Digital marketing trends change quickly. Marketers have to follow Google’s latest developments and findings, and they also need to keep an eye on the competition. When it comes to search engine optimization trends, you must stay ahead in the game to be successful.
If you’re wondering what’s next, here are four important SEO trends that you need to know about:
Link Building and In-Depth Content
In-depth content and backlinks are the most important ranking factors, and they play essential roles in SEO. Without both of them, you cannot rank high on the first page of search engine results.
Google’s spiders are fond of valuable, fresh, and detailed content that helps searchers learn about specific topics. In-depth content has a few crucial points:
- Aim for 2000 words or more to include everything a visitor needs to know about your particular subject. Try to cover all the vital information for which the user is searching. Address any concerns and issues they might have.
- Include synonyms that add value to your keywords. They will help not only search engines but your potential visitors as well.
Links are still super-important, and this trend is not going to change anytime soon. The crucial thing is to focus on quality, not quantity. Backlinks are becoming a trust signal for search engines in 2018.
Mobile-First Indexing
A couple of years ago it became clear that mobile searches are surpassing desktop searches on Google, which is a significant shift for everyone in the digital world. A recent study found that 57 percent of all web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets.
In response to this growing trend, Google is launching something called mobile-first indexing. In short, Google rankings are now going to be based on mobile versions of websites. What used to matter for mobile searches will not be important for ALL searches.
You need to prepare for mobile-first indexing because if you don’t have a mobile site, chances are it might cease to exist before you know it. Your mobile site has to be as responsive and content-driven as your desktop site.
Voice Search
Voice search is on the rise. Mobile search queries dominate search methods, and one in five of them derive from voice search. We are expecting this number to grow, especially with the invention of Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. In fact, Google reports that 40 percent of adults and 55 percent of teens use voice search daily.
The rise of voice search also means a surge in featured snippets and knowledge graphs.
The Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph, along with Quick Answers and Featured Snippets, is the next big thing in SEO. The popularity of these Google’s innovations has increased, and brands are battling to appear in them in the search engine results page and rank for “position zero.”
Featured snippets represent the summaries of user queries that get displayed on top of Google’s organic results. To rank for position zero, you need to identify the questions Google users are asking and create quality content for the sole purpose of answering those questions.
To make sure your website stays on top of Google SEO trends, contact our team of marketing experts.