Affiliate marketing has strategically evolved over the years, with a major part of that change being search engine optimization. As our online presence continues to grow, search engine optimization continues to grow with it. As we have previously discussed in our blog posts, search engine optimization can be potentially useful as one of your affiliate marketing strategies. Allow us to take a look at the future of search engine optimization.
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The Future of Search Engine Optimization
A recent study by Borrell Associates indicated companies spent $65 million on search engine optimization in 2016. Furthermore, the SEO industry will grow to an estimated $72 billion by 2018, and $79 billion by 2020. This indicates that search engine optimization has grown even more than previously expected. A separate survey has indicated that of approximately 350 marketers, more than 90 percent plan to either increase or keep-same their SEO budgets for the following year. So certainly, the future of search engine optimization is bright.
As the internet becomes more affordable and accessible over time, there will be more users and more user searches. The future of search engine optimization will reflect these demographic changes. The ability for anyone to search for anything at anytime is becoming increasingly more realistic. Additionally, traditional advertising methods have been diminishing, and appear to be trending downwards. This increases the amount of marketing campaigns in the online world that will have to be utilized.
Search Engine Optimization and the Modern Internet Connected Household
You probably use a digital assistant in your life without even thinking twice about it – the two that come to mind are Siri and Google Now, depending on your choice in mobile phone. Digital Voice Assistant Devices are becoming increasingly popular, with the likes of Google Home and Amazon’s Echo competing for share of a market that is far from being established. The purpose of Digital Voice Assistant Devices is to capture, process, and act on task-oriented, voice-based request and queries. Global sales of digital voice assistant devices are expected to exponentially grow to 15.1 million by 2020.
Digital assistants have redefined the search process, as users use commands and queries to engage in human-like conversations, as opposed to opening a browser window and searching for an answer. As a result, search engines operate in the background, and traffic from searches is completely negated. Obviously, this impacts the future of search engine optimization, as these digital assistants take the user directly to a website, not allowing the user to search through engine results on their own.
Knowing this, there are a few things you can do to incorporate your future of search engine optimization strategies into the ever-expanding world of digital assistants. You can keep conversational language that will allow you to appear relevant for more voice-based searches. Your content will also need to become more complex. Digital assistants search more than just the web, and can provide basic answers directly without searching the internet. If they can provide a basic answer that doesn’t require an extended browsing trip, they will do so.
It will also be important to expand your reach on other platforms. You can build a niche on social media platforms where digital assistants have not become established. Although this won’t help you appear with digital assistant search results, it will allow you to gain greater visibility in areas where users are still driven. When incorporating SEO into your affiliate marketing strategy, you should consider creating a blog or user community on your website. This adds new content to your website on a daily basis, but also increases loyalty to your website. A user community gives users a reason to bypass a digital assistant search and head directly to your website.
It’s also worthwhile to consider that, even considering the above, many of the queries and searches that a digital assistant may handle on a regular basis are not relevant to businesses anyway. For example, “Play Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen” and “What’s the weather outside today?” likely are not searches that would impact your goal as an affiliate marketer. The business exposure on many of these queries can be considered minimal.
How Does The Future Of Search Engine Optimization Impact My Ability To Make Money Online?
As digital assistants grow more and more popular, they could potentially one day replace the browser-based search engine as we know it. As users become more reliant on immediate answers, overall visits to websites will diminish. Search engine optimization as it is could completely vanish. Fortunately for you, the affiliate marketer, that time is not tomorrow. It is worth your while to expose yourself with diverse content, building a presence on as many platforms and applications as possibility. You should be working toward a goal of visibility.
Your Strategy Moving Forward
It is up to you as an affiliate marketer to determine the most effective strategy for the goals you are trying to achieve. The future of search engine optimization can be an important part of your affiliate marketing strategies. While there is room for exponential growth, there are also threats against the industry. Weighing these pros and cons should be something you consider when determining the value that search engine optimization will have on your affiliate marketing strategy. Developing an effective strategy will not be easy, but could potentially yield tremendous benefits down the road. Time will tell how search engine optimization will be impacted by developing technologies, but in the meantime, it is something that you should at least consider when approaching your work.
