If you are in the internet marketing industry, you know how unpredictable SEO is. With Google and other SERPS constantly changing their algorithms and with artificial intelligence becoming more prevalent, SEO is bound to change significantly in the future.
Here are some of the changes expected for SEO in the near future.
Link Building
For the longest time, building links has been the one factor that that has really boosted visibility on search engines. When you build many quality links, search engines recognize your website as a big brand and your rankings start to improve.
This already started to change with the Google RankBrain update that places more emphasis on relevance, context and quality. This is because the RankBrain algorithm focuses mainly on user intent. For your website to rank, it is best that it answers searcher’s intent and provide value first before you can even think about building links.
Optimizing Visual Content
With continued developments in artificial intelligence, search engines are becoming smarter with what is on visual content like images, videos and others. It is therefore, important that content creators start to optimize around visual content like YouTube Videos. This is done by optimizing the title tag, Meta descriptions, tags, considering the video length and so 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 brands like Forbes, CNN, Huffingtonpost and others dominate the market. If you provide exceptional value to your followers, your brand grows and soon you will find yourself ranking better on search engines.
When you are 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 gives you that authority.
Optimizing for Mobile and Voice Search
Most people now access the internet through their mobile devices. From the word go, your site needs to have a responsive design. This means that it should adapt according to the size of the device being used. Actually, Google suggests that your website should be made for mobile first, not for desktop.
Google penalizes sites that are not optimized for mobile by sinking their rankings. With smart home products and increase in mobile, voice search is on the rise. Cortana, Google Voice Search, Siri and Amazon Echo have become favorite virtual assistants for many people.
Voice searches are usually longer and more conversational; therefore, you should target such long words on your website. Become more conversational in your blog and do comprehensive keyword research for long phrases.
Google and all other search engines are getting smarter and therefore hard to beat with bad SEO strategies techniques. However, with AI and more information on user intent, if you provide value and answer to the queries that people have comprehensively, your rankings might just shoot to the first page of Google.
