If the science that goes behind successful SEO wasn’t hard enough already, Panda and Penguin have made sure that no business can game the system. To make things go your way in this ever-changing search engine universe, it is essential that you are always abreast of what is working and what is not. As you slip into the holiday mode, we have done all the hard work and come out with a list of SEO trends which will gain trajectory in 2018. You’re welcome.

Machine learning meets content

Content has always been the king and will remain so. What’s going to change in 2018 is how Google maps user intent with the content on the page. Thanks to machine learning, search engine algorithms will get the chops to understand and fulfill the user’s intent for a search radically.
What this means for your SEO strategy is that you will need to make sure the content you put out answers multiple intents. This will maximize your chances of getting featured. You will also need to put different media types on the page because different personas come with different media preferences.

Voice search

You know how the Apples and the Amazons of the world are pouring research dollars into making their personal voice assistants – the Siris and the Alexas of the world – sound more human and become more functional? It’s for a reason. The uptake of voice search among teenagers and adults is growing much faster than typed search.

Now, voice search is more conversational in nature with people asking everyday questions in everyday language. This means that your SEO strategy also needs to be optimized to answer more verbose queries.

Mobile page acceleration

People simply don’t want to wait anymore to access anything. It’s the world of instant gratification. If your business mobile page doesn’t load in a flash, a user will abandon it more quickly than you can say the words: Mobile page acceleration.

Enter, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project – a set of guidelines designed to give you a simpler and lighter version of your HTML sites. Make your pages complaint with AMP and watch your pages load 30 times (no kidding!) faster than average.

Personalized search

So, you know how Google shows customized search results to people based not only on their query, but also their search history, location, etc.? Well, you don’t have to worry about this neat feature working against you.

There is a simple way to get personalized search results to improve your rankings. Concentrate on getting featured in the unbiased SERP results with a copy enticing enough for someone to click on. Once they click on your result, your site will become a part of their preferred sites in personalized results.

Quality backlinks

Gone is the time when all that mattered was the number of backlinks you could get. 2018 will be all about quality. The best links get featured on pages where it will be a natural action for a user to click on them. Another trend that will go hand in hand with this is getting a shout-out by quality websites – with or without links.

All this depends on creating content which is highly shareable. Original data and attractive visual elements will automatically attract influencers to share your content. And if you keep getting quality backlinks and mentions to your website, your rankings will improve for sure.

So, go ahead and leverage these SEO trends in 2018 to stay on top of search results and grow your traffic.