2017 was a big year for SEO with the introduction of AI and more emphasis on conversational SEO. This coming year will be no different and we can expect many changes that will once again have us going back to how drawing boards and adjusting our strategies to fit new realities.
Here are some of the trends that will change how we do SEO in 2018.
The Advent of Voice Search
While voice recognition has been around since 2002, 2018 should be a breakout year for the technology. Google recently modified its voice search to include searches in five new languages.
How will it affect SEO do you ask? Well, with its personal assistance function and entertainment, the increasing amount of search being conducted by voice is set to change local search results, which includes online shopping as well.
For this reason, users will have to make sure that their mobile version of their sites does not block some valuable resource such as images, CSS files, and videos since many of the voice searches are conducted on mobile devices.
For the same reason, web owners should refrain from using bulky elements such as flash to maximize loading speed. They will also have to modify their search queries and on-page SEO for voice queries instead of regular queries, which can be very different.
Companies like Snap SEO have already started embracing the trend and Snap’s SEO services include technical markup, which can be optimized for search queries as well.
More Focus on User Experience
User experience, or UX for short, has started to make noise in 2017, but 2018 should be the year it goes mainstream.
We can expect Google’s algorithms to continue its march towards optimal UX and we can expect developers to follow suit. Third party programs aimed at testing UX will become the norm and developers will spend much more time doing A/B testing and tweaking their sites to reach new standards.
The rise of mobile search and voice search will also have an effect on UX in 2018. Much more emphasis will be put on cross-device UX, so we can expect old-time mobile pages to be completely obsolete in 2018. The increasing importance of UX will make Accelerated Mobile Pages the new standard from now on.
Featured Snippets
If you’re conducting a lot of searches, you may have noticed something different with Google’s first page.
Snippets now appear at the top of the page, offering a condensed and summarized version of content being searched for. This will also affect SEO in 2018 and how developers approach on-page SEO.
On-page SEO will now be made with snippets in mind, which will alter the way pages are designed from now on.
Conclusion
Whether it’s featured snippets, user experience or voice searches, 2018 is set to change how we do SEO from now on.
This is why it’s essential to stay on top of the trends and re-evaluate your SEO strategy with experts that are abreast of these new changes.
Hello Erik,
2017 has been a great year for SEO. I have learned many new things in this year. I am able to manage to rank my blog in few keywords. Thanks for sharing these insights with us all. Lets wish a good 2018 for SEO.
Have a great day 🙂
Vishwajeet
Good to hear that, Vishwajeet.
With time, hard work will pay off.
Happy blogging! 🙂
Hi Erik,
You have written a nice post for the bloggers, I found it on Twitter. User experience, Low bounce rate, Content quality, Genuine link building ways, are going to rock on the web. I always focus on quality content and looking for the ways to make my readers stay long on my blog posts. Thanks for the post!
Hi Nirmala,
thanks for the feedback.
Agreed on that. Content quality will always be the first priority.
Shared this post on Flipboard, it went pretty viral:
https://flipboard.com/@erikemanuelli/blogging-e2nlri68y
Interesting ideas to consider for the rise of voice search. You mentioned that AMPs will be the “new standard”– sometimes I wonder about that… Nice ideas, though!
Thanks for commenting, Hip.
Hi Erik,
These three things are really something we need to focus much on. Right now I am focusing on Mobile-First Index for my clients.
Thanks for great article!
Making the pages web-friendly is another important step to make on a site.
I recently purchased this new domain: http://gifsboom.net/
I discovered from GA that 70% of visitors (500 per day) come from mobile!
Thanks for commenting, Akash Srivastava.
Hello Erik,
Very informative post over here 🙂
Indeed 2017 was big for the SEO as the introduction of the AI was brought into this field and we all know that something big
is waiting up there in 2018 for this platform.
Indeed voice search has taken an immense growth this year, and if one wants that their site should rank well then they
need to approach in a better way to enhance the voice search credibility of their web site and for this they need to
focus on making their web site mobile friendly, as voice search are conducted over them.
Snippets are also becoming a part of Google and they love to display snippets about the related quarry so that,
people would find it more easy, thus it would be an important factor that would affect the ranking of the web site.
Thanks for the share.
Shantanu.
Glad you found this post interesting, Shantanu.
Thanks for visiting and commenting here!
I agree with these three points that you have added over here.
If I talk about and if I am not wrong then featured Snippets may bring the change in the world of SEO. I have noticed that many of web pages are ranking at 3rd or 4th positions in SERPs, but their featured snippets appear at the very first place after the search box in Google. This practice increases the CTR of that page.
However, we all know that featured snippets help us and that is one of the ranking factors too, but the issue is, no one has a proven method that shows how to implement it and visible featured snippets for a web page.
Hey George,
this is a great post showing how to get featured snippets on Google:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/03/google-featured-snippets/
Hi Erik great ideas you got there, i have learn new frpm this post.
Thanks Paul.
nice artical sir, very usefull your post thanks for information provide
Hi Erik! Such great resource here! I’m familiar with snippets but the other two are new to me. Quality content at top of the list then comes SEO, thanks for the heads up and for sharing this upcoming trends!