SEO trends to expect in 2018

SEO has played a huge part in the success of marketing campaigns and has helped increase customer engagement for brands ranging from local companies to global businesses. Search is the biggest driver of traffic to websites with 75% of browsers never scrolling past the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs). This means an effective SEO strategy is vital. Here are some of the trends to look out for in 2018.

Optimised search for videos and images

Visual imagery now makes up an increasingly large portion of digital content and research has shown that videos are three times more likely to attract visitors to a website. Google has recently bought numerous start-ups developing more sophisticated software capable of recognising elements within videos and images. This illustrates a move towards more intricate search engine optimisations for visual content in 2018.

Voice search will dominate

Over the last two years, the technology sector saw a spike in the sale of smart home devices and voice recognition products such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. In addition to this, Google has made several updates and innovations to its voice recognition algorithms. The growing popularity of virtual assistants has led to a stronger focus from digital marketers on the features and benefits of voice search. In 2018 there will be an increase in SEO strategies that cater towards this.

Increased focus on personalised search results

One of Google’s main focuses over the last ten years has been to create a personalised search experience that uses cookies and search history to flag up results based on the specific user. While this has helped to deliver more accurate and personal SERPs for web users, it has affected the rankings for companies online. It looks like Google will still be looking to further develop the concept of personalised searches as the popularity of virtual assistants and voice search grows.

SEO will spread from Google

While it’s no secret that Google is the number one platform when it comes to search engines, the emergence of competing brands suggests that SEO strategies will focus more heavily on other search engines in 2018. Online entities such as Yelp and Amazon have developed to the point where they have established virtual search engine status. This, along with the increased use of virtual assistants such as Siri, will cause SEO strategists to re-think their tactics this year.