The year has flown by again and the new year is already at the door. So it’s high time we take you through the most important SEO trends and SEO tips for the year 2018. The wondrous world of SEO is developing at lightning speed. On top of that, Google is also getting smarter by the day. Read in our blog how you can still make the difference with your SEO in 2018.

SEO tips & trends 2018 with practical tips!

Hundreds of developments naturally happen at the same time. We’ve taken the trouble to lay out the most important trends for you, explain them, and give practical tips along the way. In the SEO trends of 2018 too, this holds: everything hinges on usability and relevance for your visitor. The shift from desktop to mobile internet also continues undiminished, and we see that reflected in the 2018 trends too.

SEO trends 2018: Rankbrain

Google Rankbrain is a self-learning algorithm that uses user interaction data to rank your website in the organic results. The ranking is by now influenced by hundreds of factors. Factors like click-through rate (CTR) and so-called dwell time are considered among the most important SEO factors in 2018. We explain exactly what this means and why it ultimately all comes down to relevance.

CTR – the click-through rate

The click-through rate is one of the metrics Google uses to determine your position in the search results. The percentage of visitors who actually click on your page once it’s shown in the search results — that’s your click-through rate, or CTR. That CTR is very telling for Google is fairly logical. After all, if a result gets clicked a lot, it’s reasonably obvious that the result seems interesting to the visitor.
Over the past years we’ve seen that the click-through rate in organic search results is declining across the board. This is mainly because Google pays a lot of attention to ads, product carousels, automatic answers via structured data and much more. Below you can see how results are displayed at the so-called ‘position 0’.
Ads above the organic search results:

structured data and automatically generated answers (the most deadly for your organic CTR!):

product carousels:

4 SEO tips to compensate for a declining (organic) CTR

1. Keep mainly aiming to answer your visitor’s question with your content. So write rock-solid content! The content should answer your visitor’s question as completely as possible and preferably also offer a bit of extra relevant information.
2. Also think about the meta descriptions of your page, so that the searcher can already read on Google’s results page what to expect on your page. A tip for your meta description: look at the meta descriptions of ads. These are often already fully optimised (careful: no copy-paste!)
3. Give your content marketing a boost. Also write more often about related ‘off-topic’ subjects to reach a bigger audience. You can then reach this audience with a retargeting campaign to convert a portion of these visitors (prompt them to take action).
4. Use structured data wherever possible. Various plugins are available for platforms like WordPress and Magento. This structured data is retrieved very easily by a search engine. The great thing about this is that Google displays this kind of data above the organic search results. This is the so-called position 0. We see a lot of this reflected here, such as automatic answers, product carousels and more.

What the Dwell (time)?

Dwell time is a combination of CTR, session duration and bounce rate. For Google, this complex calculation is an important indicator that shows how relevant your content is to the user. If someone visits your website and this visitor leaves the website again without any interaction, that’s seen as a bounce. The bounce rate alone, however, is too simplistic. You often see that blogs have hugely high bounce rates, even though most visitors do take the time to read (part of) the blog.
We’ll never really know exactly how Google works. Google, after all, is always secretive about the exact factors and how calculations come about. Most marketers agree, based on experiments and data, that dwell time is an important ranking factor in the organic search results.

Dwell time = being relevant

Relevance and user experience are the key to organic success. If you’re relevant and visitors stay on your website, you automatically have a good dwell time. So think of visitors’ search terms as questions and answer these questions as well as possible with a landing page. So: visitor search term = question, your landing page = answer.
Always make sure the user experience is completely tip-top by giving a full answer to the user’s question. Preferably you also give them a bit of extra (relevant) information. That makes the user — and Google — happy.
Make sure the content and information are rock-solid. Also go into depth on the subject matter. Use videos and images to make your message even clearer. Also link from your content to other pages if you’re covering topics you don’t want to elaborate on further on your page, but that are still important/useful/informative for the user.

SEO trends 2018: video content, make sure you join in!

If you’re not already working on video content, it’s time to get started as soon as possible. Expectations are, after all, that video content will make up more than 80% of the total data traffic on the internet. Research firm Cisco shows this in a graph:

The reason for the increase in video content is also easy to explain: user convenience. The vast majority of people prefer to be informed via a video rather than plain text. What’s more, images speak to the imagination far more than plain text.

Video in the search results

This had already been the case for a while in the United States, but by now we’re also increasingly seeing YouTube videos appear in the organic search results in the Netherlands. Besides convenience for your visitor, videos are therefore also very interesting for your business!

Video dimensions: landscape, portrait… or square?

Frankwatching recently wrote an interesting article about square videos. Square videos take up 78% more space on a mobile display. These videos are therefore displayed considerably larger. This also makes the chance of them being seen a lot bigger.

If you think about it, it also makes sense. Many people use their phone, where portrait or landscape orientation makes a big difference. A landscape image isn’t displayed nicely when someone holds their phone upright, and vice versa.
With square videos, the position of the device doesn’t matter for the display. Whether you hold your device upright or on its side, the video is then displayed at the same size. This makes for a nicer user experience and a bigger chance that your video stands out. Ultimately this translates back into more interaction. And that’s what it’s all about in the end, of course!

