How Can We Prepare for What SEO May Look Like In Future?

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Aug 24, 2021

0

Share

Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Renee in Morganville, who asks:

“What is the future of SEO in 5 years? I am struggling to hire a partner who is thinking of the future of SEO, not the just the present common SEO deliverables. What should I address and how them in order to determine they will be a strong SEO partner?”

Renee, this is a great question. You want to hire a partner who is not only thinking about SEO as it stands now but is also prepared for what is to come.

As long as there are search engines, there will be SEO. However, as we have already seen throughout the years, it is a practice that is constantly evolving.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

We have come a long way from optimizing meta keywords tags and taking the approach of optimizing one keyword for one page. Today, it is more about understanding the searcher.

That trend will continue as search engines attempt to better serve users by anticipating the intent behind their searches, but I believe there are some other key areas we will see become even more important over the next five years.

Here are a few.

1. Question Answering

Bill Slawski wrote an in-depth article about a patent granted to Google in May 2021, centered on natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

Google has been using machine learning, including the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language model. These types of language models are designed to better understand words within the context of sentences.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

BERT and this recently granted patent continue Google’s quest to implement machine learning and provide relevant answers to searchers’ questions.

Here is an excerpt from the patent posted in Slawski’s article, BERT Question-Answering at Google:

“…the knowledge retriever may get fine-tuned using open-domain question and answering (“open-QA”) tasks, in which the language model must try to predict answers to a set of direct questions (e.g., What is the capital of California?).

During this fine-tuning stage, the knowledge retriever uses its learned relevance rankings to retrieve helpful documents for the language model to answer each question.”

With mobile devices and voice search, we have trained ourselves to turn to search engines for quick answers. This makes question-answering all that much more important.

From an SEO perspective, it means that now (and in the years to come) we need to go beyond identifying a list of keyword phrases to also focusing on the questions that our target customers are asking.