Estate Apps digital predictions for this year

My prediction for this year is the impact site loading speed will have on your SEO. Website loading speed is one of the very important factors for ranking, helping you to reduce your bounce rate as well as keeping your visitors to stay for a long time on your website. Not only does it affect your rankings, it’s also a major UX (user experience) factor, with Google expecting pages to load in under three seconds, this year should see more and more businesses trying to improve their site loading speed, if not, expect to lose more potential customer than ever. It is essentially the survival of the fastest!

I expect long tail keywords to play a bigger role in search engine rankings this year. Short team keywords are so fierce in competition and while they do help you achieve page 1, the traffic will be more quantity than quality, a big difference. For instance, if you type in ‘digital marketing company’ for a specific industry and your website comes up, you’re likely to get people coming into your website who are attracted to digital marketing but not necessarily interested in your area of expertise.

This is where the power of long tail keywords come into action, a long tail keyword such as ‘digital marketing for estate agents’ will bring you more relevant traffic. Ranking higher for long tail keywords is much easier due to less competition, i think we’ll see more companies using long tail keywords to gain more relevant traffic to their site.

Last prediction for me is the rise of smart homes. There will be a rise in the availability of ‘smart homes’ or homes where the heating, lighting and ventilation system can be controlled remotely with a device, or even with a voice recognition system. In addition to this, more smart gadgets will be used for homes with LG having already introduced new refrigerators with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant built in. I personally expect to see more developments like this over the next year.

Up next is Alex Evans who will be speaking about his predictions on Virtual and Augmented Reality.