Even though Google still controls the search engine industry, companies are also competing to get good rankings on places like Yelp or Amazon.

Positioning arrives to voice assistants
Will 2018 be the year of the consolidation of searches through voice control? The launch of Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers seems to suggest it will. By 2020, it’s expected that 50% of all searches will be made by voice.
The remaining challenges for Siri, Alexa, Bixby and Cortana are to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning so that their answers better match users’ questions rather than relying on algorithms. These will be more and more in the form of long tail keywords or conversational sentences, which for brands means the need to create more precise optimization and positioning strategies in order to benefit from the competitive advantage that comes with knowing their customers’ behaviour and needs better.
However, the days of organic positioning may be coming to an end. Google is already considering paid advertisements for its voice control purchase services.

Videos and images searches grow
The growth of high speed internet access has increased the demand for visual content. This trend has led search engines to become more sophisticated and to start prioritising results that are images and videos.

Mobile predominance
As Google continues to roll out Mobile-First Indexing, websites using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) which improves mobile experience, will be enjoy a boost in organic searches. These pages load, on average, four times faster, than pages without AMP-enabled. This improves the user experience and increases their engagement with the site. Currently, only 900.000 websites have implemented the AMP framework.

Don’t forget to link build
The old strategy of ensuring high quality inbound links to boost domain authority is more important than ever when fighting for the top position in the voice assistant search results.

Segmentation by proximity
The increasing use of mobile devices for web browsing means we should see hyperlocal results really start to take off. Local businesses should make full use of keywords to optimize their position in locally relevant searches.

Photo by Arthur Osipyan