If your business is not capturing the full benefit of SEO techniques on its website, and blogs, you are missing out on the search engine ranking train. Search Engine Optimization or SEO, as people use to say in short, offers the best methods to make sure your clientele discover you and your business and shell out their pockets for your products and services.
SEO is constantly evolving and shifting gears analogous to other domains of the technology industries. The previous trustworthy approach of persistently staying at the top SERPs such as Google and Yahoo turned out to become insignificant within the next season. SEO methods that once ruled the web optimization industry shortly lose the game. This world is swiftly changing and so are we; therefore, you have to have newer SEO strategies within a few months time frame to survive in this gigantic cyber world. These strategies help to increase SEO score of a site to get more organic traffic.
It’s been half of 2018 passed; it’s a high time to evaluate where we stand in the SEO world and what we need to do to stay abreast of the continuously evolving Google algorithms. Everyone wants to be placed at the top of the Google search list as most of the folks trust Google as their search engine provider choice.
The SEO trends that may impact SERPs this year can be summarized as:
- Secure Links or SSL: A few years back, Google has confirmed that Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates will be influencing the websites rankings. In recent times, it’s been came to notice that some web browsers like Google Chrome are highlighting the websites as being potentially unsafe which don’t follow SSL protocols and not start with HTTPS. So, make sure your website starts with HTTPS.
- Voice Search: Voice search feature will change the way how the content is written. Most appreciable content will be greatly inclined towards having more conversational nature that answers the search queries directly rather than writing a specific keyword-based content.
Search engine algorithms can decipher context so that the content that is gonna answer a question and have relevant information about a search query will have an upper hand.
- Sub-directory Vs Sub-domain: First let us understand the distinction between sub-domain and sub-directory with this example – “testsubdomain.testsitename.com/testfolder/”
In this case, testsubdomain is the sub-domain of the website, testsitename is the domain of the website, and testfolder is the sub-directory (also known as a folder). A sub-domain is considered by the SERPs as a unique website.
Thus, if you have one domain with two different sub-domains, each will be considered differently by Google. Domain authority from SEO viewpoint can be increased by migrating a blog from a sub-domain to a sub-directory in the main domain. I know this is a little confusing but you need to understand this and utilize this to optimize your search result ranking.
- Intent of Searcher: Google’s spotlight this year will be on comparing search results to the unique objective of a user’s query. You should watch ahead of the keywords theory of conventional search results ranking to comprehend the categories of content, the SERPs think appropriate for priority conditions.
You should focus not only on the first page but also on the other pages of your website to realize the unparalleled opportunities and warning signs by the business verticals.
- Fast Loading Mobile Page: Taking into account the growing figure of rejection ratios by viewers of websites that don’t load promptly, Google floated Accelerated Mobile Page project in 2016. In a few months, till date, Google has started redirecting the users towards AMP powered web pages for a superior experience.
Thus, you need to take into account AMP pages requirements implementation in order to enhance your website’s SEO.
- Optimization for Mobile Devices: According to the statistics, mobile (phone and tablet) gadgets surpassed computers (desktops and laptops) as the principal devices for internet access. Plus, with growing number of smartphone customers in the whole world (predicted to cross 2.87 billion users by 2020) you would definitely not afford to ignore this opportunity with such a rising customer base in 2018.
Thus, try to develop a mobile-friendly website as well along with the desktop version, offer distinctive URL for mobile pages, and stay away from using flash. - Local SEO: With the ever-increasing number of smartphone consumers across the world and with the assistance of the Google Maps, it seems quite comfortable to many tech-savvy people to search for information around their local sphere of say 5 or 10 KM range that comprises of address, phone number, business hours, online reviews, etc. of the various companies.
Google has furthermore provided a novel FAQ feature to the Google Maps which allows the users to ask queries to the entrepreneurs and allow them to answer. Therefore, if you include these local SEO features in your website, you will be getting best ranking among SERPs and growing network traffic.