What’s Next For SEO: 7 Predictions From Google

Google’s Search Relations team gets together for a discussion on the future of SEO in the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast. The team of Google’s talk about the changes they’ve seen in the past decade and anticipate what’s next for SEO.

More specifically, the three Google veterans touch on the following aspects of SEO and predict how important they’ll be within the next several years:

• HTML
• JavaScript
• URLs
• Meta tags
• Structured data
• Content
• Voice search

The Future Of HTML In SEO

SEO is more than just writing content. There are important elements of SEO that require some understanding of HTML, and that’s not likely to change in the future. HTML isn’t going anywhere as far as SEO is concerned.

The Future Of JavaScript In SEO

JavaScript may become more important to SEO in the future, but more on the progressive web app (PWA) side of things versus traditional websites.

The Future Of URLs In SEO

URLs might go away in favor of entities or IP addresses.

The Future Of Meta Tags In SEO

there’s almost never a good reason to introduce a new meta tag

The Future Of Structured Data In SEO

structured data is still helpful and recommended

The Future Of Content In SEO

Google sees potential in machine generated content. it can be indistinguishable from content written by humans at times.
However, Google doesn’t want to rank machine generated content in search unless it has been reviewed by humans.

The Future Of Voice Search In SEO

Voice search is unlikely to be the next big thing in SEO, so don’t worry too much about learning how to optimize for it.