If your business is yet to take advantage of using SEO strategies on its social media pages, blogs, and website, then it’s time for your company to take a step forward. SEO is one of the most effective and simple ways of ensuring customers find your business and purchase your products or services.
However, SEO is constantly evolving and what was considered useful a year ago may not be of any use today. With the advancement of technology, search engines are continuously enhancing the quality of search results.
That’s why you need a knowledge base and a good understanding of what’s new on the horizon for ranking practices. The infographic below made by SEO Tribunal is very enlightening, but here are a couple of more in-depth thoughts regarding key trends in SEO for 2018:
Voice Search
This is one of the latest trends in SEO. It’s growing exponentially and is revolutionizing how people search for things on the internet. Evidence? Currently, 20% of all web searches are voice searches.
So, how can you use voice search to your web page traffic’s advantage? Well, voice search in Google tends to choose the text placed inside a Featured Snippet. To successfully take advantage of voice search, your content has to be on the first page and it will even be better if it is in the Featured Snippet.
Additionally, ensure to include a more conversational keyword. For instance, a type search such as “pie definition” becomes “what is a pie?” or “define a pie” in voice search. Also, it will help a lot to include questions and answers in the content; this is what Google’s algorithm for voice search prefers.
Useful Content
Today, user engagement plays a more significant role in achieving overall SEO success. Creating a user-driven and insightful content that delves deep to answer relevant questions is imperative.
Another thing to remember is that link building goes hand in hand with quality content. If your content has what it takes for people to like it, they’ll naturally want to link to your website.
Site Speed
Whether desktop or mobile, a site’s load speed is is essential for SEO and positive search engine results. It is also one of Google’s pivotal ranking factors.
Users want results and want them fast. Therefore, having an unresponsive website will negatively influence your business in terms of sales, traffic, and page views. That is how vital speed is.
To improve your site’s speed, talk to your web developer if it is custom-coded or to the tech support team of your hosting company in case you use some CMS like WordPress. They should be able to recommend an adequate caching plugin and add GZIP compression to speed things up a notch.
Bottom Line
Integrating SEO into your marketing strategy is without a doubt vital to the overall success of your business’s website. Although SEO is evolving with each day, keeping up with the changes is critical in ensuring that you are ahead of the pack in 2018.
About the Author
Hristina Nikolovska is the Marketing Manager at SEO Tribunal. A big part of Tina’s daily engagements involve raising awareness of the importance of digital marketing when it comes to the success of small businesses. As her first step towards this journey was in the field of content marketing, she’s still using every opportunity she gets to put her thoughts into educational articles. Connect with her on Twitter.
