In recent years, the term “Search Engine Optimization,” or SEO, has evolved into an advanced science from a term that once amounted to little more than stuffing a page full of keywords. Anybody who knows how the internet works recognizes the importance of SEO for any business and how it helps you generate web traffic in order to reach a larger amount of potential clientele. Search Engine Optimization is essential for a company’s web traffic to be able to grow so that they can continue to reach out to new potential clients and customers about their products and services. By following webmaster guidelines or hiring a trusted SEO company, you are able to grow your brand and company and stand out from the crowd to stay all the way ahead of the pack. But you may be thinking- what exactly is the future of SEO?
The internet is constantly shifting and evolving, and it can be hard to keep up sometimes about what is actually important and will continue to help your brand and business expand through increased web traffic. Search Engine Optimization is here to stay, and there are many, many reasons why this concept will continue to grow in importance. Read on to learn more about the future of SEO and why you as a business and brand need to utilize or continue to utilize and upgrade your SEO efforts in order to stay competitive in your industry, as web traffic has become such a key factor in garnering potential clients and customers and to promote your products and services. MyCity Social is a top Orlando SEO Company who is able to help grow your web presence through increasing your search engine rankings and other digital marketing efforts. Contact MyCity Social in Orlando today for your SEO needs today to grow your business!
What is SEO?
Firstly, it’s important for business owners to understand exactly what SEO is and how this concept when put into practice is able to help their businesses grow. In today’s digital market, the vast majority of companies are aware of the concept and are at least attempting to utilize it in order to expand their brand and increase web traffic. There are many strategies that are utilized in order to get a web page to rank high and appear at the top of the search engine results page in search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and they all fall under the blanket term Search Engine Optimization. Basically, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, consists of choosing the target topics you want to rank for, defining high traffic keywords, tailoring the company page or blog post to suit it, and then scrambling to get quality backlinks and exposure on social media. The competition in this day and age has made it more difficult for webmasters to target high volume keywords, which means that SEO has shifted to the long tail strategy as it has become more crucial for starter SEO efforts. When it comes to the search engine rankings that are the most important today, Google is undeniably the winner of the search engine wars, and is the most important of the search engines that we use. The majority of SEO is now geared towards catering to Google’s algorithms due to this domination of the search engine market by Google. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the future of SEO is necessarily set in stone.
There are many aspects of SEO that continue to shift and evolve, which is why it’s important to always stay on your feet when it comes to new and changing ways that web traffic is affected. Starting a search engine was like a suicide mission for a very long time, due to Google’s iron grip on the market. However, things are always changing, and people do seem to be getting increasingly skeptical of Google’s data practices and the fact that they are profiteering off of people’s data. While Google remains dominant for the foreseeable future, there is a new search engine on the block today called Ecosia, which promises to plant trees using 80% of their profits, and at the moment has 7 million users and continues to gain traction. As we previously discussed, while SEO back in the days used to consist of little more than discovering the right keywords and stuffing pages with them, Google’s algorithms have been getting progressively more and more advanced (and life-like) with each passing year since then. To experts such as top Orlando SEO company MyCity Social, SEO looks like it is moving towards having a lot less to do with keywords and a lot more to do with readability and a user friendly experience.
What Is The Future of SEO? Experts Speak.
There are many predictions regarding the current state as well as the foreseeable future of SEO and its evolution. Anthony De Guzman, an SEO Specialist at Shopify, notes that there will be a large involvement from voice search in the future of SEO, particularly around research for content and keywords. As Google’s question/answer knowledge graphs expand gradually, along with a push for smart home technologies such as Google Home and Amazon Echo, Guzman believes that there will be a change in content marketing towards solving the immediate needs that people pose their voice search queries for. The owner of ™ Blast, Greg Kristan, notes that in order to stand out from the competition as SEO continues to evolve, it is important to incorporate log file analysis. There are many tools that are free on the internet which webmasters often utilize such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools which are able to inform you about how many pages were crawled on in a specific day, but these tools don’t provide you with what content that these pages held.
