Rachel Hand — July 20, 2018 We are over halfway through 2018 and we thought it might be a good time to highlight some of the new SEO trends present so far this year. As Google continues to crack down on low quality, spam content new updates are more important than ever. Throughout 2017, Google made countless updates to their algorithm meaning the search engine would begin favouring quality content over quantity.
SEO is becoming more important year after year, you could even argue that it becomes more important day-by-day, due to an ever changing/growing digital landscape. We know that those businesses who spend time on increasing the quality and experience of their sites will benefit greatly.
Google’s main aim is to accurately match information on a website to the users search terms. As we have previously commented the changes such as LSI keywords, cornerstone content and Rankbrain are further updates to increase the importance of quality content that matches the users search. We want to look at what’s next and how it might change the SEO landscape further.
Voice Search
We know that voice search is not new, but the role of voice search in everyday life is growing at an incredible pace. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and Cortana are all names we have heard and these types of virtual assistant are only growing. Google says 72% of people who own a voice-activated speaker say that their devices are often used as part of their daily routine.
Voice search eliminates the power of 1 or 2 keyword search terms, you cannot simply optimize for keywords only. Voice search will usually hear a sentence and search for the closest match to the question. This is where quality website content comes into play. Voice search reads your content out loud in answer to a users question, therefore we could argue SEO strategies are starting to favour user experience over the link building tactics of old.
Video and Animation
Google has the ability to differentiate good content from bad, proving that searches are becoming more and more sophisticated. At the forefront of this change is video content. Perhaps the most obvious advantage of video is that it can easily increase engagement.
As a result, users then spend longer on your website proving to Google that you have quality content and increasing trust, the more trust Google has in you, the higher you rank. You can also optimise sites such as YouTube for SEO, meaning they could appear directly in the search results.
Customer Reviews
Customer reviews have become a powerful force for all consumers. 90 % of customers check out reviews before visiting a business. Reviews are an important part of the sales process, usually customers have found a product or service they require and before purchase will look into the reviews for that product. At this point you have to make an impression, it could win or lose you the sale.
When customers write reviews not only can this be classed as a top source of user-generated content about your business but also these tend to use a certain type of language and often your keywords. Not to mention that highly rated sites tend to rank higher on Google as there is more trust in the brand. Review sites like Trustpilot even integrate their ‘trust boxes’ to optimise for SEO.
All of these elements are becoming more and more prominent in future plans for SEO. We can see the landscape is changing so our in-house SEO experts are always spending time keeping up to date with latest trends and predicting what is next. SEO is what drives your entire marketing campaign, being on page 1 provides you with the search traffic, then it is over to your website to supply the customer with the correct information to prompt a purchase or enquiry.
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