It’s the end of the year and I am sure you have already read a few posts about the next big thing for 2018 in the marketing & SEO world right!? Here at Auctus Marketing it’s just business as usual and we realize that over the years marketing tactics alter a bit from year to year as new technologies come and go. Predicting these trends is not easy and for the most part we place more value in the fundamentals of sales and marketing which we believe don’t change. We believe in the value of people, relationships, technology and lots of hard work.

So what do our experts see for 2018 in the digital marketing & seo world?

We see more of the same. More mobile, more voice recognition technology & voice search and more automation. These are few areas where we believe marketers will see the most growth as well as opportunity in the year ahead. So let’s go over each to provide a little more background and color to help you and your team, so you can take advantage of these important tactics.

Mobile – 60-70% of Searches will be Mobile in 2018

For a little background on the state of the search engine market, here is some info. Who has the biggest search engine market share worldwide?
According to Net Market Share (as of April 2017) the global marketing share percentage, in terms of the use of Search Engines heavily favors Google, with over 77%. This data reinforces Google’s leadership position in this market, however it also highlights that the “Others” such as Yahoo, Bing and Baidu etc still hold a large audience and it would be silly to simply ignore them. It’s interesting to note that Google’s large market share is still on the increase. Last year we saw a 67% market share for Google, so Google has taken another 10% of the market from its rivals in just the past 12 months. It would not surprise us if Google’s share continue rise in 2018 and surpasses 80%. After all, when was the last time you used Bing?

 

search engine global market share

 

What’s driving the mobile rate increase further? I don’t think we need to spend much time here, but the speed at which our smartphones can perform these days is only getting better despite Apple’s best efforts to slow down their old devices lol. (Stunning how they can get away with so much and we all still think they walk on water!) Besides performance, more and more of us are simply just on the move more, so mobile devices just come into play more, and the cost of these devices has come down considerably. Remember when the first iPad commanded a $999 price tag? Now you can purchase used ones for a third of this price.

How many searches are made each day?
The number of people using internet search engines is increasing year on year and is almost unfathomable. At… 6,586,013,574 searches a day worldwide. Which in “word-terms” equates to six billion, five hundred eighty-six million, thirteen thousand, five hundred and seventy-four. To put it into perspective there are on average around 500million tweets per day, so 500million X 13. Breaking this down using the above Market Share chart and the data from Internet live stats, below you’ll find the number of daily searches per Search Engine.

Search Engine Searches per day:
Google 4,464,000,000
Bing 873,964,000
Baidu 583,520,803
Yahoo 536,101,505
Other (AOL, Ask etc) 128,427,264

How many searches are made on Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet? It was several years ago now that Google announced that we had passed the tipping point whereby the number of Mobile searches had taken over that of Desktop stating… “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” The graph below highlights the rate at which Mobile has surpassed Desktop search, specifically in this instance in the form of Local Search i.e. users searching for local businesses.

mobile search growth versus desktop search growth US market

 

Voice Search – Voice searches will approach 40% in 2018

This really is not that bold of a prediction as voice search already commands 20-25% of the search market. Here is some background on the growth of voice search and voice recognition tech. Below are two charts that highlight the growth and usage of this technology. The fist one is from Mary Meeker’s internet report which has now become somewhat iconic if that’s possible. The latter is a bit more current (2016) and we like it since it shows the percent usage per age group which we find very useful and telling. It’s pretty clear that the younger demos are really driving the adoption of this technology and as we all know, when the younger generations are driving tech adoption; it’s just a matter of time for us older peeps to catch up.

 

 

growth of voice search graph percentage rise

percent of voice search on mobile device by age group

Marketing Automation Services – 

We expect that marketing automation services for everything under the sun will only continue to rise. This includes services for email campaigns, social media, customer service etc. The new technologies that are behind a lot of this growth are chat bots of course, Ai and big data. With the rise of data collection and companies making use of all of this rich data, more and more automated marketing services will be available. This will make the day to day lives of us marketers easier for sure, but we anticipate bumps in the road just due to the fact that many of these technologies are young. It’s just part of the deal.

We hope you found this post useful, and that you had a healthy 2017. Here’s to a promising, healthy and positive 2018.

-Christian

marketing automation services