SEO in 2018 - Powerful Analysis from 10 Industry Experts
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 9:48 am
The importance of advanced SERP features, machine learning and language assistants, First, Second and Third Mobile....
We asked ten of the UK’s leading SEO and digital marketing experts to reflect on 2017 – the lessons learned and the factors that had the biggest impact for them and their clients.
With 2017 behind us and us moving into 2018 – we posed a wildcard question to each expert to round out what’s on their agenda, where they plan to invest their time and resources, and what they think will be the big issues for the SEO industry.
Read on to find out what they shared!
Andy Drinkwater - Freelance SEO Consultant and SEO Expert. IQSEO.
Marcus Miller - SEO, PPC and Digital Marketing Consultant and Strategist. Bowler Hat.
Craig Campbell - SEO Consultant and Trainer based in Glasgow, Scotland. Craig Campbell SEO.
Dawn Anderson - MD, Digital Marketing Trainer georgia mobile phone numbers database International SEO Consultant and Speaker. Move It Marketing.
Paddy Moogan - Co-Founder. Aira.
Omi Sido - Senior Technical SEO. Canon Europe.
Lukasz Zelezny - Keynote Speaker, Author, Head of Organic. uSwitchUK.
Alexandra Tachalova - Digital Marketing Consultant and Founder. DigitalOlympus.net.
Ross Tavendale - Managing Director. Type A SEO Agency.
Gerry White - SEO and Analytics Consultant. Just Eat.
Andy Drinkwater
SEO Consultant iQSEO
1. Looking back at 2017, what were the most important SEO factors that made a real impact for you and your clients?
For me, the most important thing has to be internal linking. I’ve had incredible success by creating a site hierarchy that includes logical hub pages, great content/powerful pages, and a sensible internal linking strategy.
As a result, Google saw these hub pages as important to sites and gave them a big boost. In some cases, I saw a 1,400%+ increase in Share of Voice in just a short period of time.
This has allowed my clients to jump from page 3 to page 1 and even into the top 3 without doing any additional work.
2. What's on your agenda for both you and your customers in 2018?
There are a few elements here...
Usability (UX) - ensuring visitors to my clients' sites can navigate smoothly and find problem areas with live user recording.
Content - For every great piece of content I find the opportunity to create even stronger hub pages. Often these attract external links to further increase their power.
Mobile – We know Mobile First is just around the corner, so make sure every client site is fully responsive and built correctly to enhance the mobile experience.
3. What is an obvious SEO fundamental that is often overlooked?
The importance of clicks and happy visitors… This is something I’ve personally tested a lot and have seen others confirm the same thing, and that is the impact of visitors finding your pages, clicking through, and staying there. There has been speculation for a while now as to whether Google counts things like bounce rate, dwell time, time on site, pages viewed, etc. as part of its ranking algorithm. The simple answer is yes. When I tested these factors alone, I saw pages move up the SERPs within a few days.
It’s important to create a site that answers questions thoroughly and keeps visitors on the site rather than getting turned off and going somewhere else. Take the time to learn how to achieve this through testing to make your site the best it can be (see UX section above).
Marcus Miller
SEO Consultant, bowlerhat.co.uk
1. Looking back at 2017, what were the most important SEO factors that had a real impact for you and your clients?
I’ve never been one to follow SEO trends. I’ve been in and around SEO and digital marketing since about 1999, so I guess I’ve often seen businesses approach SEO in a trendy way. “We should have a blog for our SEO,” “Social media is good for our SEO,” or “We need videos on our site for our SEO.” This paint-by-numbers approach rarely works. And when it does, it’s more down to luck than anything else.
I always try to take a strategic approach. Where are you right now? What are your SEO strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are the opportunities out there? What are the threats? Taking a step back and using simple tools like a SWOT analysis of your SEO can really help you determine where you should focus your efforts.
I tend not to recommend any particular SEO tactic as the go-to approach. Instead, I recommend getting a solid understanding of what is required for any given goal and building an SEO strategy from there.
2. What's on your agenda for both you and your customers in 2018?
When we have a good strategy and core elements, we almost always focus on content and authority. We see so much benefit from well-ranked content that when it aligns well, it’s hard to beat. Content helps you expand the scope of what you can rank for. Content increases brand awareness. Content shows your credibility with your audience. Content gets you in front of people in a way that’s about helping them, not selling to them.
And content promotion is always the best way to build links, authority, and referral traffic. Content is truly the backbone of effective SEO in many ways.
Of course, there are exceptions, and some local businesses don’t need a strong content-focused approach and Local SEO may be a better fit. Or maybe Local SEO and some content to help with link building. There are no cookie-cutter approaches. We need to look at what’s specific to the client’s situation, their goals, and their market.
Of course, we need a cohesive marketing approach to support strong SEO. If we have content that generates visibility and traffic, then we need to move those visitors to the next level. This could be a sale, a lead, or a softer conversion like social following or email data capture. As always, we have to consider the specific business and customer journey, but in most cases, solid content-based SEO is the spark that ignites the digital marketing fire!
