Before we talk about the possible future of SEO and predictions from different SEO experts, it is good to understand what is SEO and how it works and evolve over the years.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization which is an online process where users will use search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing to get the traffic from free or organic search results which are most relevant to the users.
To the website owners, the purpose of doing SEO for their business is to increase the quality and quantity of the online traffic to their website through organic search engine results. It is different from SEM (Search Engine Marketing) as the website owner do not need to pay for any traffic in the search engine when people click on the search results that link to your website. Thus choosing the right keywords for SEO will determine the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERPs) of the website.
Nowadays, there are many methods and channels to improve the keywords ranking for SEO which is much easier to learn and do. For example, using built-in SEO solutions can assist new website’s owners to not only build their website in an SEO friendly manner but also guides the owner on how to optimize their website’s content to increase the keyword’s ranking in the search engine.
The only downside of using these built-in tools or apps is that it does not offer much customization options to cater for different company’s business objective, the content analysis tools may not be up to date to match the requirements of the search engine’s algorithm, not to mention the fact that most built-in tools do not follow with the owner to evaluate the website’s performance or advise them on how to get better ranking results over time.
While there are different opinions from SEO professionals on how the future of SEO will go, I have done some research and list down some of the best possibilities which SEO will look in the near future.
- Popular search engines like Google might focus on the technology to detect and understand the voice input of the person and access to the desired search results. Although this technology is available now, there is room for further improvement in voice search SEO by creating smarter algorithms that can decipher complex or lengthy voice inputs that can give the most relevant search results for the person.
- Using Artificial intelligence (short for AI) is definitely the next revolution that will create a great impact on the future of SEO. A good example will be Google’s Rankbrain algorithm that aims to improve search results via machine consistent learning to understand, translate user’s intention and gives better search results in terms of quality and quantity.
- There will be a more in-depth focus to improve the user’s experience in terms of getting the best search results and better content. This means that more attention will be pay to optimize the website’s content, multimedia and richer snippets for SEO purpose.
- Many SEO experts have foreseen that on the development of better contents, many businesses will rely more on the use of social media to promote the content that not only has a strong impact in the SERPs but also change the way on how the native advertising works in the future.
- In the near future, there will be a stronger “alliance” between SEO, social media and PR & marketing practices that will further isolate unorthodox methods and software that aims to increase the SEO ranking. This means that’s SEO will focus on creating quality content in terms of textual, videos, images, interactive applications and so on. Link building will also evolve to relationship building in the near future that integrates PR to network and improves the SEO ranking for the website.
Looking at the current trend of online search behavior from the consumer’s market, digital marketers and business owners will need to understand and adapt to stay in the competition of getting the best results for their SEO campaign.
