Staff of Link-Assistant.com - makers of SEO Power Suite search-optimization software - reported yesterday from the SMX Munich conference on Google SEO trends that industry insiders expect to see in 2018.

Key points, in a nutshell:

• Mobile-first indexing: Once Google has switched your site to mobile-first indexing, if your site has a dedicated mobile version, Google will crawl that with a smartphone user agent. If your site has no dedicated mobile version, Google will still crawl the site with a smartphone agent. In either case, Google will index whatever content the smartphone agent is able to see. Your server access logs should indicate what Google crawler has been indexing your site.
• JavaScript: There's no guarantee that Google or any other search engine will be able to crawl, render or index any JavaScript website correctly. Each piece of content should have a clean URL like domain.com/filename. Crawlers don't click, mouse over or scrawl to get at content. Make sure robots.txt isn't blocking your JavaScript. Use server-side rendering.
• Voice search: Use Google Featured Snippets with Schema markup. Consider levels of cost and risk of your products in choosing keywords. Speak in your audience's language.
• Content marketing: Typically it's the highest-performing 3% of your content - that with the highest engagement - that brings most of your traffic. Add budget and promotion to this top-performing content; re-purpose it and use it in other media.
• A/B test your SEO: Identify a set of pages to test, create control and test groups, formulate a hypothesis to test ("Changing X will impact Y and thus improve organic search traffic"), see which version causes Google's crawler to bring more/better traffic to your site.
• Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): It's usually easier to rebuild an entire site from scratch than to convert an existing site to AMP. Using AMP adds to technical requirements and maintenance costs. AMP are hard to brand, and JavaScript restrictions limit monetization and marketing automation. And using AMP doesn't guarantee faster loading. But AMP should boost SEO and improve user experience.

That's a long list of things to worry about in 2018.

Priority items for me are:

1. Mobile: make sure Google smartphone agent can reach, render and index all my content correctly. There are tools to help with that.
2. JavaScript: Make sure JS isn't blocking content or META tags. There are tools for that, too.
3. Content: Identify that top-performing 3% and run with it.
4. Everything else

Recommend you read the full report at the External Article link, below.

FYI, I'm not being compensated by Link-Assistant.com or Google for this post.