At least 53% of trackable web traffic on the internet originates from organic search, and approximately 15% comes from paid search on search engines. The estimations only take trackable website traffic into consideration. It is safe to say that internet search engine like Google, YouTube, and social media websites such as Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook account for the majority of the traffic on the internet.
With Google getting the huge share of traffic in the internet search engine, along with the lion’s share in the internet browser industry, it is reliable to say that the search engine giant has deep insights as well as all the data relating to what people search for, what online resources they are browse, the amount of time they spent on browsing websites, the webpages they visit and much more. With access to a great deal of data, Google is consistently improving its algorithm to personalise user’s experience and enhance the search engine ability to predict user searches.
There are millions of Google crawlers, also known as spiders, collecting data online and millions of lines of programming code sorting out these data, processing it and converting into useful information. In other words, the search results and the search recommendations you get as you begin typing your search phrase are all being personalised to your preferences based upon your past actions. Search engines like Google and YouTube are arguably developing into AIs. They are utilizing machine learning algorithms (Rank Brain) to process user information. Google search engine are extremely accurate in predicting what you are searching for, and recommending you the subject matters that are of interest to you. So what does the near future look like for Google when machine, self-learning and AI technologies continue to evolve further? Here are our predictions:
E-A-T Is Here To Stay & Online Celebrities Will Arise
E-A-T, an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, is presently used by Google’s Quality Raters to rate the credibility and authenticity of the website content. These quality raters are human, but as this responsibility is entrusted to AI, soon EAT will become one of the major ranking factor. It may become a more substantial ranking factor as compared to backlinks. For example, an article by Dr. Fauci, posted on his private blog site about the recent pandemic will receive much more traction on Google and may rank much better without getting any backlinks, as compared to an article talking about the same topic but written by an experienced content article writers with a huge loads of backlinks.
When EAT becomes a major ranking factor, it will bring to life to online celebrities in all industries, and all subject experts will finally have an edge over these experienced content article writers.
Google Algorithm Updates Will Happen More Frequently Without Prior Announcement
So far whenever Google introduces any major updates on its algorithm, all SEO agencies will keep a close watch on their website rankings and online traffic flow when the update has been rolled out. Generally, Google algorithm updates are announced way beforehand. However, in January 2020, Google rolled out a major update and announced it at the very last minute, catching all businesses off-guard.
When the world has been busy with Covid-19 pandemic, there have been hushed whispers on various online communities such as Reddit about a major drops or increases in their website’s rankings. Sufficient cases are identified to rule it out as an isolated occurrence. Throughout the SEO industry, Google is well-known for exploring with how search results appear, and quickly reverting to the older algorithm if the new experiment doesn’t goes as planned. Their capability of a swift, small-scale experimental approach of rolling out massive updates has been increasing, all thanks to the Google Rank Brain algorithm. Soon we may expect monthly or perhaps even weekly updates to how personalization works in its search engine.
Be prepared to see some changes in website’s search rankings and big fluctuations in online traffic in the next few months.
Schemas Mark-up Will Be The Norm For All SEOs
At this moment, there are plenty of schemas mark-up you can implement to your website. For example, the Frequently Asked Questions schema for your FAQ page, a recipe schema if you have a cooking blog site, the game schema if you are in the gaming industry, the news article schema and so forth. It seems like we are heading into a schema intensive territory where everything from a tutorial, a testimony, a review, an advertisement, or practically everything that you post on the internet will need to be accompanied by a specific schema mark-up if you intend to rank well and high for your keywords.
Video & Organic Search Results Will Appear Together
Video usage around the world has reaches an all-time high. For example, given the option between reading a post about ‘how to change a water pipe’ versus watching a video on ‘how to change a water pipe’, which one would you rather do? At this moment, when you search for something on the Google search engine, most of the time video results either appear in featured snippets or they will show up in a separate result section named ‘Videos’.
We can foresee that in the upcoming years, Google will eliminate the ‘Videos’ result section and video web content on YouTube will be competing with text-based content on Google search engine results pages. We can also foresee that AIs will become more accustomed to videos and thus creating a greater capacity to sort and rank videos based on its content quality and type. Given that videos usually have better user consumption, they may somehow occupy the majority of the real estate on SERPs in the future.
