SEO marketing has become one of the most vital tools for businesses in today's competitive market. Every day, millions of people use search engines to find answers to their inquiries or solutions to their issues.

SEO can help you acquire free targeted traffic from search engines if you have a website, blog, or online store.

SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.

The majority of search engine users (more than 70%) are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.

SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.

The Shift in SEO Traffic

Over the past decade, there has been a shift in focus from desktop to mobile search traffic. With more people browsing on their phones than ever before, Google now rewards sites that are mobile friendly.

Within the last couple of years, more websites have been optimizing for mobile to accommodate for this change in how users search. Additionally, with mobile-first indexing, Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, making it even more crucial that your site is optimized for mobile devices.

Future of SEO

One of the biggest changes in SEO over the last couple of years revolves around local search, as local searches have become more common and also more specific.

By embracing the new focus on local search, local companies have additional opportunities to reach their target audience. Google My Business allows local companies to create a profile with the goal of ranking in local searches.

Along with this rise in local search comes additional opportunities for keyword optimization. SEOs can now optimize content to rank for location-specific keywords that help them more easily reach their target market.

In the early days of SEO, many people participated in link building schemes that gave their website numerous fake links from various sources to increase rankings. Like all other black hat SEO techniques, Google caught on and now penalizes, bans, or de-lists websites that take part in these link schemes.

Instead, Google now values websites that have gained links in natural ways. Common link building include guest posts or gaining backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites or directories.