SEO trends to watch in 2018

Tom Mcloughlin, founder of travel marketing specialists SEO Travel, examines the key trends in online search and tells travel companies what to watch out for in 2018.

Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are changing the face of the search results, with many search queries delivering some form of answer box at the top of the results. This means you can jump to the top of results in ‘position 0’ even if you wouldn’t normally appear there in the usual circumstances. Obviously this is a huge opportunity for those that implement it correctly. So how do you do that? Follow a common format with your pages, which includes a short summary paragraph at the top, and well-formatted headers throughout the post. Including a list somewhere on the page will also help.

Mobile First
Google has been talking about introducing the mobile-first index for a long time, and it now feels closer than ever. You should already have a site which is well optimised for mobile, purely to cater to the amount of people who now use a mobile device to browse the web. However, this is about to become even more important as Google introduces mobile-first and mobile elements become even bigger ranking factors.

Voice Search
As a by-product of the increase in mobile use, voice search has also exploded. With more than 40% of adults using voices search daily, it is growing faster than any other type of search. You can benefit from this by creating content which answers questions, as this is is the most popular format used in voice searches. Make that content comprehensive and the best answer on the web, and you’ll be sat in a good position to benefit as this trend continues to rise.

Comprehensive Content
The importance of having great content will continue to increase, as Google gets better and better at working out what truly is high quality and ignoring manipulated signals that artificially push forward lower quality pages. There’s no shortcut to this, it’s just a case of getting some good old-fashioned elbow grease out, analysing what the best performing content is and then making something even better. It will take effort, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Links
Links will continue to matter in 2018, but they no longer serve as a stand-alone approach to gain success. You need to focus on getting high quality links through activities like PR and content marketing, and teaming that up with great content on your site that engages the user when they find you. Stop messing around with link schemes and shortcuts to getting links in the wrong places, and focus on fewer, but bigger wins in the placements you pursue.

User Intent
The intent of searches is an increasingly important factor, and you need to ensure your content serves the intent of the user. For example, for searches like ‘villas in spain’, the user wants to see a selection of villas, so if your page is just text and images, you won’t serve the intent of the query. You need some listings on your page to put yourself in the ring for those results. Check the page 1 results for the queries you want to appear for, and analyse more than ever what type of results are being returned. Then make sure your page is structured in the same way.

The core principles of SEO will remain the same next year; create the best content out there and promote it well and you will see success. However, you can see from the pointers above that there are certain areas you can give yourself an extra leg-up. If you become one of the earlier adopters in these areas, you’ll give yourself the opportunity of seeing even better returns.

You can follow Mcloughlin on Twitter for actionable tips and advice on how to grow travel websites.