Did you know that 72% of consumers who do a local Search on their smartphone visit a store within a day? Same with 34% of consumers who conduct a search on a computer or tablet! Before we delve further into telling you what SEO is and how crucial a marketing element it is, here are a few more stats to get you up and listening.

• Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day which is roughly 160+ billion monthly Google searches
• Marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly.
• 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
• 30% of mobile searches are related to a location.
• Almost 90% of users trust online reviews.
• 3 out of 4 marketers say relevant content creation is the most effective SEO strategy.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the game-changing trends that will dominate 2018:

1. Voice Search

People have less time and more work and therefore they tend to go for options that give better results in less time. So, instead of typing what they need to search for, they now go for directly using the voice search functionality. The search queries can be simply spoken and Google will search it for you. This has changed the search market and the year 2018 will see a much higher shift towards voice search.

Few points have to be focused upon if voice search has to be made efficient:

• Try to use long tail keywords within the content.
• Always go for suffixes like nearest, amazing, best and top within your website content.
• Make sure that the website is fast and highly responsive.
• The website must always have FAQs that can be general questions of the viewers with the correct answers to them.

2. “Near Me” SEO Strategy

If you are targeting local searchers and have not employed a “Near Me” SEO strategy, I think it’s time we had a word.

Trends data shows explosive growth of “near me” queries worldwide. As people are using more of mobile now so they keep on searching for places near them and hence the fundamental of local searches has increased even more. Hence, it is important to make the website more optimized for mobile search and add more of the keywords which are related to some local search.

3. Feature Snippet & Rich Answers

You would have noticed whenever you type any query or search something on Google that sounds like a question, a box appears containing the desired answer. This is nothing but Rich answers and this is another ruling element in Google search results.

Google is actively rolling out featured snippets for a wide variety of search queries because they want to serve quicker answers to people.

And SEO professionals are absolutely excited about this new opportunity because featured snippets give a chance for low-ranking pages to get to the top of search results with almost zero effort.

How can you write such type of content?

Here are a few tips to do so:

• Find out questions that your audience is asking and include them in your content
• Create high-quality, snippet-able content
• Have question and answer pages on your website
• Engagement metrics play an important role in getting content featured in Google Snippets

4. Mobile 1st Index Strategy

According to Google Webmaster blog,

“To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site.”

What does all this mean?

Mobile SEO is going to be a high priority in 2018.

As an SEO expert, you should plan your marketing strategy keeping the mobile SEO in the mind.

Here are a few best practices that will help you excel at mobile SEO:

• Leverage browser caching, minify code and reduce redirects to boost page speed
• Never block, images, CSS, or JavaScript
• Have a mobile-friendly website
• Don’t use pop-ups and Flash
• Use structured data

5. Content marketing

Content marketing is the new SEO. Content marketing is the cheapest and most effective way to do SEO these days. Not only does writing high-quality content produce links at a quicker pace than building them manually, but it’s also cheaper. Plus, your content will naturally get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

6. PPC + SEO

PPC Campaign can have a direct impact on the website organic traffic. People often who click on the ads return to the site via organic branded keywords. Running both PPC and SEO campaigns side by side can improve the CTR of keywords and hence we get organic traffic.

Also, PPC opened up a floodgate for new keyword opportunities so that we can target those keywords in our content plan.

FINAL WORDS

By focusing on these best SEO trends in 2018 and actualizing particular methodologies, it will guarantee that a site is completely streamlined and prepared to get targeted clients.

The post Top SEO Trends That Will Dominate 2018 appeared first on Digital Leadership Institute.