The future of SEO as predicted by industry experts
If you’re in the internet marketing industry, you know how unpredictable SEO is. With Google and other SERPS constantly changing their algorithms and artificial intelligence becoming more prevalent, SEO is bound to change significantly in the future.
These are some of the expected changes for SEO in the near future.
link building
For a long time, link building has been the only factor that has really increased search engine visibility. When you build lots of quality links, search engines recognize your website as a great brand and your rankings start to improve.
This has already started to change with the update to Google RankBrain which puts more emphasis on relevance, context and quality. This is because the RankBrain algorithm focuses primarily on user intent. In order for your website to rank, it better respond to searcher intent and provide value before you can even think about linking.
Visual content optimization
With the continuous developments in artificial intelligence, search engines are getting smarter with visual content like images, videos, and others. Therefore, it is important for content creators to start optimizing visual content like YouTube videos. This is done by optimizing the title tag, meta descriptions, tags, considering the length of the video, and much more.
building a brand
According to Neil Patel, a global brand in internet marketing, the future of SEO lies in building a brand. Most of the brands like Forbes, CNN, Huffingtonpost and others dominate the market. By providing exceptional value to your followers, your brand grows and you will soon find yourself ranked higher in search engines.
When you’re recognized as a brand, it becomes easy to build links and everything else about your SEO falls into place. You demand authority when the number of people searching for you online increases and you grant that authority to them.
Mobile optimization and voice search
Most of the people now access the internet through their mobile devices. From the very beginning, your site should have a responsive design. This means that it must be adapted according to the size of the device being used. Actually, Google suggests that your website should be made for mobile first, not desktop.
Google penalizes sites that are not optimized for mobile devices by sinking their rankings. With smart home products and the rise of mobile devices, voice search is on the rise. Cortana, Google Voice Search, Siri and Amazon Echo have become many people’s favorite virtual assistants.
Voice searches tend to be longer and more conversational; therefore, you should target such long words on your website. Be more conversational on your blog and do extensive keyword research for long phrases.
Google and all other search engines are getting smarter and therefore hard to beat with bad technical SEO strategies. However, with AI and more insight into user intent, if you provide value and answer the queries people have holistically, your rankings could skyrocket to the first page of Google.
