how-seo-will-look

SEO is a fast-paced segment of the digital marketing world. It is highly dynamic and changes at the drop of a hat.

Believe it or not, but SEO will continue to transform. From the mid 1990s to 2016, SEO has constantly undergone changes . Optimizing your website or content for search is a vital to your online success. There’s no way better way to drive organic traffic. It’s probably the best method to drive ROI for business.

A polling by Econsultancy showed that 73% of in-house marketers and 76% of US agencies said SEO provided excellent or good return on investment.

No one can predict the future. At least not in our consistently changing technological world. In the context of SEO, it is still more difficult. How SEO will look like next year, two years from now, or in the next 5 years solely depends on how search engines structure their algorithms. This is something that is not in the control of search engine optimizers.

That’s why it’s important for SEO professionals to look for changes and keep themselves updated. This blog post is an effort in this direction: to look out for new technology and developments to determine how SEO will look like in the next five years.

Mobile Search will be on the forefront

According to Google: –

1. Nearly 40% of people search only on a smartphone in an average day as they look to meet immediate needs.
2. 82% of smartphone users say that they use their phones in a store when deciding what to buy.
3. 91% say they turn to their smartphones for ideas in the middle of tasks.

For people, their smartphones are their world. So if you have a business that needs to reach the masses, then you need to enter the world people are living in. Your business must be visible on mobile.

This mobile insight also means that your website must be mobile friendly. You cannot afford to have a website that does not function well on mobile or has a terrible UX and UI for mobile.

You can test a website’s mobile performance using Google’s PageSpeed Tools.

Mobile search is miles apart from web search. Thanks to Google’s latest Hummingbird algorithm. This latest algorithm from Google no longer shows those websites which is not mobile friendly. And in the next few years, this trend is going to accentuate.

Indeed, some 62 percent of organic searches now display different results on smartphones versus desktops. No doubt in future, this trend will dominate.

Local SEO will be the key to success for retailers

Modern consumers want to interact with the world on the go. They are constantly looking for products and services near them.

According to a recent data from Google, 50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their mobiles were likely to visit a store related to that search within that day.

Consumer are using their smartphones to search for products or services in their areas before they rush out to buy them. And this also shows that consumers are not purchasing items which they find online. They are looking for retailers too.

In the future, local SEO will play a prominent role in optimizing businesses and providing more accurate results of your neighborhood or street corner instead of showing city or state regions.

Voice SEO will be in demand

The rise of mobile technology has given birth to a new modern search engine phenomenon: Voice SEO. The mobile users don’t need to type a word, simply think it, say it, and the result will appear on your mobile screen.

Google Now, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are the precursors to this technology. Search engines are receiving more and more queries from digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Now.

google-now

It was found that  55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis, and that number is only growing.

So, if your business or brand isn’t considering the rise of this technology, you’re already lagging. This is definitely the future of SEO and in upcoming years if you want your business to gain more mobile traffic, then you must prepare for this trend.

Social network and search engine will work together

Google shows less results related to Facebook and Twitter when we search for news items. But in an upcoming year, we will witness more results from social media pages in the Google search engine. Even now, your social media footprint is a crucial factor for search engine rankings.

Consequently, the boundary line between social media and the search engine will get blurred in next five years.

Search Box Optimization will be used more

search-box-optimization
Yeah, I know this one looks like a black hat SEO practice. But it isn’t. Future holds a time when this will become a good friend of SEO professionals.

But why?

Search box optimization is the method of tricking Google to put your brand or blog name in Google suggest. And it was also found that 75% of marketers have benefited through this auto search suggestion. There are companies who are already using this method to increase the visibility of their brand even before the user hit the search button.

Content will be searched by advanced semantic search technique

google-semantic-web
Semantic search is an advanced data search technique which will improve the search accuracy of the searcher by understanding the contextual meaning of the search word and the intent of the searcher rather than focusing on finding just the keywords.

This advance technique fetches more results from the database and provide them to the searcher.

No wonder that this is the future of marketing. By applying the following tips, you can make the most of semantic search.

  • Create content that is understandable.
  • Try to identify the “companion” words that usually follow the keyword and insert them into your content. That way, you’ll be able to provide some clues related to the subject of your content to search engines.
  • Use variations and synonyms of words that are directly related to the subject matter of your content.
  • Use the keywords effectively to take complete advantage of semantic search.
  • Link to third-party websites related to some aspect of your business/domain/industry to provide your users with more value.
  • Mark up your content on specific social networking sites.
  • Use tools like schema.org, Yandex Checker, AlchemyAPI, Schema Creator, Gruff etc. to add more semantic value to your content.

Conclusion
One thing is clear. Those who are saying that the rise of content means the demise of SEO are totally wrong. It is continuously evolving with the evolution of search engine to make the user experience better.

The point throughout these developments is to be prepared and keep updating SEO skills with the latest technology. And that’s the only way to stay ahead of your SEO competitors.