Six Effective Methods to Boost Your SEO Campaign in 2018

20 March 2018 Maria Jones

Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the most crucial aspects of digital marketing strategies in the modern era. Whether small or big, business houses need to implement SEO in their online marketing campaign to stay ahead of their competitors. SEO is an ongoing process that meets new trends and strategies every year. These trends are mostly due to the latest changes in search engine algorithms.

To ensure the success of your company’s SEO campaign, you need to keep an eye on the search engine algorithm updates in 2018 and employ the strategies and trends in your marketing campaign that will dominate the online market this year. Look at these tips and tricks to get ahead of your competitors in the industry, improve your brand visibility and your website’s performance on search engines.

Focus on Voice Search

In 2016, Google announced that around twenty percent of search queries on mobile platforms were voice based. Two years later, the question that every marketer is facing - How to implement the smart speaker sales? For Amazon Echo and Google Home, the sales in 2017 escalated profoundly, and in 2018, the sales will probably reach record-breaking heights. Since these speakers offer voice search results and no typing is required due to voice activation, more and more users are finding these as an excellent tool for making queries and access the search engine results. With the development of voice-based search, it is time to evolve your attitude and SEO methods. You need to customize your SEO strategies catering to this trend. Your website’s content must have a conversational tone with more long-tail keywords.

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Make Your Site Mobile Responsive

In recent years, mobile device usage has witnessed a dramatic surge and has grabbed the attention of major search engines like Google. As search queries taking place through mobile devices increases, Google might switch to a mobile-first index in 2018. A great way to prepare for the mobile-first index is to have a mobile site. There are two ways to build a mobile site for your business:

Design a clone of your desktop site and place it on any sub-domain of your main domain. Then, customize that site to look well on small screens of compact devices.
Create a mobile responsive site, one that displays content suitable for the screen size of the user. A mobile responsive site is well-functioning, as well as, loved by both visitors and Google.

With the rising trend of the mobile-first index, creating a responsive mobile site sounds a great option. That is because Google will rank you better based on the content and quality of your mobile version rather than its desktop counterpart. Therefore, work on the page loading speed too and flourish on the SERPs.

Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages

Launched in 2016, Google’s Accelerated Mobile pages or AMP is no more a new concept to marketers. In 2018, AMP will offer you a lot of opportunities to enhance your SEO campaign and enrich the user experience on your site. AMP allows you to engage with your visitors more efficiently, as users on an AMP are more likely to communicate with any features you provide, such as links, videos, forms, buttons and many more. With AMP, your website will appear sleeker and offer more functionality.

Also, it is important to note that if your peers are using AMP, and you are not; you are more likely to lag in the competition. AMPs can help you in differentiating yourself positively and offer your visitors a great impression of your brand. You're welcome to check out our templates with accelerated mobile pages.

Shape Your Content for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are brief pieces of details promoted at the top of the SERP. They offer major search engine users with a condensed summary of the overall content on a website, along with the link to the site. The reason why Featured Snippets are an SEO trend is due to their capability of fetching at least ten percent of the organic traffic from the first page results showcased on the SERPs. Hence, it is critical to managing your content accordingly. Shaping your content for featured snippets profoundly influences the user experience and creates a positive impact on your brand. Moreover, search engine visitors find it more feasible to click on the link for the snippet rather than browsing the results below it. You can leverage the use of featured snippets by organizing your content and data and putting relevant and useful information on your site.

Optimize Your Keywords Strategically

The intent behind the search queries has now become an important consideration because of the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and smart assistants, machine learning, and personalization all through the various stages of SEO. In 2018, Google will keep an eye on user search history, geographic location, and the intention behind their query to display the current and most relevant information. With this prioritizing the user intent method of Google, it is imperative to set up your keyword optimization for this trend and work on to figure out the intent of your target audience.

High-quality Content Is Paramount

SEO trends come and prevail every year, but the only element that is stationary and defines the success of your SEO campaign is the content on your website. The quality and relevance of your website’s content are of incredible value to both the visitors and search engines. With tons of content present on the web, people have become selective about the content of a site. Low-quality content is bound to drive your site backward while excellent content will engage more users with your brand and search engines will prefer your website more.

Final Thoughts

In 2018, digital marketing is set to switch to the trends and tricks above. New trends are influencing search engine optimization, and for keeping your business stable, it is essential to pay attention to these trends. With the need for more online presence and higher user engagement, these trends are going to shape tomorrow’s SEO and digital marketing campaigns.