Key Takeaways about SEO in the Year 2018

In case you wonder, 2018 has been the year in which a lot happened in the SEO industry. This is due to the fact that Google, the main search engine, kept on updating its algorithms. As a result, there have been developments throughout the year 2018. A few takeaways are worth mentioning in this regard.

The updates have been unparalleled

The rolling out and rolling back of updates had been frequent throughout 2018. The impact of Google Penguin and Panda was also quite huge. Other updates had also been launched. This is the reason that SERPs kept on changing and the SEO pros were not quite sure what happened due to what reasons. There were instances when an update was rolled out and when the professionals were figuring out the impact of updates, the updates were rolled back. There has been a concept about 200 ranking factors in the past. Now, nobody knows about exact number of those factors.

The rule of Google in online world

More people are now using Google as their preferred search engine. It means that digital marketers will need to focus more on ranking their websites and pages on Google if they want to succeed. With this bigger number of users, Google has the authority to dictate its terms in the way it wants. It doesn’t mean that this rule of Google over internet is powered by something unjust. It rather means that they are now doing everything to make sure that the users get what they need from search results. it also means more hard work required from the side of digital marketers.

The impact of mobile first index is not quite huge yet

Although the Google’s Mobile first index has been rolled out, there has not been much of impact on the search results. But it surely means that a direction has been set because the number of mobile users is not going to decrease in the future. And so, they need to be facilitated more.

SEO pros do not like the change

Now, this one is not the drawback. It is rather a human nature that we generally do not like things to be changed as quickly as things are changing in the world of Google. But then, there are many people who are not doing the necessary things to at least cope with the new challenges at some extent. This is reason that many SEO pros are doing SEO audit, reporting, use of tools and other actions in the same old-fashioned manner.

The rise of search intent

Now this may be a bad news for the old-fashioned guys who like to dictate Google to rank their websites with the help of keyword research in the outdated manner. Search intent is out there and it has drastically changed things related to keyword research. Now, if you want your website to rank in the Google search results, you have to make sure that you are focusing on users rather than search engines.