Trends That Will Shake Up The SEO World

Nicolas Bouchand posted on Twitter that he is working on his thesis and selected SEO as the subject. He asked on Twitter “What do you think are the trends that will shake up the sector and that will absolutely have to be mastered?” John Mueller of Google retweeted it and I thought the responses were interesting.

I am going to post the tweets here so you can read some of them, but feel free to click through to scroll through all of them.

Here is the retweet, you would need to click on the original tweet to see the responses there and John’s retweet to see those responses.

What are some trends that will shake up the SEO world in the future? — @nbouchand13 wants to know (and I’d love your thoughts too)! https://t.co/W7SYmOBqMr

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 9, 2021

Here are some of the responses that caught my eye:

I’m still waiting … and kinda curious now if voice search seo is the next 3D TV … Where do you see voice search rising in the future?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 9, 2021

pic.twitter.com/JJkhE3YGQa

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) May 9, 2021

Inputs

Navigational queries
Voice
Visual such as images/gifs but also AR
Related searches whilst watching a video

— Andy Beard (@AndyBeard) May 9, 2021

What might that look like?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 10, 2021

Teens in SEO to learn and follow;

1. Schema & structured data.
2. Machine learning based on information retrieval signals.
3 User experience, and how it affects web site usage and ranking.
4. Entity extraction, Tuples, and NLP Query Responses.

— Bill Slawski ⚓ (@bill_slawski) May 9, 2021

I’m not convinced that time on site indicates a good user experience.

I’ve wasted time on pages and didn’t get an answer, and I’ve gotten answers quickly on other pages.

This metric seems more digital than analog.

— Jonas Sickler (@JonasSickler) May 9, 2021

this!!! UX is going to play a much larger role in the search space – whether thats straight web page design or ux for voice queries – the way we organize information has to become more user friendly

— It’s Jess! (@jgirardi_) May 9, 2021

That sounds like it would be like getting additional information while you’re doing something away from a big screen — is that what you’d envision? Would that include a shift away from “pages of information” to “pieces of information” (if you can’t view a full page with AR)?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 10, 2021

On serving side: edge/distributed SEO, esp. to deal with tech debt, but also with growth of headless CMS. Headless also leads to JS SEO becoming far more prominent requirement.

On the content side – ML/AI for content generation, categorisation etc. We’re seeing buds now…

— Richard Hearne (@RedCardinal) May 10, 2021

As search engines move to reward better experiences, understanding and mastering areas like UX/Information Architecture, Usability and Web Accessibility will be essential and gain space.

— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) May 9, 2021

It feels like there’s still a ton that can be done with personalized web content – but also a ton of risks of going overboard :). Where would it help you as a user?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 9, 2021

That sounds exciting – how would you use it?

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 9, 2021

There is just too much to embed here but you get the point. I would click through both threads to see what the community thinks. It would be fun to look back at this post in ten years and see what ended up shaking things up, if anything.

Forum discussion at Twitter.