It’s hard to believe that there are just a few weeks left in 2017. How effective were your SEO strategies and its initiatives will be? Were they better or worse or beyond than expectations? We can’t Predict!

Similar to other areas of the industries, SEO is constantly changing. The once fail-proof method of consistently landing a top SERPs(search engine results pages) became irrelevant within a few months. SEO practices that once dominated the industry quickly fell out of favor.

The Google algorithm itself changes constantly, sometimes with multiple changes happening within months. On top of that, the technology available to SEO professionals also constantly evolves, allowing us to stay informed the seemingly daily changes of what it takes to dominate search.

While 2017 has brought about the dominance of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages), the rise of HTTPS, the importance of backlinks, the precaution of the overuse of 301 redirects and reformatting of rich snippets to accommodate the increasing popularity of voice search, some of these trends will continue into 2018 and some will fall away.

Increased SERPs Features

It is the goal of any SEO professional to achieve and maintain a high volume of traffic to a given website. Ideally, this would be the result of reaching the top spot on a search engine results page. Not only is it important to achieve this coveted position, but to also maintain it as long as possible.

However, with the latest developments in the search engines, achieving this #1 ranking may no longer be enough to get the traffic you desire. Gone are the days of the ten search results listings, highlighted in blue hypertext, and a couple of clearly marked ads.

Now, when you look at a SERP, it is cluttered with images, videos, links, social media mentions, in-depth article listings, various widgets, and ads. While keyword and key phrase optimization are still important, you now have other offsite elements to consider. Popular search engine results page features include AdWords, news block, featured snippets, local packs, reviews, tweets, video, image pack, shopping results and site links.

“Rich Snippet” Structuring needed

There are rich snippets and regular snippets. Both include a clickable title, a URL, and a meta description. Rich snippets have more condensed titles that include “|” instead of a dash (-), reviews and an image. How you structure the data, however, is important in how search engines will display the information.

Page Speed

In today’s fast-paced, on-demand society, people want things, including information, immediately. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a website that appears to answer your question exactly, only to have to wait for the page to load. If the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds, you’re off onto another website that can hopefully give you the answers you need. If your page is slow, your site traffic will suffer. Page speed is a user experience feature that is expected of all websites. To see how the speed of your website stacks up, you can take Google’s PageSpeed Insights. As speed has been a critical component for years, but moving into 2018, we’re going to see even more emphasis on it in the future.

Increased Page Relevance

This means that search engines will evaluate the relevancy of the content on your website. As Google assess the relevance of a website’s content is with Latent Semantic Indexing. Through Latent Semantic Indexing Google can gather content from billions of websites and parse through the content, scanning for related terms and words.

Voice Search is More Real

Just like in 2017, voice search will continue to pick up steam. Many consumers prefer the convenience of speaking over typing. Not only is it faster, but the queries can also be more detailed. More importantly, voice recognition software has reached the point where users are comfortable trusting it to understand their normal speech. The increased detail of search queries means you’ll need to go beyond the simple keyword and phrases to rank and focus more on terms and phrases people are naturally going to say out loud. People speak differently than they type, so your SEO strategy should try using conversational terms and sentences.

Mobile Will be More Important

Smartphones dominate the landscape and more & more web browsing is occurring on mobile devices. In fact, the number of people using their smartphones to browse the Internet is higher than the number who browse on a traditional desktop computer. It is no longer optional to have a mobile-friendly website. It is now required and expected by the search engines and the users. In fact, mobile friendliness is now a search ranking factor.

The Rise of “Linkless” Backlinks

Backlinks have been the tea and saucer of SEO for many years. In the past, this linking from another source to shore a webpage’s authority in the eyes of Google was abused, prompting Google to come up with the Penguin algorithm in 2012. A simple link just isn’t going to stand out from the crowd. Search engines now have the ability to associate mentions of brands, institutions, organizations, and people without the need of linking to their corresponding webpages. While links are going to still carry some weight, the other content around the hyperlinked text is going to also be very important.

SERPs Will Continue Getting Personal

Traditional search ranking factors, such as page speed, content relevancy and page authority, search engines are using information about the user, such as interests, browsing history and location, provide a personalized search results list. Pages that succeed in dominating search will not only get more initial traffic, but when a user clicks to their page, that business’s page will subsequently appear in future searches by that user.This will give you a greater opportunity to dominate that user’s SERPs in the future.

Optimize Your Strategies in 2018

SEO is an ever-changing industry. In 2018, Google will continue to enhance the web user’s experience by scanning the relevancy of a page’s content, using personalized search engine results and faster page speeds, and include additional results page features.

Websites are mobile-friendly and full of normal, conversational terms and words.It takes time and long-term care. If your company is small or new and it doesn’t have a designated Digital marketing professional, IMarks can help you out our trained and knowledgeable SEO professionals can set up and monitor a customized SEO campaign specialized just for your business’ website. Contact us now for more information.

How Effective Will It Be?

Today’s most popular link-building tactics are content marketing and guest blogging. But step back for a moment and take a thought-provoking look at it.

Aren’t you just pick for yourself?

And didn’t we just see how Google’s evolution might remove any benefit from self-linking or worse, maybe even punish it as a “dishonest” practice in the future?

If you’re guest blogging only for links, it’s time to reconsider that strategy. It might work better in the long term if you built quality content that people want to link to themselves because it is helpful, solves their problems and fulfills their needs, or delivers overwhelming value.

