It’s hard to speculate about the future of any technology or marketing strategy, but in the SEO industry, it’s important to recognize and react to trends quickly.
Several past
Now, as I speculate about the future of SEO (based on projections of current trends and anticipating Google’s motivation in the coming months and years), I imagine that the changes to come will naturally favor small businesses and entrepreneurs. There are several reasons why I believe this to be the case.
1. Local Search
First, local search is going to get bigger, better, and more significant in the coming years. Google has spent a lot of time tinkering with this algorithm, from the massive Pigeon overhaul back in 2014 to the quick-change dynamics of upgrading from a local 7-pack to a local 3-pack of results. Local search has been refined for mobile devices, and has become more prominent as more users have submitted their geographic location by default.
In general, I suspect local search will rise in importance, and more local businesses will step up to take advantage of this. Mobile technology will become even more mobile with wearable devices and similar technologies, and cumulatively, user preference toward local results will grow. As most “local” businesses are small- to mid-sized businesses, these trends will work in their favor.
2. Digital Assistants and Personalization
Digital assistants and the trend of personalization may also favor local businesses. Major tech companies are making a conscious effort to deliver more personalized results to their users, particularly through digital assistants like Cortana and Siri because they’re able to gather more behavioral information about their respective users.
One of the easiest ways to personalize search is to tailor it to location and buying histories, both of which will favor small and local businesses for most users. Unless a user is searching for a specific national brand, “near me” searches, by default, will likely highlight small businesses.
3. Social Signals and Syndication
Currently, social signals are a poorly understood phenomenon in the SEO world—some think that a social signal, like the sharing of an on-site content article, is a direct ranking signal. However, this isn’t exactly the case; the social sharing of an article may lead to that article’s rise in popularity, which can cause it to earn more inbound links, thereby resulting in an indirect increase in its rank.
Despite this, it’s likely that social signals will play a bigger role in the near future of SEO—both directly and indirectly. Google is doing more to integrate social media-based results into its SERPs, and users are relying on social media for content discovery more and more as time goes on. In the near future, search engines will likely start populating content based on interests of social contacts. This trend could favor small businesses, because they can develop better relationships among tight niches (like those local to one specific area).
4. The Fall of Generalized Keywords
A handful of trends are leading to the downfall of “generalized” keywords, which big businesses have historically had on lockdown due to their enormous SEO budgets and long histories. First and most prominently, voice and mobile search have led to more conversational, long-tail keyword queries. Second, direct answer functions have given users more immediate results, bypassing typical organic traffic flow (think of the Knowledge Graph and “rich answers” here). Since more users are searching for a wider breadth of low-competition, niche phrases, more small businesses will have the chance to achieve meaningful search visibility.
5. Ease of Entry
This point is somewhat debatable, but I feel strongly about it. The more sophisticated search engines become, the simpler it is to enter the game. Yes, there are still technical components of SEO that are very important and can’t be ignored, but when it comes to the ongoing execution of SEO, things have gotten more approachable; rather than precisely calculating keyword density or building links in some orchestrated network, you can focus on providing a great user experience, producing high-quality content, and building strong relationships with publishers.
Variables and Uncertainty
Of course, these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt. Nobody knows exactly how the search world is going to develop, and even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to predict exactly what kind of impact it would have on small and local businesses. Still, I believe small businesses will earn more visibility and have more opportunities as SEO develops in the future.
