Do you remember the buzz and commotion around the year 2000? Maybe not, but it was an activity fire drill to avert disaster. This year may seem similar as things are moving fast in the search arena. For example, sites that have delayed mobile readiness, thinking most of their traffic comes from desktop, so why bother with mobile? - will find themselves in crisis this year. Marketing teams across the board will face shrinking budgets as the C-suite becomes less and less willing to hand out money without strong evidence that it delivers results (according to the October 2017 CMO Survey from Gartner). As a result, I expect the focus to be on attribution tools and better data reporting as the company employee list industry struggles to connect the dots in customer journeys and justify marketing spend. Predictions for digital marketing in 2018 are pretty easy to make – at least compared to the last 13 years of annual prediction posts I've written. I'm sure most people in the SEO industry who follow Google are already seeing these trends moving forward. In a nutshell, the hot buttons SEOs now know will stay hot. the ladies move Make the right choices this year, informed by Bruce Clay's 2018 digital marketing predictions. Here are my predictions for mobile-first, voice search, content, links, speed, SEO, e-commerce, machine learning, virtual reality, and video, to help you make more informed decisions this year. My digital marketing predictions for 2018 Mobile First: Google 's mobile first index will .