The Future of SEO as Predicted by Industry Experts
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.
These are some of the changes that are expected for SEO in the near future.
Link building
Link building has long been the factor that has really driven search engine visibility. When you create a lot of quality links, the search engines recognize your website as a great brand and your ranking starts to improve.
This has already started to change with the Google RankBrain update that puts more emphasis on relevance, context and quality. This is because the RankBrain algorithm is primarily focused on user intent. In order for your website to rank, it is better that it responds to the intent of the search engine and provides value before you can even think about creating links.
Visual content optimization
With the continuous development of artificial intelligence, search engines are getting smarter with visual content such as 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 brands like Forbes, CNN, Huffingtonpost and others dominate the market. If you provide exceptional value to your followers, your brand grows and you will soon find yourself higher in search engines.
When you are recognized as a brand, it is 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 it gives you that authority.
Optimization for mobile and voice search
Most people now access the internet through their mobile devices. Right from the start, 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 designed for mobile devices first, not desktop computers.
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 must target such long words on your website. Be more chatty on your blog and do extensive keyword research for long sentences.
Google and all other search engines are getting smarter and therefore difficult to beat with bad SEO strategy techniques. However, with artificial intelligence and more insight into user intent, if you provide value and respond to the queries that people have comprehensively, your ranking could skyrocket to the first page of Google.