SEO tip: embedded video on your page

Videos on your YouTube channel are interesting for several reasons. Besides the fact that YouTube is the second-biggest search engine in the world after Google (hint!), you can also display embedded videos from your YouTube channel on your website. Google sees this as a valuable enrichment of the user experience, which therefore benefits your SEO score.
Embedded videos on your page lead to a longer session duration. Let’s assume for a moment that you place a video that’s highly relevant and an addition to the content on that page. Visitors then take the time to watch your video, meaning they stick around longer.
As mentioned earlier, this session duration of your visitors in turn makes sure you score better in Google’s search results. It’s, after all, a logical thought that if the visitor spends more time on your page, you probably have something useful to say too.

SEO Trends 2018: Voice Search

We’re all by now reasonably familiar with spoken search queries. Think, for example, of Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. This is software that carries out commands based on your spoken instruction. Google also offers this option. You can select the ‘OK Google’ option in Google’s settings. When you then say ‘OK Google’, you activate the spoken search command function. Very handy!

Current facts about voice search

• Today, 40% of adults use voice search at least once a day.
• According to Microsoft, Cortana has 133 million monthly users
• In America in 2016, 1 in 5 Android app searches were voice-driven
• 25% of 16-24 year-olds use voice-driven search

Why voice search?

A combination of the rise of internet via mobile devices and the availability of voice-driven ‘assistants’ like Siri and Cortana is causing the way people search for information to change dramatically. It’s expected that 50% of all searches in 2020 will be voice-driven searches. The main reasons for voice-driven searches also make clear exactly why this is so popular with everyone:

• User convenience, especially if you’re busy doing something else in the meantime
• Faster results
• Many people struggle with typing on other (smaller) devices

Be future-proof and prepare for voice search

Google uses featured snippets (structured data) to give direct answers on the search results page. The same goes for voice-driven commands. If you’re not yet using structured data for voice-driven search, you can read here how this works.

SEO trends 2018: Mobile First index

Now that more than half of all search traffic goes via mobile, Google is working on ranking websites based on their mobile display. Expectations are that this will be rolled out sometime in 2018. Don’t have responsive design yet? Then it’s important to arrange this in the short term. After all, you don’t want to notice any negative consequences in your ranking. How big the impact will be isn’t known yet, but make sure you’re ready for it. Also make sure you’re not hiding any content on your mobile display, and instead show the same valuable content if you want to be sure it gets indexed.

Mobile first SEO tips 2018

• Make sure you have a mobile-friendly website (responsive). Make an appointment right away to make your website responsive
• Test your mobile website
• Keep both your desktop and mobile page speed optimal
• Go for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). These are extremely fast HTML pages that can display photos, videos and text super fast.
• Look into the possibilities for a Progressive Web App (PWA). These are, after all, faster apps and are therefore beneficial for the user experience. And therefore also your SEO score!
• Make sure all content is visible on your mobile site, so that Google can index it
• Think carefully about your internal link structure. Large dropdown menus, after all, disappear on mobile displays. Link from your text to deeper-lying pages

SEO trends 2018: the AMP project

We’ll stay with mobile topics a bit longer, because we’d like to go a little deeper into Google’s AMP project. A while back, Google started promoting AMP pages. Here you can read Google’s official announcement.

Accelerated Mobile Pages more appealing to the user

As mentioned earlier, Accelerated Mobile Pages are special mobile pages that can display rich content (photos, videos and text) extremely fast. These pages load extra fast on mobile, making them appealing to mobile users.

User experience is key

Ultimately, the user experience on your website is what leads Google to rank your page in the organic results. The better the user experience, the more Google rewards you. It’s expected that Google will soon also give these pages priority in the search results. Google has even launched an open source framework for this.

AMP or not?

There are contradictions going around about AMP. We believe, in any case, that mobile sites are the future, and we see that reflected in the rise in mobile traffic too. It’s therefore fairly plausible to say that Google is focusing on developments that benefit the mobile experience. The AMP project would therefore fit that picture very well.

SEO trends 2018: rock-solid content

If you want to score in the search engines nowadays, small blog posts and pages work less and less well. That’s because Google’s algorithms keep getting smarter, and because of the growing competition in your field. Everyone, after all, is working on SEO, if things are going well (hint!). By now Google understands very well whether your content or page matches the visitor’s expectation. As we mentioned at the start of the blog, click-through rate, bounce rate and session duration of your visitors are important indicators for determining how valuable your content is.

SEO tip 2018: enrich your content and make it complete

Make sure you have rich content where you go into depth and make use of multimedia content, such as images and videos. Also place relevant outgoing links if you don’t want to elaborate further on a particular topic but still want to give the user the option to read more about that topic. Make sure your information provision is complete.
Most pages that rank high in the search results have more than 1,000 words. Research even shows that the 1st and 2nd results on Google’s results page contain an average of 1,800 words.
So you can’t get away with it easily if you still want to score. Make sure you really add value. Of course you shouldn’t write just for the sake of writing. When you have nothing more to say about a particular topic, you especially shouldn’t repeat yourself just to reach that 1,000 words. The point is that you should be as complete as possible, so the user’s questions are answered optimally.

Conclusion

Developments in SEO-land continue at full speed, undiminished. What’s important today can already be outdated next year. For the coming year, it’s especially important to focus on:

• The mobile experience
• Relevance and enrichment of your content
• Boosting your video content

If after reading this blog you’re thinking: my god, where do I even start!? Then get in touch with one of our consultants and we’ll make sure you can keep scoring in 2018 too!