Search marketing consistently outperforms other digital marketing tactics for return on investment. An effective search marketing campaign, will encompass both search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click advertising (PPC). Like the rest of the digital landscape, SEO marketing is continuously evolving. It’s important for any professional in this field to keep up to date with the changes in trends and algorithms.

Mobile First

Of course, mobile has had a dramatic impact on the digital landscape over the past few years. This is typified by the Mobile-First Index Roll-out on 26 March 2018, which was announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. What this meant was that after a lot of testing, Google confirmed it is moving a large number of sites to this mobile-first indexing process. In essence, Google systems for crawling and creating its index will be much more heavily focused on a mobile-first experience going forward.

For clients with a responsive website in main, the roll-out should have little impact; however, it does get a little trickier for those clients with a desktop and mobile site. For example, if a website has a device type redirect in place, then the mobile crawler will see the mobile site only. This means that if some content is missing from the mobile site in comparison with the desktop site, then it will be not be seen by Mobile Googlebot and will not be included in the mobile first index. So, the advance here is to ensure all key content is present on both mobile and desktop versions of your website.

Maccabees

At the end of last year (2017) we also saw the Maccabees update. Google announced that they released several minor improvements over the period of the period of about a week and after analysis, experts within the SEO industry concluded that the updates were the result of keyword permutations and site using doorway pages. The creation of multiple landing pages for close keyword permutations undermines user experience and of course is an indicator of spam for search engines. It’s for these reasons that it is a tactic that we would always advise against.

Fred

Another fairly recent but unconfirmed update dubbed ‘Fred’, looks to devalue affiliate-heavy or ad-centred content. The update rolled out in March 2017 and mainly sites (particularly blogs) with low quality posts that appear to have been created largely for the purpose of generating ad revenue. This update has a number of implications for clients:

• Ensure ads are placed on high quality websites
• In terms of outreach targets for content marketing, avoid websites such as those described above at all costs!

This is something that we will continue to see impact both websites looking to place content on other websites, as well as publisher websites into 2018 and beyond.

For me, the most impactful algorithm updates are often unconfirmed. While we can see their impact in SERPs, any detail surrounding them is still yet to be provided by Google as well as some the well-known, historic names such as, Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird and of course Rank Brain.

The future of engagement in SEO

In my view, engagement is incredibly important and always has been for SEO. For example, Google has access to a wealth of data including metrics from search engine results pages such as click through rate, through to key engagement metrics taken from individual websites that use Google Analytics. With that in mind, it seems to me incredibly unlikely that data would not be used to either directly or indirectly inform search engine results.

There is no point in wasting resource and efforts to rank highly for a generic keyword (albeit with high search volume) if that results in users not engaging with your website because it is not specific enough. Equally, there is no point in wasting your SEO marketing efforts by delivering lots of traffic to your website from highly relevant search queries, if the user experience upon landing on that website is poor quality.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence or AI has become a buzzword of the past couple of years and is set to go on to be a 2019 trend. Positioned by the media as a phenomenon that seems destined to impact to all aspect of our lives in the imminent future. While the goal of introducing AI into search engine algorithms is to predict results that are more useful to humans, Google’s continued efforts to embrace AI means we can expect to see more and more search results where ranking factors change from query to query. This will be impacted by factors such as location, search history, favourite websites and what other users clicked on for a similar query. The algorithm learns from the behaviour undertaken and data relevant to a given search query and uses it to decides on the most relevant factors to take into account for each search moving forward.

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