It’s another instance of how blindly following the crowd and repeating what someone else says or does might have limited SEO shelf life, potentially harming your business and brand down the line.

Make something unique!

This word “Unique” something that stands out. Invest the time to do it right, even if it means taking a lot of time. That’s what will pay off in the long run, and that’s what will make your SEO and link building more certify.

Don’t haunt overwriting content that will get traction. Instead, focus on how you can best help your prospective buyers. How will they benefit from your planned post? How can you provide them with genuine value? To create great content, you must understand what goes on in your ideal customer’s mind.

Ascertain user intention correctly.

• Identify their problems and desires
• Think of solutions that can help them
• Position yourself as trustworthy, honest and professional
• Gain their trust and become known as the go-to person or company when they need your product or service

In adopting an SEO strategy centered around creating high-quality content, your brand will grow and gain visibility naturally. You’ll increase your chances of being mentioned in newspapers, magazines and authoritative blogs or websites in your niche.

You’ll achieve all these without doing any marketing.

• Offering solutions
• Providing valuable content
• Being helpful
• Fostering trust

Remember, no one will mention or link to you unless they trust you. Trust is king. If getting links is your only aim, don’t do it. If better rankings for a destination website is your only win, it will be short-lived. That’s not a good strategic move.

If you’re blogging on other sites where you might meet your ideal customers and people you want to connect with them, the links which are generated from guest blogging are secondary to other benefits like better brand awareness, wider recognition, greater trust and more referral traffic.

What about press releases?

Without drawing any conclusions about how beneficial Press Releases are for businesses, can we just agree that all of these practices might generate quite a bit of trouble, by adding to the difficulty search engines like Google are facing when trying to determine the value of an inbound link!

Google must filter out this noise.

As the first step in this direction, initiatives like Google Authorship and the Google+ platform are helping add a quality layer to the search results.

The natural links come from people who trusted you, ballot for you, and actually, serve as marketing department to send you more traffic and leads through their links. And it won’t even matter that they are no-follow links because they have relevant context. So think about this before you dive hasty into securing more links.

The Dark Side Of SEO & Link

Higher search rankings mean an increase in relevant traffic and sales.It’s currently possible for businesses and website owners to influence their own rankings. It’s true that breaking Google’s guidelines is not illegal. It’s not a crime. And the stakes are high. A lot of money can be made by manipulating search rankings. But look at it from Google’s perspective. People are using Google before they buy a product or a service for what they find listed on SERPs.

Google is aware that it plays an important role in people’s decision making. The smart technologist tweaking search algorithms to know that it is possible to engage in sneaky tactics to affect rank for specific keywords and search terms.

In keyword research, the goal of identifying concepts rather than individual keywords. It’s a communal term for SEO (niche keywords). As “niche” is a set of related words or concepts that are essentially variants of the identical query.

You find with the variants of these niche topics using Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner or any another tool, looking for the keywords with the best qualities. (Difficulty, Search Volume, Low competition, Opportunity, etc.)

By organizing the keyword research in this way, it conceptually aligns with the search logic of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update. For that we then we dive into specific keyword variants to find opportunities where we can rank.

Why the answer for most sites is unquestionable when they optimize the page for multiple keywords.

If you want to develop a strategy of optimizing your website pages only for one keyword, this can lead to a couple of issues.  Making the search engine less likely to distinguish your unique value as to deliver it into SERP.

So how do you find niche keyword topics?

 Enter a relevant question into your search engine

Question-format search queries are great because they often generate featured snippets. Featured snippets are the little boxes that show up at the top of search results, usually displaying one- to two-sentence answers or a list. Recently, when featured snippets are displayed, there is commonly another box nearby showing “People also ask” This second box allows you to peer into the logic of the search algorithm. It shows you what the search engine thinks which are closely related to the topics.

Select the most relevant “People also ask” query

Take a look at those initial “People also ask” suggestions. They are often different variants of your query, representing slightly different search intent. Choose the one that most aligns with the search intent of your target user. What happens? A new set of three “People also ask” suggestions will populate at the bottom of the list that is associated with the first option you choose.

 Find suggestions with low-value featured snippets

Every “People also ask” suggestion is a featured snippet. As you dig deeper into the topic by selecting one “People also ask” after another, keep an eye out for featured snippets that are not particularly helpful. This is the search engine attempting to generate a simple answer to a question and not quite hitting the mark. These present an opportunity to keep the track of the ones you think could be improved. In the following example, see the Featured Snippet being generated by an article that doesn’t fully answer the question for an average user.

Analyze your list of words using a keyword research tool

With a nice list of keywords that generating featured snippets, plug the words into Keyword Explorer or your preferred keyword research tool. And just apply your normal assessment criteria for a keyword (usually a combination of search volume and competitiveness).

Apply the keywords to your page title and heading tags

Once you’ve tightened the list to set keywords you’d like to target on the page, the content team will work on generating relevant, valuable answers to the questions. Place your target keywords as the heading tags (H2, H3) and a concise, valuable description.

Quantity of niche keywords in your campaign

While your content writers are generating the content, you can update your baselining at your rank position for the keywords if you’re using in the heading tags. Add the keywords to your campaign and then label them appropriately. As using a label linked to the niche topic.