SEO Strategy: A Forward Look at Website Traffic Strategy
This article looks into search engine optimization (SEO) and the current state of this growing and changing industry. Search engine optimization, also referred to as SEO, is a methodology of strategies used to increase the amount of views a webpage gets by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results place of a search engine. This increases the total authority of a webpage and drives more traffic to the site.
SEO, once considered “black magic” of the internet, has become a crucial and integral part of businesses’ strategies to attract customers. The amount of money that businesses will spend on SEO in 2018 alone is projected to be over $70 million. Furthermore, changes in technology have a big impact on SEO strategies for businesses and the industry is set to see some major changes in the upcoming years in regards to different tactics used to improve SEO.
In the past SEO has been solely an IT role; however, in today’s market professionals point out the increasing role of user experience in relation to SEO. As user experience is becoming more and more prevalent in engaging users, SEO strategies will need to adapt to produce high-quality content that have strong levels of user experience which will drive more traffic. In addition to user experience, Google is now developing two indexes of documents when pulling search queries: one for mobile and one for desktop. With mobile becoming the primary index for searches, companies need to adapt their SEO strategies to account for this. In response to this, Google and others have been pushing for accelerated mobile pages (AMP). Lastly, the rise in AI is changing the way google is ranking search factors. This means that machine learning will begin to understand patterns in searches and the content that’s both informative and engaging users. This means that businesses will need to be developing content that’s both informative and engaging, rather than one or the other.
This article directly relates to what we are learning in class about search engines and page authority. SEO is a way to influence page authority and guide traffic to one’s webpage. The changes in the industry are significant because it provides us with an applicable context to expand on the material we are learning in class and learn about practical applications on what businesses are doing to manipulate and influence search results. This can then be applied to the discussion we had in class about advertising and matching. It is important for businesses to weight the options of whether to invest in SEO or pay for advertising in order to increase traffic to a specific website.