2017 has gone by so fast and there has been a lot going on in the SEO world. With massive fluctuations, all the way to the basics of SEO becoming ever more important to millions of online presences. It has been eventful, to say the least.

But what about next year? Is there anything we should be preparing or focusing on going into the new year? This blog post will highlight some of my focuses going into the new year and the things that I will be keeping an eye on very closely.

Voice Search

With the massive push of home automation devices such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, voice search is starting to become the norm within households. Translating this into web searches will become key for obtaining voice-based traffic.

Further Mobile Optimisations

Search through traffic is still rising quite considerably. In 2017, websites were penalised if they had slow page speeds and Google also revealed their separate mobile search engine which rewarded well-coded pages with a quick page speed. This tied in well with AMP push for article and blog based content.

I predict that in 2018 there will be further rules put forward for mobile search, increasing the chances for additional penalties. So making sure your mobile responsive websites are properly optimised will be essential.

Backlinking

Links will always play a massive part in SEO. It was stated in 2017 that links are in the top 3 for ranking factors. But with the amount of negative SEO and unethical link building practices surrounding this, I predict Google will cotton on to this and develop better algorithms for link profiles for the largest websites.

As a result of this, penalties could be larger, and this will reinforce content marketing – something that has been rapidly growing over the last few years.

Content Marketing

You will hear it time and time again from any professional SEO expert – “To build links and to rank, you will have to provide quality content”.

The content marketing war will definitely continue into 2018. With marketers constantly competing to create the most random and informative content on the web. Get your trending and event calendar out people, you will need to be the first to post about anything if you want to get an advantage over your competitors.

User Experience (as a whole)

User experience is a big thing in terms of design. In recent years, Google is building on its ability to read JS based code to understand the design of a website. I believe this may start to be rewarded and websites that are visually pleasing (and maybe a low bounce rate) may receive rewards within the SERPs.

On the other side of user ability, I believe the patterns in which people are searching will change. What I mean by that is that people are changing the way in which they search. Target keywords which were relevant last year, or the year before, will have less search volume – pushing SEO’s to redo keyword research.

Local Search

Here at Bravr, we have been seeing a lot of fluctuations in the keyword rankings and all of this relates to local search. Local SEO is nothing new, but going into the new year, I'm sure that we will see more fluctuations related to Local SEO and the rich snippets that surround it. This will help local businesses rank even better for larger keywords, offering the user more of a variety of local and national terms.

If you are not optimised for local at this point, I would strongly recommend that you look into it as it will be a big player for 2018.

But over all we can only wait and see. SEO is forever a changing game and as SEO’s, our aim is to stay on top of this. Here at Bravr, we will be keeping a close eye on all of this to ensure that 2018 will be a successful one.