckoning.
Companies should devise their SEO strategies while considering the users of all such devices.
Perhaps using upscale methods to extend the visibility of your business in featured snippets, voice searches, and other organic results could help a long way in strengthening your business on the digital front.
Likewise, SEO trends like AMPs, long-form keywords, AI mobile optimization and more are equally effective in contributing to your business growth.
To sum up, the way you anticipate the trends and implement them in your strategy would decide the fate of your business, and I wish you all the best in your efforts.
What trend do you think is going to matter the most?
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