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Google’s senior webmasters John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Martin Splitt team up to predict the future of SEO in the recent episode of Search Off the Record. As veterans in the Search Relations Team, the three impart their expertise to discuss the important aspects of search engines, how they work now and how they will work in the coming years.
Aside from the factors included in Google’s latest Core Web Vitals (page speed, interactivity, and visual stability), there are other aspects that may or may not define the future of web optimization.
Keep reading below for the takeaways.
How Does the Future of SEO Look Like?
HTML will remain vital for Search Engines
In the first part of the discussion, John Mueller rounds off that HTML will not be as essential for SEO in the future which Gary Illyes immediately disagreed with.
Illyes further explained that the SEO landscape is more than just creating content for a blog post and inserting links. It also deals with metadata, title elements, and other “weird” things in the head section. Illyes added that to properly do SEO, one must at least be familiar with HTML and know its implication in the website.
“So you kind of want to know about them to control how your snippets look like or how your titles show up in search results and the rel canonical tag to control what will be the– or what should be the canonical version of a URL. You kind of want to know that,” said Gary Illyes.
HTML is a progressive technology that keeps on evolving and making a lot of things possible for most authoritative websites and marketing channels. They wrapped up the discussion by making clear that HTML will always be alongside SEO in every online marketing strategy, and it won’t go away soon as Mueller initially concluded.
JavaScript to become more fundamental in an SEO Strategy
Although JavaScript might seem unrelated to website optimization, it is in fact a core process for the improvement of SEO traffic. JavaScripts are an important ranking factor of technical SEO which focuses on optimizing it to improve its visibility which will later bring traffic to the site. It also makes a website interactive.
JavaScript and HTML are also the core of developing an application which is really useful especially for healthcare applications. In a study conducted by BMC, an open-access journal publishing, it was proven that incorporating JavaScript for health data visualization makes way for visualizing a complete, accurate, and normalized graphical representation of health data.
It was also proven that the data visualization tool was useful in helping users to understand and track changes in health data.
In conclusion, incorporating SEO along with JavaScript and HTML helps encourage patients to be active in developing and maintaining their well-being by making a website or content more visible in the search results.
URLs, Voice Search, Meta Tags, and Content for Digital Marketing
The three experts also discussed the other important parts of SEO: URLs, voice search, metadata, and content.
On URL and Meta Tags in Search Engine Optimization
Illyses says URLs are not going away, at least in the foreseeable future SEO.
“[URLs] are the standard way to communicate addresses on the Internet. And without that the Internet is just not the Internet,” Illyses said.
Is there a possibility that more meta tags may be introduced in the future?
Splitt claims the idea may not be viable as there’s almost never a good reason to introduce a new meta tag.
On the Future of Voice Searches
In a 2016 Google report, 20% of search queries using a mobile device are voice searches. Hence, many SEO experts have predicted it to be one of the emerging SEO trends.
However, when asked about voice search, Splitt says it is unlikely to a prominent trend in SEO, and that digital marketers need not to worry about it too much.
“It changes the input modality, and it changes probably how queries are phrased, but it doesn’t change the fundamental use of natural language to retrieve information from the Internet,” Split explains.
[Read: All The Healthcare Marketing Statistics To Pay Close Attention To In 2022]
Are human SEO writers still necessary?
Illyes believes ai-generated content has potential. He reiterates however that Google does not want to rank machine-generated content in search results unless it has been reviewed and approved by humans.
“Right now, our stance on machine-generated content is that if it’s without human supervision, then we don’t want it in search. If someone reviews it before putting it up for the public then it’s fine,” Illyses said.
SEO remains the most crucial in driving search traffic to your website
The number of search queries has continuously increased over the past years especially in healthcare during this pandemic. Healthcare research studies show that more and more people rely on the internet to look for a doctor and manage their health.
SEO along with SEO consultants helps health professionals gain more visibility to their future patients and continuously provide their services through the Internet.
Understanding and learning how SEO progresses and changes will help your site rank better so you can stay ahead of the competition.
For more cutting-edge healthcare SEO and marketing updates, visit the Digitalis blog.