3. What key areas should businesses focus on in 2018?
There are two big areas to watch out for in 2018:
1. Mobile Directory – The Mobile First Directory is coming. It’s hard to know what kind of impact this will have. It could be very minimal. But we still see many businesses with poor mobile sites compared to the desktop experience, and there are still many traditional businesses without a mobile site. In fact, at least one major retailer in the UK doesn’t have an entire site that is mobile friendly. It takes a lot more than responsive design to have a truly user-friendly and mobile-optimised site, so there are opportunities here for most businesses.
2. SERP Features – we’ve seen more advanced SERP features this year. SERPs are Search Engine Results Pages, and SERP features are new components beyond the standard ads and organic results. Common features include featured snippets or answer boxes and People Also Ask results.
These can appear above the organic results, and even the #1 organic listing can be the 10th result on the page once we factor in ads (and it can have many more links than that once we factor in sitelinks and other features on individual listings.) We’ve seen this work really well for some of our clients, and it definitely changes the landscape.
As always, targeting SERP features can be seen as an opportunity if you monitor what’s out there and have a dynamic approach. Don’t rest on your laurels. Be aware of what the search results look like for your keywords and make sure your SEO strategy targets these more advanced listings.
Craig Campbell
SEO Consultant and Trainer, craigcampbellseo.co.uk
1. Looking back at 2017, what were the most important SEO factors that made a real impact for you and your clients?
The core of SEO is Link Building and Content, but Technical SEO is often overlooked and if you’re not building on good solid foundations, you’re likely to have a problem. Additionally, UX and site speed are also very important and again not always taken that seriously.
SEO is no longer just about links and content, these other factors are vital and help you bring the entire campaign together. So using this approach has worked and helped clients maintain and improve their rankings in 2017 and hopefully this will continue in 2018.
2. What's on your agenda for both you and your customers in 2018?
Looking for ways to continue to improve websites, content and performance are high on the agenda and continuing to learn and develop clients’ websites and continue to grow as we enter the new year will be key to doing this.
Although I don’t do a lot of client work, I will be doing more training and consulting in the future and helping agencies and individuals develop their knowledge, so that will be my focus going into the new year.
3. So will link building still matter in 2018?
Yes, Link Building has always been important and will always continue to be important, what you should try to get is quality relevant links, others use the PR approach to get links on some big websites, this is mixed with some outreach and use your links, resources and creative thinking to get links on as many good relevant websites as possible.
It's tedious and can be difficult at times but you have to dig deep and get the links, they help.
We asked ten of the UK’s leading SEO and digital marketing experts to reflect on 2017 – the lessons learned and the factors that had the biggest impact for them and their clients.
With 2017 behind us and us moving into 2018 – we posed a wildcard question to each expert to round out what’s on their agenda, where they plan to invest their time and resources, and what they think will be the big issues for the SEO industry.
Read on to find out what they shared!
Andy Drinkwater - Freelance SEO Consultant and SEO Expert. IQSEO.
Marcus Miller - SEO, PPC and Digital Marketing Consultant and Strategist. Bowler Hat.
Craig Campbell - SEO Consultant and Trainer based in Glasgow, Scotland. Craig Campbell SEO.
Dawn Anderson - MD, Digital Marketing Trainer georgia mobile phone numbers database International SEO Consultant and Speaker. Move It Marketing.
Paddy Moogan - Co-Founder. Aira.
Omi Sido - Senior Technical SEO. Canon Europe.
Lukasz Zelezny - Keynote Speaker, Author, Head of Organic. uSwitchUK.
Alexandra Tachalova - Digital Marketing Consultant and Founder. DigitalOlympus.net.
Ross Tavendale - Managing Director. Type A SEO Agency.
Gerry White - SEO and Analytics Consultant. Just Eat.
Andy Drinkwater
SEO Consultant iQSEO
1. Looking back at 2017, what were the most important SEO factors that made a real impact for you and your clients?
For me, the most important thing has to be internal linking. I’ve had incredible success by creating a site hierarchy that includes logical hub pages, great content/powerful pages, and a sensible internal linking strategy.
As a result, Google saw these hub pages as important to sites and gave them a big boost. In some cases, I saw a 1,400%+ increase in Share of Voice in just a short period of time.
This has allowed my clients to jump from page 3 to page 1 and even into the top 3 without doing any additional work.
2. What's on your agenda for both you and your customers in 2018?
There are a few elements here...
Usability (UX) - ensuring visitors to my clients' sites can navigate smoothly and find problem areas with live user recording.
Content - For every great piece of content I find the opportunity to create even stronger hub pages. Often these attract external links to further increase their power.
Mobile – We know Mobile First is just around the corner, so make sure every client site is fully responsive and built correctly to enhance the mobile experience.
