Search engine optimization is gaining much awareness these days. It is a Web Marketing activity that allows you to optimize the structure and content of a website to make it more authoritative and appealing to Google’s eyes by ranking it higher among search results related to specific user queries. But how will SEO turn into the future and how much will the web become more symbiotic with our daily lives?
Pasquale Gangemi, Head of Operations at Pro Web Consulting, a specialized SEO agency based in Chiasso, will provide us with some possible scenarios for the evolution of this discipline and its integration with the user’s experience.
- Rich Snippets information in SERP
Google becomes more and more autonomous in providing responses and details to users directly in SERP. This is done in two ways: either through rich snippet or with direct answers and knowledge graphs.
Rich snippets are those extra details that enrich the SERP: for example, a recipe image, the “stars” of reviews for a hotel, the price for a product for sale, etc. Presenting to the user, at a glance, more useful information means increasing the click rate on our product/service.
In addition, try searching for “European Rankings” or “Weather London” on Google: the engine will return the results you are looking for directly on the page without having to click on another website (thus focusing on all traffic).
A few weeks ago, Google has also engulfed the market of music lyrics: just type in the title of a song to get the lyrics directly in the SERP, with a number of dedicated portals dedicated to this subject.
- Vocal Search and App
Another evolving reality that will take more and more foot is voice search via mobile devices. Thanks to Google Maps and the “little magic assistants” developed by almost all operating systems – from Siri to Cortana – every day, people talk directly to the device to receive practical information and guidance. Smartphones and smartwatches, thanks to vocal search, contribute to the explosive growth of the web and Mobile SEO, also increasing the variety of search queries.
Another great innovation around the corner is related to Apps: applications can be downloaded directly from search results pages and, with the “instant app“, there is will be no longer need for download anymore. At that point, App Indexing, which is now a spot activity and still quite marginal, will become an integral part of the SEO consultant’s daily workflow.
- SEO and… food
Search engines can help us optimize … our eating habits!
While it is true that we are more and more tracked according to our digital queries and habits, this information can almost certainly be used in a not so remote future to simplify daily activities like grocery shopping and eating. For example, the integration between the latest generation of refrigerators and the browser will bring alerts directly via email on what products are on shortage and where to order them online. The opening of big players like Amazon to large-scale distribution products probably also in this direction.
In addition, those looking for information on diets, allergies, intolerances, and illnesses may receive news and information about e-commerce, retail outlets and geo-localized restaurants that sell celiac, diabetic and vegan or weight loss products.
Like it or not, we will be more and more always-on users and profiled for our searches: this will lead to an ever-greater precision and concreteness of the results offered by search engines, thanks to the constant work of SEO professionals.