Last Updated on January 14, 2018
2018 is expected to be the golden year for SEO. One should be aware of certain facts to enhance the traffic of your website by getting good knowledge about current trends in the optimization. SEO is a complicated thing to understand as Google considers over 200 factors to design algorithms for search engine rankings. All the search engines work to improve the quality of their rankings. Some factors may vary in the objectives, some factors may become void and new ranking factors may sometimes come on to the stage. In the current year, the following factors may dominate the picture of search engine rankings.
- Impact of SERP features
SERP features such as local packs, featured snippets, knowledge panels etc are helpful to grab the attention of the searchers and make your website top the organic listings. Most of us think that #1 rank in organic listings is helpful to get your website massive traffic. SEO Powersuite’s Rank tracker helps to evaluate the position of your website in the organic listings and you can track the SERP features your website is containing to top the searches. You can analyze the productivity of SERP features on a daily basis to get a clear picture of the steps to be taken to enhance your website rankings.
- Structured Data
There is no official strategy about impact of structured data in deciding the website traffic trends. Structured data is a method of formatting HTML in the form of specific vocabulary and this plays a decisive part in analyzing SERP features of a particular website. Experiments prove that structured data plays a vital role in boosting click through rate (CTR) of the websites. You can use structured data format to improve your website rankings based on your convenience. Most of the SEO experts prefer the tool from schema.org to implement structured data formats.
- Loading speed counts
We cannot affirm that only the page speed is the factor to improve the website traffic but it is the important point to be focussed on for long term benefits. Speed is not the only ranking indicator but it affects the UX factor which in turn helps to get more traffic for your website. You can take Google’s page speed test, launch your project and take the test of the tool website Auditor. You can then navigate to content analysis section and assess the speed of a specified page with the help of this tool. Take care that your page loading speed is up to 2 to 3 seconds but not more.
- Relevant Content
It is hard to boost your website rankings unless you make Google believe that the content in your website is relevant, unique and is of high-quality. Google assesses the website content quality by methods like Latent Semantic Indexing and ranks the websites in search pages based on the quality and the relevance of the content. Sometimes your website may get penalized for showing low quality or irrelevant content. By using the tool Rankbrain, you can assess the relevance of your website content and proceed further.
- Voice search
Google research shows that 45 percent of adults and 55 percent of teens use voice search to search for particular content. The ratio of voice search is on the rise day by day when compared to type search. Voice searches use normal vocabulary when compared to complex words. To analyse the SEO trends, you can take the help of the tool Rank Tracker in order to make changes in your website and get massive traffic for your website. You can research about common questions asked by voice searchers to get awareness about SEO trends day by day.
- Never ignore mobile searches
Just like voice searches, web browsing through mobile devices is also growing day by day. To improve your website rankings, you cannot dare to ignore mobile-friendliness of your website. It is not an exaggeration if anybody says half of the Google searches are from mobile devices. The tool Web Auditor helps to assess mobile friendliness of your website. This tool helps to point out problems that are to be fixed and steps you have to take to enhance your website rankings.
- Relevant back links
The back links you provide for your website must be relevant and legitimate. Google is striving to design complicated algorithms to eliminate from searches or penalize the websites that promote spam or irrelevant back links. Back links are mostly proved to be manipulative and Google is acting swiftly to make such pages with linkless back links off the search pages. There is a myth that more back links give more website traffic but websites with low quality back links will be penalized by Google. Awario, backlink checker are some of the applications that support your website to check irrelevant back links and promote your brands and websites.
- Personalized SERP to impact website rankings
Personalized SERP is the current SEO trend that is helpful to decide website traffic. The information about the searchers like location, search history is also effective to improve website traffic in addition to the traditional ranking factors. Research shows that 50 percent of Google search results are personalized. You can check for progress of your website rankings in a depersonalized manner but it is safe to go private for better results in your assessment. Tools like Rank Tracker supports you to check personalized SERP features that impact your website traffic in an easy and productive manner. You need not set any extra preferences for this. You can check depersonalized SERP features by default using Google search.
To get accurate results about your website rankings, you can take the help of tools like Rank Tracker. Only thing you have to remember here is that your rank tracking should be accurate. You need not panic as the personalized SERP features are not effective all the time. You can impress a searcher who checks for a particular keyword and content by good presentation of high quality content.
