SEO, as well as social media marketing, and marketing in general, continues to evolve and shift. How can anyone keep up? It is like trying to nail jello to a wall sometimes. Staying on top of this forever changing landscape can be a challenge. There are some new trends developing however, that you must be aware of and be ready to prepare for and deploy. If you don’t, you can petty much be assured that your rivals are.
- Perhaps the most challenging of the current trends is what is known as the zero-result click. What has been happening, at the Google search engine at least, is that Google’s AI brings up a brief snippet of info at the top of every SERP. Google’s AI, in effect, has answered the searcher’s question already. According to recent research published by Entrepreneur magazine, nearly 62% of all SERPs now have the Google AI snippet at the top. No one knows how the Google AI chooses the snippet or how to optimize for that yet. First company to figure it out will likely dominate Google SERPs.
- The next innovation that has been moving rather slowly, but surely, is advertising on the so called “smart speakers”. Why they don’t just tell people that Alexa and Siri are fully functional AI is a mystery but more and more companies are looking to buy advertising on these AI “smart speaker” platforms. Stay tuned…
- Finally, two areas of growing importance are going to take on even greater importance for your overall SEO marketing efforts and those are chatbots and mobile search. Right now, around 70% of all searches are being carried out on a mobile device and voice search has crept up to around 20% of all searches and will only be growing. If your SEO is not optimized for mobile then you are already way behind. Chatbots are becoming more and more sophisticated every day and continue to play a major and growing role in online customer service.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