3. What is an obvious SEO fundamental that is often overlooked?
The importance of clicks and happy visitors… This is something I’ve personally tested a lot and have seen others confirm the same thing, and that is the impact of visitors finding your pages, clicking through, and staying there. There has been speculation for a while now as to whether Google counts things like bounce rate, dwell time, time on site, pages viewed, etc. as part of its ranking algorithm. The simple answer is yes. When I tested these factors alone, I saw pages move up the SERPs within a few days.
It’s important to create a site that answers questions thoroughly and keeps visitors on the site rather than getting turned off and going somewhere else. Take the time to learn how to achieve this through testing to make your site the best it can be (see UX section above).
Marcus Miller
SEO Consultant, bowlerhat.co.uk
1. Looking back at 2017, what were the most important SEO factors that had a real impact for you and your clients?
I’ve never been one to follow SEO trends. I’ve been in and around SEO and digital marketing since about 1999, so I guess I’ve often seen businesses approach SEO in a trendy way. “We should have a blog for our SEO,” “Social media is good for our SEO,” or “We need videos on our site for our SEO.” This paint-by-numbers approach rarely works. And when it does, it’s more down to luck than anything else.
I always try to take a strategic approach. Where are you right now? What are your SEO strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are the opportunities out there? What are the threats? Taking a step back and using simple tools like a SWOT analysis of your SEO can really help you determine where you should focus your efforts.
I tend not to recommend any particular SEO tactic as the go-to approach. Instead, I recommend getting a solid understanding of what is required for any given goal and building an SEO strategy from there.
2. What's on your agenda for both you and your customers in 2018?
When we have a good strategy and core elements, we almost always focus on content and authority. We see so much benefit from well-ranked content that when it aligns well, it’s hard to beat. Content helps you expand the scope of what you can rank for. Content increases brand awareness. Content shows your credibility with your audience. Content gets you in front of people in a way that’s about helping them, not selling to them.
And content promotion is always the best way to build links, authority, and referral traffic. Content is truly the backbone of effective SEO in many ways.
Of course, there are exceptions, and some local businesses don’t need a strong content-focused approach and Local SEO may be a better fit. Or maybe Local SEO and some content to help with link building. There are no cookie-cutter approaches. We need to look at what’s specific to the client’s situation, their goals, and their market.
Of course, we need a cohesive marketing approach to support strong SEO. If we have content that generates visibility and traffic, then we need to move those visitors to the next level. This could be a sale, a lead, or a softer conversion like social following or email data capture. As always, we have to consider the specific business and customer journey, but in most cases, solid content-based SEO is the spark that ignites the digital marketing fire!
3. What key areas should businesses focus on in 2018?
There are two big areas to watch out for in 2018:
1. Mobile Directory – The Mobile First Directory is coming. It’s hard to know what kind of impact this will have. It could be very minimal. But we still see many businesses with poor mobile sites compared to the desktop experience, and there are still many traditional businesses without a mobile site. In fact, at least one major retailer in the UK doesn’t have an entire site that is mobile friendly. It takes a lot more than responsive design to have a truly user-friendly and mobile-optimised site, so there are opportunities here for most businesses.
2. SERP Features – we’ve seen more advanced SERP features this year. SERPs are Search Engine Results Pages, and SERP features are new components beyond the standard ads and organic results. Common features include featured snippets or answer boxes and People Also Ask results.
These can appear above the organic results, and even the #1 organic listing can be the 10th result on the page once we factor in ads (and it can have many more links than that once we factor in sitelinks and other features on individual listings.) We’ve seen this work really well for some of our clients, and it definitely changes the landscape.
As always, targeting SERP features can be seen as an opportunity if you monitor what’s out there and have a dynamic approach. Don’t rest on your laurels. Be aware of what the search results look like for your keywords and make sure your SEO strategy targets these more advanced listings.
Craig Campbell
SEO Consultant and Trainer, craigcampbellseo.co.uk
1. Looking back at 2017, what were the most important SEO factors that made a real impact for you and your clients?
The core of SEO is Link Building and Content, but Technical SEO is often overlooked and if you’re not building on good solid foundations, you’re likely to have a problem. Additionally, UX and site speed are also very important and again not always taken that seriously.
SEO is no longer just about links and content, these other factors are vital and help you bring the entire campaign together. So using this approach has worked and helped clients maintain and improve their rankings in 2017 and hopefully this will continue in 2018.
2. What's on your agenda for both you and your customers in 2018?
Looking for ways to continue to improve websites, content and performance are high on the agenda and continuing to learn and develop clients’ websites and continue to grow as we enter the new year will be key to doing this.
Although I don’t do a lot of client work, I will be doing more training and consulting in the future and helping agencies and individuals develop their knowledge, so that will be my focus going into the new year.
3. So will link building still matter in 2018?
Yes, Link Building has always been important and will always continue to be important, what you should try to get is quality relevant links, others use the PR approach to get links on some big websites, this is mixed with some outreach and use your links, resources and creative thinking to get links on as many good relevant websites as possible.
It's tedious and can be difficult at times but you have to dig deep and get the links, they help.