Search engine results pages (SERPs) rarely stay the same for long, and all it takes is a new dominant competitor or a major shift in market interest to undermine an entire campaign.

Over the course of a year, you may see hundreds of small changes in response to changing market conditions, or over the course of the next decade, and beyond, we could see a massive overhaul of how search works on line, thanks to innovative new technologies.

So how might these changes manifest and what would this future look like?

The pillars of SEO today

Let's start by looking at how SEO works today. When a user searches for a certain topic (usually on Google), a complex algorithm produces results in SERPS based on two big factors: relevance and authority. Relevance has to do with how closely a page fits the user's intent, and authority has to do with how trustworthy the source is. This is why if you want your site (or a page on that site) to rank.

We expect some degree of competition, both from other sites like ours and from direct sources like Google, which occupy the SERP space with ads and rich snippets as direct answers to user queries. We also expect occasional changes with algorithm updates that change how relevancy or authority is determined. Fundamentally, these settings and processes are designed to provide users with the most useful content possible for each of their desktop or mobile searches.

How technology could reshape our future

So how might technology change what we understand as search marketers?

1.Machine learning. Machine learning has limitless applications, but in the world of search, there is one that stands out above the rest: the ability to perform seamless, constant, and much more sophisticated search algorithm updates than human-level thinking would allow. . In the future, updates like these could automate the entire algorithm update process, making it less predictable and faster than ever.

2.Smart speakers, digital assistants and IoT.digital assistants are found on almost every major mobile device. More users than ever rely solely on voice-based search to find what they're looking for. Consequently, search engines are specifically adapting to serve a voice-only audience, better understanding the semantics of language and providing instant answers, rather than the developed SERPs we expect as commonplace. There is an entire quest wing that has no visual results, and can only grow as time goes on.

3.Portable devices. Wearable devices are also shaping users' search patterns and may require a change in the user interface we've come to expect from online search. Portable devices demand hyper local results and some method of navigation that is intuitive and convenient for users. It's another factor that could result in the decline (or outright death) of the traditional visual SERP.

4.VR and AR. One saving grace for the SERPs that we all know and love is the potential rise of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) apps. These semi-digital interfaces could breathe new life into the visual layers we've grown accustomed to, presenting users with more navigation options than their audio- and voice-focused contemporaries. VR and AR could also revolutionize the way local search works, presenting users with deeper visual experiences to help them make decisions and demanding more immersive types of content from optimizers.

5.Decentralization. We're definitely a decade or more away, but it's a development we need to consider for the far future of SEO. Once the Internet is decentralized, certain problems associated with the typical online experience, including individual user privacy and spotty availability, will disappear. In response, search engines will need to be redesigned to fit a new kind of Internet, giving users an interface that adapts to modern devices, while maximizing the strengths of the new network. Since the decentralization of the Internet is still conceptual, it is difficult to speculate too much