How SEO Marketing Is Changing in 2018?

by Kevin Smith Author

Several new technologies are changing the way internet marketing works. For developing your e-commerce SEO strategy for 2018, here’s everything you need to know about the future of online marketing.

Voice Searching

According to reports from the experts over at Search Engine Land, one out of every five mobile queries is generated by voice search. The voice search feature has been around for several years, so it’s nothing new to mobile users. However, the recent spike in voice-generated queries is due to an increase in home AI. Smart devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa have become more commonplace in homes around the world. People use them for everything like checking movie listings, looking up recipes, ordering take-out, and helping the kids with homework. This industry shift also signaled a change to keyword marketing strategies. Since people speak differently than they type, keywords are adapting to reflect natural speech rather than the written word.

Featured Snippets

The rise in voice searching has also lead to an increase in featured snippets. Google was the first to reinvent the standard SERP format with the featured snippets box. The box is displayed at the top of your first result page after a question-based query has been processed. The box contains the most relevant answer first before the organic search results. AI use a similar process by providing the person asking the question with the most relevant answer from a pool of organic results. While Google’s been vague on how to sites can improve their chances of getting in the snippet box, the engine seems to favor step-by-step lists and instructions when it looks for answers to how-to queries.

Image Analysis

While image search has been tricky to navigate in the past, search engines have refined their pages to make this feature more mobile-friendly. For companies that rely on e-commerce, this means stepping up your image game. The more images you have of your product and then better those images are, the more likely you are to turn up in an image search result. For businesses hoping to break into international markets, image search works to break down language barriers and generate results across borders.

Mobile-Friendly Index

Last year, Google announced that they were working on a mobile-first index for their search engine, expected for launch sometime in 2018. According to Google webmaster trends analyst, Gary Illyes, the mobile-first index would filter websites based on whether or not they’re mobile-friendly. Since more people are using their phones to browse the web, the ability for a website to adapt to mobile users is essential to ranking high on the major search engines. Reach more potential customers with a mobile-friendly interface and e-commerce SEO.