Eric Siu breaks down four SEO priorities: backlinks will remain critical for five to ten years, voice search is rising so optimize for featured snippets, brand queries matter more as Google filters spam, and AI like RankBrain is reshaping how search ranks pages.
In this video, we're going to talk about 4 things that you need to know about the future of SEO. So the first thing that you need to understand in today's day and age, at least in 2017 to 2018, links still matter. The fundamental basis of what Google was built on, and Google still has most of the market share, links still matter. And if you want to Google this to get a little more case studies, you can Google Eric Ainge, do links still matter, and check out the case study there. And I can tell you, I mean, we do a lot of link building internally for our clients as well. Links still very much matter because they are the signal for search engines to show what matters as well. So there's a lot of other things coming down the pipeline. I'm going to talk about the, well, I guess in point number 4, what's kind of coming down the pipeline, but you got to understand that at least in the near future, we're talking perhaps the next 5 years, 10 years or so, links are still going to matter very much so. Point number 2 is voice search. So, when you think about having an Alexa or a Google Home or whatever other these in-home devices are coming, you always, you're gonna ask Alexa, right? I'll ask Alexa, for example, what does cornucopia mean, right? And Alexa's only gonna give me one answer. It's gonna give me the best answer out there. Same thing with Google Home. So you gotta figure out how you can optimize for voice search. The best way you can do that right now in today's day and age is to Google how to rank zero. You can also listen to the Marketing School Podcast that I do with Neil Patel. And we talk about how you can rank zero. You gotta think about how you can constantly optimize and make things easy for search engines, and then that way a Google Home or Alexa can pull and make your number one or your rank zero query the number one result, and then you're gonna rank that way on voice search, 'cause you only get one time to make it right. Point number 3, Neil and I on the podcast, we talk a lot about the importance of brand queries. So, if you can, you know, Neil is very much focused on building a brand, he's looking at his Google Trends all the time. You know, for me, I'm looking at monitoring my brand through a tool like BuzzSumo, and that's how I'm tracking brand queries. But if you're like a Coca-Cola, for example, or even if you're Neil in the marketing space, you do have a big brand, and having a big brand is a signal to the search engines that you are doing well, you're doing something correct, and you're not just another ho-hum spammy-looking website. Point number 4, and I think this is probably the most important point going forward, looking into, you know, 15, 20 years and beyond, AI is going to run a search. Google what RankBrain is. It is one of the ranking factors right now. It's getting smarter and smarter. If you think about artificial intelligence, don't think about it being something really complex. AI, let's just look at your calculator for example, right? Your calculator always does math better than you. AI is just a computer doing something much better than you. Now yeah, in the future perhaps there will be general AI where, you know, these computers are actually smarter than human beings. They can do everything better than us. Maybe, and maybe that's probably, I don't know, 40, 50 years down the road. But in general, AI, like thinking about how search engines think about different queries, they think about different stories and how everything connects together. Computers are getting faster and faster, right? You think about machine learning, which is a facet of AI. Because Google's invested so much into artificial intelligence and RankBrain, it is going to become a bigger and bigger factor over time, and you need to understand that. If you enjoyed videos like this, you wanna continue to learn how to grow your business, just hit subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
