Zak Parker
The rules of SEO change almost every day and what worked well last week might get you a penalty today. Staying up-to-date with the changes requires a lot of work and unless you work in the industry it’s difficult to invest that much time. To hammer home just how quickly the industry moves, here’s a bunch of search trends that only really kicked off this year. Voice search continued to grow in importance, featured snippets started popping up more and more, Google’s AI search algorithm RankBrain started rolling out, search engines started tracking unlinked brand mentions, intrusive advertising fell out of favor and Google’s mobile index rolled out.
How many of those had you heard of? For example, did you know Google now has two separate indexes (databases) with one specifically for mobile? What about the penalties for intrusive advertising? If you’ve still got a big welcome mat pop up, you might want to think about taking it down. If you’re an SME business owner, no one expects you to follow the industry close enough to know all this stuff. After all, you’ve got a business to run! Hiring an SEO expert means you get access to an individual who is (or, at least, should be) fully up-to-date with the industry.
Contributors: David Vallance from LeaseFetcher
