SEO Focus Areas 2018 Updated

The year 2017 was boiling with news and interesting features that impacted the SEO scene, and 2018 is only expected to be even more chaotic and information-packed, so it’s not a bad idea to take a look at what you can expect during the remaining 11 months of 2018. It will definitely prove useful and might give hints as to which direction further development of white label SEO services techniques might take.

Improve Your Ranking Factors

Although most, if not all, SEO experts are already familiar with the fact that improving your ranking factors is the main SEO technique used to rank higher (as the name implies), it is still a great idea to remind that it is still the most important method that you should utilize. All the other focus areas that will be discussed throughout the remainder of the article are important in their own way and in their own category, but they all pale in comparison to this.

It has been the SEO staple method for many years, and will definitely continue to be throughout 2018 and beyond, mainly because it is the method that addresses the search algorithm used by various platforms on the most fundamental level. Namely, you want to be focusing on the usual stuff – the number of total visits that your website gets in different periods of time, the percentage share of visits that are actually organic, the time spent on-site as well as the bounce rate, and, finally, the number of views on different pages your website might have.

Although the exact algorithm that Google and similar engines use for ranking is unknown, which is supposed to prevent artificially high rankings for someone who figured out how to exploit the algorithm, it is undeniable that they use them in one way or another.

Therefore, focusing on providing the highest possible quality content, as well as following trends and successful marketing techniques is crucial. Of course, search engines don’t make rare, big updates to their algorithms, but rather make several smaller adjustments over a small period of time, and this is happening constantly, so make sure you’re flexible and adaptive in the content you provide and the format of the content that you provide. With constantly evolving algorithms, 2018 is bound to bring a lot more to the table than the previous years have.

Increase the Length of Your Content

This might sound counterintuitive to some people, but, in a recent study, it was discovered that pages with more content actually rank higher than similar pages in the same niche that have shorter pages or articles. This is most likely because most algorithms are built to assume that, if the page is longer, it must contain more relevant and valuable information, thus making the page more informative to the viewer.

However, increasing the length of your content is a double-edged sword, so be cautious – if you overdo it, you might rank higher because of the fact that the page is longer, but you’ll also get a much higher bounce rate which will lower your rank to an even lower spot than before. This might mean that your page could drop from the bottom 2-3 provided on the first search results page, to the top 2-3 of the second search results page, and this is a difference that will make a crushing impact on your total viewer count since almost nobody goes to the second page when looking for information.

That being said, you should be cautious, but don’t be afraid to experiment. Only a couple of hundreds of words can make a difference of almost 5-6 ranks in the search results, so tweak the length of your articles little by little until you reach the standard with the most success and optimal view count and total ranking in the search results.

Optimize for Platforms Other than Google

Google is most people’s go-to search engine, and a recent survey showed that more than half of all Internet users that have been active for the past three years use Google. However, optimizing only for Google and its algorithms means you’re almost completely forsaking the other half of people, and more than half the total internet traffic.

Two platforms that I believe are most important to discuss here are Bing and YouTube. You can easily find many jokes on the internet about how nobody uses Bing or how it’s not as good as Google, but don’t be fooled, the number of people that use Bing as their default search engine is definitely worth investing in.

In addition, over the past few years Bing has done a great job at catching up to Google in terms of features that it provides to its customers, meaning that, right now, you can use Bing for almost anything that you’re using Google. Of course, for long-term Google users, there might be other issues, like getting used to the new interface, using a different email platform, etc. but there are many people that have been using Bing for a long time now and could say similar things about white label local seo.

So, focusing on optimization for Bing search queries can be highly beneficial for your brand or website. As a final point, the evolution of data from the past few years shows a rising trend in the popularity of Bing, so, although it might never reach Google’s popularity, it is still something you should keep an eye on as we go into 2018.

If Bing was that Important, YouTube is at least three times as important. As a community, it has more profiles than almost any country in the world (apart from China and India, but this is, of course, something that will probably change in the future) has residents, and reaches more adolescents and adults across the world than any television channel.

TV, as many of us know it, is past, and YouTube is one of the platforms that is the future. Therefore, investing in optimizing the information about your site for YouTube, either in form of videos about your website or as ads that will appear on other videos that are being watched by people who have shown some degree of interest in your area.

YouTube has its own algorithm that it uses, and it’s at least as complex as Google’s algorithm, if not even more. The amount of time that people have spent on this platform jumped by 50% between 2016 and 2017, and it will have an even higher jump between 2017 and 2018, so you should definitely pay attention and focus on these two websites in the following year.

Start Implementing Backlink Strategies

Backlinking had a lot of success in 2017 and it will only have more in 2018. Basically, it’s a process in which you find a partner that is popular and relevant to your category of work, and they feature your website on one of their pages. Google actually tracks such cases, and, if the person that featured your website on theirs is someone of importance in the area, you will start ranking even higher.

A specific type of backlinking strategy is influencer backlinking, which was briefly explained above. Namely, you find your “influencer” – it should be a relatively well-known webpage that was confirmed by Google as providing legitimate and popular content in a certain area. Then, you can try and contact the owner of that website, or the CEO, if it’s a company that owns it, and explain why backlinking to your website is a good idea. Keep in mind, that having backlinks can also be beneficial for the influencer as well, mainly because having another site as a reference can make the page seem more relevant and well-grounded, especially if you provide white label seo audit relevantly, but not identical content.

Finally, you gain two benefits from this: more people will visit your website, because more people will see it from the influencers page, and simply the fact that someone created a backlink to your website will increase your search rankings. Keep in mind, though, that you should search for influencers that are relevant to your category, but don’t provide the same or very similar content, because then nobody will have a reason to even leave the original website and come to yours. Your influencer should be someone who creates content that is only subtly connected to your, but in a way that will make the people interested in your influencer’s content become interested in yours as well and in huge percentages.

This is somewhat difficult currently, but, as time goes on, more news and techniques will be discovered that will make the process easier and more beneficial for both sides, so make sure and keep an eye on that as well, because it’s definitely a potential gold mine. As a final and most important point, you can also include backlinks yourself. As I mentioned above, this is beneficial for both sides, and it doesn’t cost you much, but will only increase your validity, popularity, and rank on the search results page.