Guessing the future can be notoriously tricky – for every iPhone, there are quite a few Sinclair C5s – but thankfully, the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) isn’t quite so unpredictable.
Indeed, the following trends have been gaining traction among providers of SEO optimisation services for a long time already.
But you still need to know about them, as they are likely to become even more prominent aspects of SEO in the 12 months to come. So, here are just three big strategies you might want to try out in 2018.
1. A mobile-first approach
Did you know that six in every 10 Google searches are now made from a mobile device? Nor can you accuse the search giant of being ‘behind the curve’, as it’s already been more than a year since it declared its plans to use a site’s mobile content as the primary basis on which it would rank pages.
Such a big change hasn’t taken effect yet in Google’s search algorithm, but you can bet that it’ll happen in 2018.
That gives you plenty of reason to provide the mobile version of your site a timely refresh, bringing its data, buttons, tags and menus into line with those of your desktop site.
2. Producing more (and better) videos
Yes, video marketing has been big for the last few years, but our point here is that it’s not going away. As a matter of fact, research has shown that 43% of people want to see even more video content, and you know who’ll be listening to them, don’t you? That’s right: Google.
Amid predictions that video could make up a whopping 80% of online traffic by 2021, if you do anything for your SEO over the coming 12 months, we’d certainly recommend adding video content to your site.
You can easily enough do that with the help of YouTube, which – let’s not forget – is the world’s second-biggest search engine in its own right, processing more than three billion searches every month. And Google owns it.
3. Content of that’s deeper and more useful
Those of us who provide SEO optimisation services have been screaming to anyone who’ll listen for many years now, that content really is king of the SEO equation. This means that your content has to be genuinely great – those days of wanton keyword-stuffing doing the job are long gone.
These days, Google is placing more emphasis than ever on topical relevance and context. That means you’ll need your site content to be genuinely helpful to the human user, and you can probably guess what content is most helpful to said users… in-depth and often long content.
Expect 2,000-word articles, complete with links to other authoritative sites offering a similarly impressive amount of useful and actionable information, to achieve the best rankings in 2018.
Would you like to start incorporating some of these approaches into your own firm’s SEO to help to make next year your most successful yet? In that case, you’ll want to get on the phone or wing an email to our experts here at PENNInk Productions, pronto.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
