As we know, every day, the competition is greater on the Internet, so it costs more to appear on the first pages of search engines. To this, we must add that Google updates its algorithm more frequently, thus changing the search engine’s ranking criteria. Although it is sometimes difficult to understand the internet giant, digital marketing and SEO positioning professionals are already used to its continuous changes and updates. We know that practices considered novel today can be modified quickly.
That is why SEO will no longer be as we use it today in a few years since trends and the ways consumers search will change, and this will mean that the techniques we currently use have to be updated. Although we cannot predict what SEO will be like in 2030, we can anticipate how consumer behavior will evolve. And I am going to do it by analyzing some essential points:
Artificial Intelligence is the leading technology in data analysis and the generation of adequate results for decision-making in all sectors. Therefore, it seems inevitable that such technology will influence and even dictate SEO practices for years to come.
Within RankBrain tools, Google uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), that is, how artificial intelligence interprets texts and data to offer users more accurate answers to their questions. Therefore, the experience the user has with the content will be more and more critical than with the words and length of your texts.
- Concerning the above, today, the user no longer writes isolated terms but increasingly complex phrases or questions. Thanks to RankBrain, Google can interpret these search queries and provide more relevant results according to the user’s intention. Therefore, even though using keywords is currently effective and allows us to rank a website higher, search engines are becoming much more sophisticated and can understand the user’s intention much better. As a result, these keywords will become less and less important over time.
- With more than half of all web traffic now coming from mobile devices, it’s no surprise that Google is placing more and more emphasis on mobile-friendliness in its search algorithm. Therefore, it is recommended that websites have a responsive design, load quickly, and are easy to navigate on a smartphone.
- Voice search is undoubtedly another of the trends of the moment, which will continue to grow in the coming years. More and more people are using voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant to search the web. The rise of voice search will significantly impact how we do SEO, and therefore it is essential to consider how voice search will affect a website. Therefore, if a website’s content does not begin to be already optimized for voice search, it will likely lose visitors and potential customers.
In addition, about the keywords mentioned above, it must be taken into account that when people express their searches out loud, they tend to use natural language instead of abbreviated keywords that they could type in a search engine.
- Content is still king for SEO, and visual content, in particular, will have an increasing influence on ranking. Google not only favors YouTube videos in search results but is also working on analytics on what is an audio clip, a video clip, and an image about. SEO for videos, for example, means optimizing the descriptions, tags, and duration of the video to position in the organic results of YouTube in a specific search, since let’s not forget that it is the second most used search engine on the Internet, only behind Google.
- The changes in cookies will have many effects in the coming years, especially in big data and digital marketing. Google has already announced that by the end of 2023, it will eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome, introducing new technologies with functions similar to the cookies we know today but more respectful of user privacy. How does all this affect SEO? The new positioning proposed to us without cookies will give more importance to the quality content we can create on our website to attract qualified web traffic.
- The unstoppable rise of Tiktok makes us think that social networks will continue to be that tremendous digital showcase for brands in the coming years. Although these are separate from the positioning factors of a page for Google, they do not help SEO indirectly. That is why search engines on social networks have a significant future ahead of them, and they will be improved in the coming years. Let’s not forget that social networks are currently the best way to create a link with the followers of a brand, and the more robust this link is, the more people will want to hear from it again, which translates into searches and, therefore, in traffic.
Therefore, the SEO expert must remain attentive to trends to know precisely what they are looking for, what they want, and how the audience thinks to anticipate and give them what they are looking for.