SEO in 2018 -Top 5 critical areas to focus upon in 2018

SEO in 2018 will continue to see a focus on some of the key areas that have been in focus in 2017 as well…however the key thing for SEO in 2018 would be “Interactive & personalized search results and voice search”, and therefore relevance will continue to be one of the most important aspects of SEO in 2018.

1. Relevance:

Relevance was always relevant:) and for SEO in 2018  even more so…I can’t stress the importance of relevance enough. This is the key, if this one thing is done well, 70% of your work is done. Not only does your content need to be relevant and unique, relevance has to be everywhere, starting from SEO basics, such as, page titles, description meta tag to anchor texts, to outgoing, and incoming links, to navigation…everywhere.

Since your  objective is to show up, attract, retain, and serve the end users….paying careful attention to Google Rank Brain, Interactive search results, and Google snippets (the SERPs are being inundated with results based on these factors) will help. All these are focused on relevance and authority. Relevance is THE thing to focus on in 2018.

2. Speed:

Optimizing for faster downloading sites is critical for SEO in 2018. With high speed internet connections, one would think that every website downloads pretty fast and therefore speed should not be a concern but a whole lot of people still do not have good connectivity, and many, in fact most users search on the move, and the connectivity may not be optimal all the time. And even if the speed is optimal, some sites do not download fast enough.

With most searches happening from mobile devices (more in my next point) and with searchers wanting answers right away, it absolutely makes sense to have faster downloading sites that download fast. Optimizing for faster downloading sites is therefore a must, else you will lose out on potential customers for sure.

3. Optimizing for Mobile devices:

Optimizing websites for mobile devices continues to be critical in 2018…soon we will have pretty much every person searching from their mobile devices. You may want to check out this post on how you can optimize for mobile devices.

4. A strong presence across various social media sites:

With SERPs showing relevant results from across various social media sites, such as Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Google plus, we cannot not pay attention to optimizing for social media sites as well. A strong optimized presence across all the social media sites is a must for your SEO in 2018.

5. Voice search:

One of the fastest growing ways of searching….speaking and not typing is the most convenient thing for searchers these days, and there is already a significant population searching with voice. Content that flows naturally will be the obvious choice for voice search. It is recommended that you use keywords and phrases that naturally flow in your content. If you force keywords where they do not sound natural, it may actually end up hurting rather than helping your ranking.

In addition to the above-mentioned, links will continue to play an important part in SEO.

I wish you a very happy new year 2018. May you rank higher and higher and successfully optimize for a higher visibility across all the popular channels.