The way SEO in Toronto has to be seen is like you would art. Search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo are far past the point when simply mentioning the keywords in text or metadata would attract a higher ranking.

And here’s the irony, the greatest instances of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning that are so easily overlooked are our biggest search engines. Gone are the days when an algorithm or a set of rules could be manipulated in a certain way.

With natural language processing and ever-evolving expectations of what is relevant and contextual information, search engines are constantly changing SEO in Toronto.

User patterns have changed too. Whereas searching has become the common mode of discovering even ‘known’ information, on what platform these searches are conducted has complicated things for SEO in Toronto. It takes only a small example to illustrate: if someone is searching for a recycling services provider, he or she may search on a web browser based search engine, or simply type the same keywords in a smartphone’s maps application. Similar query, totally different results. Could someone not also try the same search on a social media platform; arguably, with better results, which are ranked on the basis of actual user views and reviews.

Which is why effective search engine optimization, for at least the next few years, will have to be prefaced on a simple strategy of Mobile, Voice and Proactivity (MVP).

Mobile – This is now commonly understood, but since search engines received a greater share of user searches from mobile devices, unsurprisingly, emphasis has shifted to mobile-friendly web pages. It is common knowledge that page rank will be adversely affected if the webpage is not optimized for mobile viewing (for instance Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project). Besides, gone are the days when users received information in simple blue links, and a lot more exposure comes from contextual information.

Voice – The proliferation of ‘smart speakers’ in people’s homes and rising numbers of spoken searches are changing what search engines value. To respond to a verbal query, the search engine (or smart assistant) will fixate on URLs with featured snippets: short responses which answer the user’s query. SEO in Toronto will require a rethink in strategy to perform effectively with this shift.

Proactivity – Linking has long been seen as a standard practice of SEO in Toronto, but recent revelations by search engines (Bing) and disclosures by Google have proved that search engines are also tracking unlinked brand name use. This places a greater emphasis on ‘conversations’, rather than backlinks. Exactly what these ‘conversations’ are remains fuzzy. Regardless, content in blog silos, hoping to receive a ranking based only on keywords without any other means of propagation, is unlikely to fare highly in rankings.

Perhaps the fourth element to this discussion would be U: the Unknown. Whether this comes under the tag of ‘AI’ is debatable, but the preponderance of machine learning and deep learning algorithms in search engine code has meant that SEO in Toronto is aiming at a constantly moving target. So much so, even the developers behind the algorithms are unsure of being able to chart the growth of the algorithm.

And that’s why in recent years, SEO in Toronto has seen a marked shift: from white hat SEO methods to, simply, good content: that which is relevant, accurate and contextual.