“Think of it like this. You have some core pages on your site that can’t rank on page one in Google or Bing. To improve these pages, you change the title tag, build some links, write new content, add new pictures, and more, but nothing changes regarding the rank position,” says Kristan. Using a log file, webmasters are able to view exactly what Google and Bing are searching for when they navigate towards your site, meaning that you are then able to find out what sections of your website are not using their crawl budget effectively and thus not seeing these changes. This makes it much easier for webmasters to experiment with various tactics with their sitemap and fetch pattern in order to see if they are able to direct Google and Bing to crawl their most important pages in a more efficient way.
Artificial Intelligence is the Future
Both Anthony Neal Macri, the founder of ANM Digital Consulting, and Tyler Thursby, senior analyst and Zion and Zion, agree that the future of SEO lies primarily in the use of Artificial Intelligence. Once seeming like a science fiction term in a faraway future, nowadays Artificial Intelligence is a very real presence in the digital world. For a little bit over over a year, Google has been playing around with their new RankBrain algorithm, which is largely patterned on Artificial Intelligence. While Artificial Intelligence may at first glance look like it will doom the SEO industry, Macri believes that a more intelligent and human search engine can only serve to benefit SEO professionals. While some Search Engine Optimization professionals may think that AI is the end of the various tactics that they utilize in order to garner further rankings, this may not necessarily be the case. SEO professionals and digital marketers need to constantly change the way that they think, along with the way that technology moves. Rather than only concentrating on how a search engine may be thinking and how to create content to cater to the algorithms that Google uses, Macri finds it important to “think as a site or business owners and ultimately as the person entering the query on the search engine.” This is due to the fact that the way that a site or business owner enters a query into the search engine is the way that the AI will end up determining ranking, and that is what a top digital marketer such as MyCity Social will be asking themselves when they are developing a campaign, rather than constantly focusing on what kind of links that they should be building or what type of keyword density that they need to achieve. While these concepts are still important to SEO, being organic is very important.
Thursby also agrees with Macri that Artificial Intelligence is where SEO is headed towards in the future. “Massive investments are being made by some of technology’s most influential companies. Google’s RankBrain algorithm is improving search results through machine learning, helping translate user intent and semantic search queries, notes Thursby. In-home assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Echo are becoming increasingly common, and these tools all rely on semantic cues. There will continue to be huge leaps in the world of Artificial Intelligence as these types of tools settle into different sectors and find a more universal application, helping to improve the search process through being able to predict results and adding more personalization to the search process. “In what truly sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk recently announced Neuralink – a company with the ambitious goal of merging human brains with artificial intelligence. Musk believes a biological link with AI is a crucial step toward mitigating the looming threat of human irrelevance. As evident through innovations like self-driving cars, machines are poised to disrupt the fabric of our society as we know it. AI will change far more than search,” says Thursby.
However, no matter how much SEO ends up relying on voice search, Rank Brain, and AI, having rich, relevant content will continue to be just as crucial as ever to the rankings of a site. Greg Secrist, the Co-founder and CEO of BKA Content, notes that although the SEO of websites will shift towards different directions as Google’s algorithms improve, “having rich content on your site will be as important as ever, and the way we optimize content will most likely change as virtual assistants gain popularity.” It is true that Google will continue to become much more intelligent through Artificial Intelligence and Rankbrain, but Google will still continue to require a database of quality information to pull from, which means that the content that is hosted on a website will not become obsolete in importance but will remain essential to Google’s functions.
Contact Us Today
When it comes to the future of SEO, there are certain shifts in direction, but quality, consistent content remains as important as ever. This is why it may be in your business’s best interest to work with a top Orlando SEO Company such as MyCity Social to continue to grow your web traffic and presence. Call MyCity Social today for your SEO and digital marketing needs today!
