Now that 2017 is over, it’s possible to carry out a performance analysis of the presence of Portuguese content on the world wide web and identify some trends for 2018.
Online communication and its functionalities for companies was a widely discussed topic at almost every technology conference that took place in Portugal over the last year.
What should be identified as a good strategy, which Key Performance Indicators are vital for the organization and which good search engine optimization practices should be considered are (and will continue to be) ex-libris of communication for 2018.
However, as Albert Einstein – the famous German theoretical physicist – would say, “the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”, which indicates that you can’t forget the past to set goals for the future.
If we look at a Marketest study carried out in October 2017, the most visited group of websites in Portugal were those belonging to the Global Media Group, with a total of 67 million visits. The most searched keywords were “Salvador” and “Sobral”, which shows that the star of the Festival da Canção delighted the Portuguese public, making him the hot topic of 2017. Finally, the blog of the year, chosen by Portuguese private television channel TVI, was “Bumba na Fofinha”.
All these results are visible through partnerships, campaigns, content and an increased effort in what is organic and what boosts websites – search engine optimization. The strategy of using a feature that doesn’t incur more costs and that elevates sites in Google’s rankings continues to be the one that organizations are more interested in.
With the help of Rand Fishkin, founder of MOZ, a SEO analysis platform, it is possible to understand the trends that will prevail in the digital ecosystem this new year.
Google will continue to dominate the search market, with an increase of 3.4% when comparing data from October 2016 and May 2017. In the same period, YouTube rose by 0.2% and Amazon by 0.1%. It’s important to highlight that entities such as Facebook, Yahoo, Reddit and Bing have fallen out of favor with users who now prefer to explore other emerging platforms on the international market.
Regarding mobile devices, it should be noted that in the CTR (click-through rate) market there is still a possibility of growth of around 57.1%, as this is the percentage of users who don’t click on any links provided by their smartphones.
In 2017 there were already several spots where SEO could be used and for 2018 this trend will not change, as the tendency is to grow. There is relevant content in books, similar searches, in search suggest, sitelinks, among others, which can help consumers find one’s website.
The forecast for this year is that users will increasingly favor relevant content over content alone. Recognizing this, Google prefers to add value in the long term with ever faster (even more so) response results and with content that is exactly what the user needs. There’s no point in putting several answers to a simple question if none of that information matters. There has been a shift from static questions and fixed results to a feature where Google knows or tries to know with almost 100% effectiveness: what is important to the consumer.
In this scenario, the question to ask is: what are the 8 areas that drive Google’s algorithm?
Content;
Links;
Satisfaction with answers submitted by users;
Keywords;
Domain quality;
User Experience;
Technical & Crawl;
Personalization.
Generating qualified content instead of just generating content is one of the premises that began in 2017 and will grow (even more) in this new year.
For this year, it’s important to identify why you’re not on the first page, place tags that identify content, keywords that are identifiers of the product/service, place more links to generate traffic and provide efficient and effective answers to those who question you.